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

Artist Dan Colen and his Sky High Farm in Upstate New York will launch a new biennial exhibition this summer that will serve as an alternative fundraising model for the nonprofit organization.

The forthcoming exhibition, which will open June 28 at an historic apple cold storage warehouse in Germantown, will also mark Sky High Farm’s move within Ancramdale, New York, from a 40-acre farm to a new 560-acre property.

Titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” and curated by Colen, the biennial will feature more than 50 artists, including a number of bold-face names such as 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, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and the Félix González-Torres Foundation. Alongside these artists are several who are currently based in the Hudson Valley region, including Autumn Ahn, Sean Desiree, Norman Douglas, Chase Hall, Lyle Ashton Harris, Andrew Moore, Marcus Leslie Singleton, and the estate of Ben Wigfall, an artist and teacher who lived in the Hudson Valley from 1963 until his death in 2017.

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The exhibition’s title borrows its name from an artwork by the organization’s first farmer, artist Joey Piecuch, which will be included in the exhibition. The inaugural edition of the biennial is rooted in its site, with the legacy of the apple warehouse and its construction during the Industrial Revolution serving as a departure point. 

“Standing right next to the building, you see the evidence that was left behind by that moment in time,” Colen told ARTnews in a recent interview. “This tension between the natural world and the industrial world—that’s really the impetus for the show.”

Colen moved to Columbia County in 2012, “without any plan of building something like this,” he said. “It’s something that I was compelled to do in the process of being here and settling in. In that way, it took shape in the same way that everything else that I make takes shape through this very natural process of discovery.”

The purpose of Sky High Farm is to “grow the most nutritious food and donate it to communities that have no access to a fresh, healthy diet,” Colen said, noting that the farm has never sold any of its harvest since it’s been in operation. 

“The basic premise of the farm at the very beginning,” said Sky High co–executive director Josh Bardfield, who had been with the organization since its founding, “was a recognition that people who were using the urgent food system generally did not have access to fresh produce or protein, and even less of the food entering that system is generally raised using ecologically sound methods.” 

Initially, Sky High Farm was run through Colen’s studio, and he saw it as part of his practice, saying “there’s no real separation for me.” Rather, it was an avenue from the beginning for him “to find ways to express myself that felt very far outside of the art industry and all of its machinations.”

Officially, Sky High Farm became a separate nonprofit entity in 2020, though it received its 501(c)3 status in 2016. The pandemic caused the formalization of the nonprofit, and was when Colen and his board began fundraising for its operations and activities.

Since then, it has developed programs “to expand the work that we were doing into areas that were addressing the systems that the food access program was designed to temporarily bridge,” Bardfield said.

One such program is a farmer training fellowship, during which they host four fellows for seven to nine months each year, and which serves as an introduction to regenerative agriculture. Their annual micro-grants program, established in 2022, are aimed at building equity within agriculture and directed at groups historically marginalized (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and migrant and refugee) from funding within this field. The grant program directs around 20 percent of its operating budget to this funding. Additionally, they host youth-serving organizations from the region for workshops that “bring young people closer to where their food comes from,” he said.  

The organization has more recently begun directly engaging with the art world. During the pandemic, it donated produce to Project EATS, an urban farming organization founded by Linda Goode Bryant, which has served as a partial influence and collaborator for over a decade as the two organizations were founded around the same time. 

Sky High also helped build an outdoor educational teaching facility at Forge Project, a Native-led arts organization in the Hudson Valley, and it organized a symposium on art, land, and community in 2022 at the Judd Foundation in New York. 

The forthcoming biennial, which has been in the works for the past two years, seemed like a natural progression as the “exhibition format felt more true to us,” Colen said. “We believe that part of what’s allowed us to succeed was seeded in that art practice founding, and we’ve looked for ways to continue to bring that spirit further into the project, especially as we formalize it as a nonprofit organization.”

A long list of artists was developed via the help of a curatorial council, which included Forge Project’s executive director Candice Hopkins; Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College; and Sarah Workneh, then the co-director of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine, among others. (Shortly afterward, Workneh joined Sky High Farm as co–executive director, around a year and a half ago.) 

Colen whitted down the list, which led him to develop new relationships with a number of the participating artists, including Imhof and the Felix Gonzalez Torres Foundation. At the center of it all was the site, which is “so embedded in all in its history that it kind of grounds all of that work in that relationship in a really important way,” Workneh said. 

Pia Camil, for example, will make a water fountain from several dead apple trees that will sit atop a reflective mirror floor installation by Rudolf Stingel. The water from Camil’s fountain will drain into industrial water containers that form the basis of Imhof’s contribution and create a labyrinth of sorts, leading to other works. (After the exhibition, the water containers in the Imhof work will be repurposed as compost bioreactors for local farms.) 

“These works are meant to exist in space together, like the elements that exist in a river or a forest—or on a farm—together, where there are all these distinct things that you can kind of approach and have intimate experiences with but when you also step back, they exist as a whole,” Colen said. 

Similarly, for its contribution, the Felix Gonzalez Torres Foundation will stage the artist’s ​​“Untitled” (It’s Just a Matter of Time), a suite of 24 billboards near the Hudson River, running along 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 several works by Gonzalez Torres.

The purpose for the exhibition, Colen said, was in part a way “to create touch points for a lot of wider audiences” that Sky High Farms might not ordinarily reach. That led them to realize that this could be a way to help fundraise for the organization but he insisted that “there’s a bigger conceptual impulse that we’re pursuing.” He considers it more “like any curatorial project, a storytelling mechanism—[and] embedded within that is our fundraising.”

Colen, however, wanted this fundraiser to be completely different from the traditional charity auction at a black-tie gala that you might see in New York City, where artists are commonally asked to donate works. Instead, the artists have signed pledges to the organization promising to donate a percentage of the sale of the works, processed through their galleries or studios, to Sky High Farm. Those range from 10 percent to 100 percent of the sale price. 

The point, he said, is to “allow artists to define the way they participate, and allow artists to create works that are very, very meaningful to them,” as well as to challenge the typical fundraising models and hierarchies, which he described as “extractive” and “fraught,” that already exist in the art world in which “the onus is on the artist, instead of the philanthropists, to be generous, to find space in their lives for this work.”

This model also gives artists flexibility in terms of what kind of art they can contribute to the biennial, beyond a painting, sculpture, or work on paper that they might typically give for a charity auction. 

For Colen, this new model goes back to the roots of how he wanted to rethink traditional ways of making art when he founded Sky High Farm 13 years ago. “There is a kind of ambition to the scale of production that we wanted to make sure, in a sense, reflected the ambition of our work at an organizational level.” 

The full artist list follows below.

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
Wade Guyton
Chase Hall
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 (Family)
Thiago Rocha Pitta
Myron Polenberg
Richard Prince
Sarah Rara/Lucky Dragons
Em Rooney
Marcos Saavedra
Michael Sailstorfer
Salem
Tschabalala Self
Marcus Leslie Singleton
Rudolf Stingel
Elaine Stocki
quori theodor
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation
Banks Violette
Charline von Heyl
Ben Wigfall Estate/ Communications Village with Lauren Halsey