Brooklyn Utopias: Farm City

Maize Field is a public art project by the artist Christina Kelly. Website here.

Utopia: An ideal place or state.

Katherine Gressel and Derek Denckla, curators

Exhibition Dates: September 16-December 12, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 16, 2010 6-8pm
Gallery Hours: Saturday & Sunday, 11am-4pm Or By Appointment

Excerpt:

Artists are increasingly incorporating farming, landscaping, and ecology into their practice. The predominance of environmentally concerned exhibitions at contemporary art institutions is one mark of the shift of environmentalism from a marginalized grassroots and activist effort to a more institutionalized and popularized subject that infiltrates every sector of society.

How can the real or imagined Farm City catalyze new visions for social and environmental change that may bring about a “Brooklyn Utopia?” How successful are Brooklyn’s existing urban farming attempts and what additional innovations and collaborations are possible? How can the borough’s rich agrarian past inform its greener future? What about questions of scale, universal access, diversity and feasibility for urban farming that determine if this is a fad or a lasting practice in Brooklyn?

To address such questions, the artworks in Brooklyn Utopias: Farm City will range from the symbolic and visionary to the literally alive and dirty. Christina Kelly’s Maize Field re-fertilizes Brooklyn neighborhoods once tilled by Native Americans; Jess Levey and Katherine Gressel also ponder the lessons of a “Utopian” agrarian past through juxtaposing colonial, present, and future imagery of the Old Stone House as a farm site in a video projection project and collaborative mural. Sallly Forth, an opening weekend outdoor “prairie tent” by the Greenhorns, aims to “begin a conversation about a new homestead act” by showing films and distributing information to give visitors the tools to start their own urban food frontiers a la 1820s westward expansion.

See more about the exhibit here.