The Brooklyn Rail

Visually stunning and conceptually ambitious, the Sky High Farm Biennial is an engaging new addition to the ever-growing mid-Hudson Valley contemporary art scene.  Spearheaded by artist Dan Colen, in his first curatorial effort, the exhibition features some 160 works by more than 50 artists installed on two floors of an historic disused apple cold storage warehouse located in the village of Germantown, N.Y., along the banks of the Hudson. Participating artists include well-known figures such as Wade Guyton, Richard Prince, Carroll Dunham, Mark Grotjahn, Charline von Heyl, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ryan McGinley, Nan Goldin, Roni Horn, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. Unlike most other biennials, many of the works in the exhibition are for sale, with a portion of proceeds benefitting the programs of the Sky High Farm. 

Founded by Colen and administered by Sarah Workneh and Joshua Bardfield, the Sky High Farm occupies a 560-acre property located in a rural area about fifteen miles east of Germantown. The non profit organization aims to address and respond to urgencies in the food system. According to a press statement, the farm uses an agroecological approach to cultivate nutrient-dense produce and protein, distributed in partnership with community-based organizations to individuals and families experiencing food and nutrition shortage and insecurity. The farm also offers grants to individual and community programs with like-minded goals, plus a nine-month residential formal training and mentorship program for burgeoning farmers interested in regenerative agriculture. The biennial, titled Trees Never End and Houses Never End is dedicated to Sky High Farm’s first staff member, Joey Piecuch, who died in 2014, and the title refers to the name he gave to a nearby wooded area that he and his sister played in.     

“We created the exhibition without a dollar of support from the art industry,” Colen told the Rail. “Except for Andrea Rosen Gallery, representing the Felix Gonzáles-Torres estate, no galleries were directly involved, nor were auction houses or other art businesses.” Among off-site biennial presentations, a series of twenty-four billboards by Gonzáles-Torres, Untitled (It’s Just a Matter of Time) (1992), are installed along the Hudson River and its estuaries. Colen met with Germantown officials, who were generally supportive of the endeavor, albeit with concerns about issues like parking and public safety. Colen was also careful to preserve as much of the building’s original character as possible. For the exhibition, no new construction material was introduced into the structure, which had sustained extensive fire damage in the mid-1970s when the volatile cork insulation used for the cold storage facility ignited. The gritty wall textures enhance many of the works on view. 

The exhibition offers an immersive experience on both floors. A ground floor gallery near the entrance features a display of African masks from Nigeria, Mali, Ivory Coast, and elsewhere, each on a freestanding support. The masks are from the collection of the late New Paltz-based artist Ben Wigfall, several of whose paintings and works on paper, often with fragments of text, hang on the surrounding walls. German artist Anne Imhof’s maze-like floor-to-ceiling arrangement of plastic farm animal feed and water containers lines the walls of a large rear gallery. Illuminated here and there by colorful neon tubing, the walls serve as unlikely supports for works by Yatika Starr Fields, Paulo Nazareth, Sarah Rara, Tschabalala Self, Alvaro Barrington, and others. 

The second floor is even more impressive. Visitors are obliged to remove their shoes and stroll through the space on a mirror floor, a work by Rudolf Stingel. Certain works serve as visual anchors to help navigate the dizzying, disorienting spatial relationships. Ann Craven’s mural-scale abstract composition of colorful diagonal stripes, for instance, hanging near one of rafa esparza’s intensely gritty relief paintings of a lioness, can offer some stability. Perhaps most conceptually resonant here, in terms of the dichotomy of art-world artifice and the Sky High Farm’s ecological initiative, is the jarring and exhilarating juxtaposition of Banks Violette’s intentionally garish totems made of metal and clustered white neon tubing, with the earthy fragility of real trees and shrubs by the late eco-art pioneers Helen and Newton Harrison. If Colen and his team can sustain this level of impassioned merger of art and nature in two years, the Sky High Farm biennial will have a long and bright future.