September 17 – December 7, 2024
Art Farm
Works by Futurefarmers, Shannon Gerard & Outdoor SchoolCurated by Amish Morrell
In the Gallery
Art Farm explores the creative, aesthetic, and critical work of farmers, asking us to consider both where and how culture is made. During the exhibition, the gallery operates as a living site for building relationships between urban farmers, campus communities, and our wider Scarborough audience. Art Farm is activated through a series of workshops, events, and talks framed by three core artist projects: Plant Parenthood, an active classroom and print studio by artist, educator, and farmer, Shannon Gerard; Art Farm Stand, a mobile sculpture by the Toronto-based collective Outdoor School; and Soil Procession: A Movement of Soil from the Country to the City, documentation of a 2015 performance by the international artist collective Futurefarmers.
Art Farm is a site for collaboration and exchange—where artists and farmers resist mainstream agricultural and economic systems, and the environmental and social injustices that can be perpetuated by them. They model new—and old—ways of land stewardship, and of coming together to share food, knowledge, stories, and ceremony. Students and members of the public are invited to participate in the workings of Gerard’s print studio and in events at the Art Farm Stand, developed with artists and farmers including It’s Giving Farm in the Rouge Valley, Ate Kay’s Farm in Tkaronto, and Colombian-Venezuelan artist Alexandra Gelis, to generate material that will grow and accumulate throughout the exhibition.
This exhibition acknowledges the vital intellectual, critical, and creative work that farmers and artists do, forms of alternative world-making that includes activism, education, and nourishment. Their lives and work constitute a rich creative counterculture that resists mainstream industrial agricultural practices, and often art galleries themselves, but deepen our relations to the other-than-human, to the land, and to one another.
About the Artists
Futurefarmers is an international working group founded in San Francisco in 1995 and working in Gent, Belgium since 2003. They are artists, architects, computer programmers, farmers, writers, and anthropologists with a common interest in the reorganization of agricultural systems. Through performative processes in collaboration with farmers they engage issues of food sovereignty, farmers rights, and the commons. Their work primarily manifest in public as long-term engagements that lead to permanent commons through a process-led approach. This often starts as performances or workshops including sound, walking, sculpture and temporary architecture. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable forms and functions of the work. Exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2010 (solo); New York Museum of Modern Art, 2008; Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, 2002; Sharjah Biennale, 2017; and Taipei Biennale, 2018.
Shannon Gerard crochets (a lot), makes books, quilts political protest banners, and produces site-specific textile installations. As a professional mischief maker, her public/pedagogical projects emphasize the materials and ethos of independent publishing as social-political engagements. Gerard is an Associate Professor in Publications and Print Media at OCAD University and a part time farmer at Small Spade Farm. Current projects include Plant Parenthood, a new farm-based publishing imprint that so far includes a radical seed subscription club and zines about herb production; and an upcoming book series exploring the relationships between small scale farming, food sovereignty, climate action, radical pedagogy, and liberation movements.
Outdoor School is an ongoing collaborative, creative platform producing environmental art and education projects with artists, farmers, scientists, activists and more, led by curator Amish Morrell and visual artist Diane Borsato. Together they have collaborated on exhibitions, performances, guided walks, residencies, and publications with artists including Sameer Farooq, Futurefarmers, Tania Willard, Public Studio and many others, supported by institutional partners including the Toronto Biennial of Art, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Sierra Nevada University, the University of Guelph, OCADU, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Outdoor School is also the title of a recent book exploring environmental art and writings by Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell, alongside the works of many Canadian and Indigenous friends and collaborators published by Douglas & McIntyre in 2021.
About the Curator
Amish Morrell is an educator, curator, editor, and writer based in Tkaronto/Toronto and Unama’ki/Cape Breton. Along with visual artist Diane Borsato, he leads Outdoor School, a platform for outdoor and environmental art practice. Since 2016, Outdoor School has included courses at the University of Guelph and Sierra Nevada University, an artist residency at the Banff Centre, the book Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art (Douglas & McIntyre, 2020), as well as numerous place-based curatorial projects that aim to deepen our relationship to our surroundings and which explore alternative forms of public engagement. From 2008 to 2017 he was Editor and Director of Programs at C Magazine, one of North America’s foremost visual arts magazines. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of the Graduate Programs in Critical and Curatorial Studies and Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories at OCAD University.
