Art Farm

In 1974, the artist Bonnie Ora Sherk co-founded a farm under what is now the Cesar Chavez Freeway in San Francisco’s Mission District. Spanning seven acres, the Crossroads Community (The Farm) included vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, goats and other livestock, a “school without walls,” a community centre, and a theatre (one for humans and another for animals) that hosted classes, performances, and even a circus (Auther & Lerner, 20). The Farm was installation art, a living theatre, and an actual farm, and is just one of many projects since the 1960s in which artists created gardens and artist-led farms, making works that aspired to help us develop more meaningful, ethical, and nourishing relationships with the earth, food, and the places we live.

Contemporary art historian Silvia Bottinelli uses the term “art farming” to explore ongoing artist projects that challenge the inequality of dominant food systems, propose alternative models for food sovereignty, and deepen how we understand our relation to the other-than-human. She surveys the practices of artists who work with agriculture, farming, and food to create alternative systems for sharing plant- and land-based knowledge, and for growing and distributing food. Among these are: Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield (1982), a two-acre field of wheat planted in Lower Manhattan; Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates (2005-14), for which he planted gardens in urban and suburban front yards across politically divided parts of the United States (Bottinelli, 27); Return of a Lake (2012) by Maria Thereza Alves in which islands that were originally built by Indigenous engineers in the 1400s were re-constructed in what today is known as Mexico (Bottinelli, 93); and Jolene Rickard’s Corn Blue Room (2000), an installation that addresses the cosmology and preservation of Tuscarora White Corn in the face of industrial agriculture and settler encroachment (Bottinelli, 32-34). These are just a few artists among many working with plants, food, and other organic matter to create gardens and communities centred around the growing and sharing of food.

Art Farm at the Doris McCarthy Gallery engages with this history, the idea that farming can be a critical aesthetic practice, and also theatre, performance, and installation art, even when it is inseparable from life. In Soil Procession: A Movement of Soil from the Country to the City, a 2015 performance organized by the international artist collective Futurefarmers, farmers from across Norway brought soil to the Losaeter neighborhood in Oslo. Arriving in an ostentatious parade of tractors, horses, wheelbarrows and bicycles, accompanied by sheep, donkeys, and other farm animals, and led by drummers, they brought soil to be used in the building of a permanent site for artworks dedicated to food production. In parkland above the Opera Tunnel Freeway, the farmers built a grain field, bake oven, and seed library, and signed a land-use agreement that established the site as a cultural commons for the free exchange of seeds and agricultural knowledge, and for farming as a form of art as social practice. To this day the project continues as a public artwork, activated by urban gardeners as a site for public programs related to agriculture and, of course, for baking and sharing bread (Tampere, 2015).

Art Farm also addresses the challenges of presenting work that is often alive, ephemeral, and process-based in an art gallery. Alongside Futurefarmer’s Soil Procession: A Movement of Soil from the Country to the City are two projects that are designed to be activated by artists and urban farmers to create and disseminate knowledge and to host events about food and farming. Shannon Gerard’s site-specific installation, Plant Parenthood is an active classroom and print studio where the artist will make publications with farmers, students, and members of the public. Visitors will view posters, zines, and various publications made over the course of the exhibition. Outdoor School’s Art Farm Stand is a mobile sculpture stand in the lobby of the gallery that will periodically be taken to other sites on campus where it can be used to share food, lead workshops, and host performances and events.

Plant Parenthood is the latest iteration of Gerard’s decades-long practice in which the artist, educator and farmer creates site-specific installations and publishing projects. Her work draws on DIY culture and the history of underground publications that have played a vital role in sharing skills and knowledge and in shaping countercultural communities. For the Carl Wagon (a previous project referencing astronomer Carl Sagan), she converted a 1988 Volkswagen Westphalia into a studio, library, reading room, classroom, and print shop. For the Mountain School Bookhouse (a reference to the infamous artist-led Black Mountain College), she made a decorated, mountain-like 10 x 10-foot hand-quilted tent where she ran workshops on book binding and zine-making and hosted performances. Building on these installation, performance, and social practice-based projects, Plant Parenthood connects printmaking, farming, and activist movements, forming a crafty and campy apparatus of alternative worldmaking.

Art Farm Stand by the Toronto-based collective Outdoor School, which I co-lead with artist Diane Borsato, was created as an invitation for farmers and artists to explore alternative ways of presenting artworks and distributing food. Like many homemade roadside and market farmstands, the Art Farm Stand is a functional mobile farm stand sculpture that draws from rural vernacular styles, using wheels from a 19th Century cart and repurposing the shaves from a horse-drawn buggy. It includes shelving, a shade umbrella and flagpole, and hosts a small eccentric art-farm library. Designed for sharing food, hosting workshops, launching publications, or presenting performances and other artworks, the stand also allows the exhibition to exist outside of the gallery, travelling to other parts of campus and taking different forms through live events and site-specific activations.

For Art Farm, we invited collaborators – urban farmers, food-sovereignty activists, artists – to use these tools, engaging with and activating Plant Parenthood and the Art Farm Stand. Activations will include projects and performances by It’s Giving Farm in the Rouge Valley, Ate Kay’s Farm in Tkaronto/Toronto, and Colombian-Venezuelan artist Alexandra Gelis. These artists and farmers do vital work to resist mainstream agricultural systems, model practices of land stewardship, and coming together for food sharing, celebration, storytelling, and ceremony. These artists and farmers will create publications with Shannon Gerard’s Plant Parenthood, and events at the Art Farm Stand, using the exhibition as a platform for creating and disseminating knowledge about land, seeds, plants, and alternative food systems.

The artist-farmers involved with Art Farm pursue intellectual, critical, and creative work, including activism and alternative-worldmaking, sometimes providing plant medicine and land education in addition to feeding people. It’s Giving Farm is operated by farmers and artists Fianna Dirks and Ekow Stone. Their work includes growing food for local farmers markets and stewarding three acres of farmland within the Greater Toronto Area, in the Rouge Valley. Dirks has also done extensive research on municipal waste recycling and created a manual on urban community composting (Dirks, 2021). Scholar and food sovereignty activist Kaitlin Rizarri runs Ate Kay’s Farm where they grow plants for medicinal teas, using them as a way of healing relationships within their community and with the land. They have written about working with seeds as part of land-based education (Tkaronto Circle Lab, 2024), and are a member of Tkaronto Plant Life, an Indigenous youth-led urban farm in Etobicoke. Toronto-based Venezuelan-Columbian artist Alexandra Gelis makes work that complicates our relationship to plants that we often consider weeds, examining the migration of plants and how they are used as tools for both colonization and liberation. Gelis is one of the co-editors and producers of Earth to Table Legacies (2023), a multimedia project and book based on interviews with food activists from across Turtle Island.

Futurefarmers’s assertion that farming is an art form is borne out by countless art students and artists who have sought to lead lives that are more sustainable and attuned to the natural world, directing their practical skills and creativity into caring for the land and feeding their communities. In addition to growing and sharing food, many of them are engaged in community organizing, education, and activism. Many also live rurally or make use of neglected or freely available spaces within urban areas. Their lives and work constitute a rich creative counterculture that resists mainstream industrial agricultural practices, and often art galleries themselves, but also deepens our connection to the other-than-human, to the land, and to one another. Inspired by their important work, Art Farm is an experiment in exploring countercultural farm practices at a suburban university campus and art gallery. Art Farm thus treats the exhibition as a site of living knowledge, providing audiences with opportunities to get their hands dirty, experience art outside of the gallery, and join in a project of alternative worldmaking.