Dan Colen’s Sky High Farm Launches New Fundraising Biennial Exhibition

Artist Dan Colen and his Sky High Farm in Upstate New York will launch a brand new biennial exhibition this summer season that can serve as a substitute fundraising mannequin for the nonprofit group.

The forthcoming exhibition, which can open June 28 at an historic apple chilly storage warehouse in Germantown, may even mark Sky Excessive Farm’s transfer inside Ancramdale, New York, from a 40-acre farm to a brand new 560-acre property.

Titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” and curated by Colen, the biennial will characteristic greater than 50 artists, together with various bold-face names similar to Alvaro Barrington, Anne Collier, Carroll Dunham, rafa esparza, Nan Goldin, Wade Guyton, Roni Horn, Anne Imhof, Brian Jungen, Maia Ruth Lee, Ryan McGinley, Tschabalala Self, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and the Félix González-Torres Basis. Alongside these artists are a number of who’re at the moment primarily based within the Hudson Valley area, together with Autumn Ahn, Sean Desiree, Norman Douglas, Chase Corridor, Lyle Ashton Harris, Andrew Moore, Marcus Leslie Singleton, and the property of Ben Wigfall, an artist and trainer who lived within the Hudson Valley from 1963 till his dying in 2017.

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The exhibition’s title borrows its identify from an art work by the group’s first farmer, artist Joey Piecuch, which can be included within the exhibition. The inaugural version of the biennial is rooted in its web site, with the legacy of the apple warehouse and its building throughout the Industrial Revolution serving as a departure level. 

“Standing proper subsequent to the constructing, you see the proof that was left behind by that second in time,” Colen informed ARTnews in a current interview. “This rigidity between the pure world and the economic world—that’s actually the impetus for the present.”

Colen moved to Columbia County in 2012, “with none plan of constructing one thing like this,” he stated. “It’s one thing that I used to be compelled to do within the strategy of being right here and settling in. In that approach, it took form in the identical approach that every part else that I make takes form by way of this very pure strategy of discovery.”

The aim of Sky Excessive Farm is to “develop essentially the most nutritious meals and donate it to communities that haven’t any entry to a recent, nutritious diet,” Colen stated, noting that the farm has by no means bought any of its harvest because it’s been in operation. 

“The essential premise of the farm on the very starting,” stated Sky Excessive co–govt director Josh Bardfield, who had been with the group since its founding, “was a recognition that individuals who have been utilizing the pressing meals system usually didn’t have entry to recent produce or protein, and even much less of the meals coming into that system is mostly raised utilizing ecologically sound strategies.” 

Initially, Sky Excessive Farm was run by way of Colen’s studio, and he noticed it as a part of his follow, saying “there’s no actual separation for me.” Quite, it was an avenue from the start for him “to search out methods to specific myself that felt very far outdoors of the artwork business and all of its machinations.”

Formally, Sky Excessive Farm turned a separate nonprofit entity in 2020, although it obtained its 501(c)3 standing in 2016. The pandemic induced the formalization of the nonprofit, and was when Colen and his board started fundraising for its operations and actions.

Since then, it has developed applications “to develop the work that we have been doing into areas that have been addressing the programs that the meals entry program was designed to quickly bridge,” Bardfield stated.

One such program is a farmer coaching fellowship, throughout which they host 4 fellows for seven to 9 months every year, and which serves as an introduction to regenerative agriculture. Their annual micro-grants program, established in 2022, are aimed toward constructing fairness inside agriculture and directed at teams traditionally marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and migrant and refugee) from funding inside this area. The grant program directs round 20 p.c of its working finances to this funding. Moreover, they host youth-serving organizations from the area for workshops that “carry younger folks nearer to the place their meals comes from,” he stated.  

The group has extra just lately begun instantly participating with the artwork world. In the course of the pandemic, it donated produce to Mission EATS, an city farming group based by Linda Goode Bryant, which has served as a partial affect and collaborator for over a decade as the 2 organizations have been based across the identical time. 

Sky Excessive additionally helped construct an outside instructional educating facility at Forge Mission, a Native-led arts group within the Hudson Valley, and it organized a symposium on artwork, land, and neighborhood in 2022 on the Judd Basis in New York. 

The forthcoming biennial, which has been within the works for the previous two years, appeared like a pure development because the “exhibition format felt extra true to us,” Colen stated. “We imagine that a part of what’s allowed us to succeed was seeded in that artwork follow founding, and we’ve appeared for methods to proceed to carry that spirit additional into the challenge, particularly as we formalize it as a nonprofit group.”

An extended listing of artists was developed by way of the assistance of a curatorial council, which included Forge Mission’s govt director Candice Hopkins; Tom Eccles, the chief director of the Middle for Curatorial Research and the Hessel Museum of Artwork at Bard School; and Sarah Workneh, then the co-director of Skowhegan Faculty of Portray & Sculpture in Maine, amongst others. (Shortly afterward, Workneh joined Sky Excessive Farm as co–govt director, round a 12 months and a half in the past.) 

Colen whitted down the listing, which led him to develop new relationships with various the taking part artists, together with Imhof and the Felix Gonzalez Torres Basis. On the heart of all of it was the location, which is “so embedded in all in its historical past that it form of grounds all of that work in that relationship in a very essential approach,” Workneh stated. 

Pia Camil, for instance, will make a water fountain from a number of useless apple timber that can sit atop a reflective mirror ground set up by Rudolf Stingel. The water from Camil’s fountain will drain into industrial water containers that type the premise of Imhof’s contribution and create a labyrinth of types, resulting in different works. (After the exhibition, the water containers within the Imhof work can be repurposed as compost bioreactors for native farms.) 

“These works are supposed to exist in house collectively, like the weather that exist in a river or a forest—or on a farm—collectively, the place there are all these distinct issues which you could form of method and have intimate experiences with however once you additionally step again, they exist as a complete,” Colen stated. 

Equally, for its contribution, the Felix Gonzalez Torres Basis will stage the artist’s ​​“Untitled” (It’s Only a Matter of Time), a collection of 24 billboards close to the Hudson River, operating alongside its tidal portion, which spans from Troy, New York, to the New York Harbor. Mark McKnight’s Duet, comprised of two blocks of limestone inscribed with sundials and featured in his 2024 Whitney Museum exhibition, reference a number of works by Gonzalez Torres.

The aim for the exhibition, Colen stated, was partly a approach “to create contact factors for lots of wider audiences” that Sky Excessive Farms won’t ordinarily attain. That led them to comprehend that this could possibly be a approach to assist fundraise for the group however he insisted that “there’s an even bigger conceptual impulse that we’re pursuing.” He considers it extra “like every curatorial challenge, a storytelling mechanism—[and] embedded inside that’s our fundraising.”

Colen, nevertheless, wished this fundraiser to be fully totally different from the standard charity public sale at a black-tie gala that you simply may see in New York Metropolis, the place artists are commonally requested to donate works. As an alternative, the artists have signed pledges to the group promising to donate a proportion of the sale of the works, processed by way of their galleries or studios, to Sky Excessive Farm. These vary from 10 p.c to one hundred pc of the sale value. 

The purpose, he stated, is to “enable artists to outline the best way they take part, and permit artists to create works which are very, very significant to them,” in addition to to problem the standard fundraising fashions and hierarchies, which he described as “extractive” and “fraught,” that exist already within the artwork world by which “the onus is on the artist, as a substitute of the philanthropists, to be beneficiant, to search out house of their lives for this work.”

This mannequin additionally offers artists flexibility by way of what sort of artwork they’ll contribute to the biennial, past a portray, sculpture, or work on paper that they could sometimes give for a charity public sale. 

For Colen, this new mannequin goes again to the roots of how he wished to rethink conventional methods of creating artwork when he based Sky Excessive Farm 13 years in the past. “There’s a form of ambition to the dimensions of manufacturing that we wished to verify, in a way, mirrored the ambition of our work at an organizational degree.” 

The total artist listing follows under.

Autumn Ahn
Alvaro Barrington
Lauren Bon
Lizzi Bougatsos
Pia Camil
Anne Collier
CAConrad
Ann Craven
Sean Desiree
Natalie Diaz
Norman Douglas
Carroll Dunham
rafa esparza
Peter Fend
Yatika Starr Fields
Aaron Gilbert
Nan Goldin
Wade Guyton
Chase Corridor
Lyle Ashton Harris
Harrison Studio
Roni Horn
Anne Imhof
Brian Jungen
Nance Klehm
Maia Ruth Lee
Stephen Lichty
Nate Lowman
Ryan McGinley
Mark Armijo McKnight
Bobbi Salvör Menuez
Andrew Moore
Paulo Nazareth
Jade Kuriki Olivo (Puppies Puppies)
Grace Rosario Perkins
Utē Josephine Petit
Joey Piecuch (Household)
Thiago Rocha Pitta
Myron Polenberg
Richard Prince
Sarah Rara/Fortunate Dragons
Em Rooney
Marcos Saavedra
Michael Sailstorfer
Salem
Tschabalala Self
Marcus Leslie Singleton
Rudolf Stingel
Elaine Stocki
quori theodor
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Basis
Banks Violette
Charline von Heyl
Ben Wigfall Property/ Communications Village with Lauren Halsey