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

Artist Dan Colen and Sky Excessive Farm, the nonprofit he based in Upstate New York, will launch a brand new biennial exhibition this summer season that may 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, will even mark Sky Excessive Farm’s transfer from its unique 40-acre farm in Ancramdale to a brand new 560-acre property in neighboring Ancram.

Titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” and curated by Colen, the biennial will characteristic greater than 50 artists, together with quite a lot of bold-face names comparable 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, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Alongside these artists are a number of who’re at present 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 instructor who lived within the Hudson Valley from 1963 till his loss of life in 2017.

The exhibition’s title borrows its identify from an paintings by the group’s first farmer, artist Joey Piecuch, which will probably be included within the exhibition. The inaugural version of the biennial is rooted in its website, 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 latest interview. “This stress between the pure world and the commercial 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 technique of being right here and settling in. In that means, it took form in the identical means that every thing else that I make takes form by this very pure technique 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 contemporary, nutritious diet,” Colen stated, noting that the farm has by no means offered any of its harvest because it’s been in operation. 

“The fundamental 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 typically didn’t have entry to contemporary 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 Colen’s studio, and he noticed it as a part of his apply, saying “there’s no actual separation for me.” Reasonably, it was an avenue from the start for him “to seek out methods to precise myself that felt very far exterior of the artwork business and all of its machinations.”

Formally, Sky Excessive Farm grew to become a separate nonprofit entity in 2020, although it obtained its 501(c)3 standing in 2016. The pandemic triggered 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 methods 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 annually, and which serves as an introduction to regenerative agriculture. Their annual micro-grants program, established in 2022, are geared 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 price range to this funding. Moreover, they host youth-serving organizations from the area for workshops that “deliver younger folks nearer to the place their meals comes from,” he stated.  

The group has extra lately begun immediately partaking with the artwork world. In the course of the pandemic, it donated produce to Venture 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 out of doors instructional instructing facility at Forge Venture, 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 apply founding, and we’ve seemed for methods to proceed to deliver that spirit additional into the challenge, particularly as we formalize it as a nonprofit group.”

A protracted record of artists was developed by way of the assistance of a curatorial council, which included Forge Venture’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 College of Portray & Sculpture in Maine, amongst others. (Shortly afterward, Workneh joined Sky Excessive Farm as co–govt director, round a yr and a half in the past.) 

Colen whitted down the record, which led him to develop new relationships with collaborating artists like Imhof or the Felix Gonzalez Torres Basis, which has facilitated a mortgage of a piece by the artist. 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 extremely vital means,” Workneh stated. 

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

“These works are supposed to exist in area 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 you can form of method and have intimate experiences with however whenever you additionally step again, they exist as an entire,” Colen stated. 

Equally, the loaned Gonzalez Torres is his ​​“Untitled” (It’s Only a Matter of Time), comprising 24 billboards that will probably be put in 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 partially a means “to create contact factors for lots of wider audiences” that Sky Excessive Farms may not ordinarily attain. That led them to understand that this might be a means 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, nonetheless, wished this fundraiser to be fully totally different from the standard charity public sale at a black-tie gala that you simply would possibly 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 share of the sale of the works, processed by their galleries or studios, to Sky Excessive Farm. These vary from 10 p.c to 100% of the sale value. 

The purpose, he stated, is to “permit artists to outline the way in which they take part, and permit artists to create works which can be very, very significant to them,” in addition to to problem the everyday 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 an alternative of the philanthropists, to be beneficiant, to seek out area of their lives for this work.”

This mannequin additionally provides artists flexibility when it comes to what sort of artwork they’ll contribute to the biennial, past a portray, sculpture, or work on paper that they could usually 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 constructing artwork when he based Sky Excessive Farm 13 years in the past. “There’s a form of ambition to the size of manufacturing that we wished to verify, in a way, mirrored the ambition of our work at an organizational stage.” 

The total artist record 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
Mark Grotjahn
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
Banks Violette
Charline von Heyl
Ben Wigfall Property/ Communications Village with Lauren Halsey