Tinworks Art in Bozeman is spearheading a public art installation and speaker series on food and farming in an effort to help locals reconnect with their food system.
The installation and speaker series are connected and encourage people to think about the value of land and what it takes to make local food systems sustainable.
Last Wednesday marked the first of four food-focused lectures that Tinworks is holding at the Rialto this spring, and the installation — over an acre of wheat symbolically planted in downtown Bozeman — is already underway.
Jenny Moore, director of Tinworks Art, a Bozeman nonprofit formed in 2021, said the installation is the first time renowned artist Agnes Denes has accepted an invitation to revisit her work.
Denes’ original work, called “Wheatfield: A Confrontation,” was displayed in New York City in 1982. Denes, now 93, planted 2 acres of wheat in lower Manhattan, in a landfill created from the construction of the World Trade Center that today is Battery Park City.
People will recognize the iconic photo of the installation still today — Denes in jeans and a blouse, standing in the middle of a golden wheat field that reaches her hips, with the towering skyscrapers of the Manhattan Financial District in the background.
The revisited work for Bozeman will be called “Wheatfield: An Inspiration, The Seed is in the Ground.” The artwork will provide “the opportunity to pose the same questions that Agnes’ work did 40 years ago about how we value the land, about climate change, about food insecurity in a new context and a new community,” Moore said.
Winter wheat was already planted on around 1.5 acres of Tinworks property in October, Moore said. The field is on the corner of Ida and Cottonwood Avenue near Wild Crumb. Local farmer Kenny Van Dyke donated the wheat — it’s an MSU variety called Bobcat — and his equipment and time to plant it.
The wheat field is now starting to germinate — and part of the installation will invite the community to be involved with food production.
“The Wheatfield is hope. There is renewal in the seed. We are planting hope,” Denes said in a press release about the work.
This summer, Tinworks will host volunteers to help tend the wheat field, with everything from weeding to harvesting.
People can also plant their own fallow plots of land with wheat “in solidarity” with the Tinworks wheat field. The group plans to distribute seed packets to interested people this summer.
There are small mills on site at Tinworks to process the wheat into flour, which then will be given to local bakery Wild Crumb to create bread for Bozemanites.
“What an interesting way to consider how we think about food production, by having a community come together to produce a crop of wheat and harvest it and process it together. Maybe that’s a new way to consider how a community could think about the value of their land and food insecurity these days,” Moore said. “And how an artwork that is a material that’s familiar can help us think in new ways about the challenges that face our communities.”
People can also get involved by filling out Denes’ “Questionnaire” online, a gathering of responses about the greatest challenges facing humanity today.
The themes brought forth in the artwork will also be discussion topics for the “In Conversation: On Food and Farming” series that Tinworks is hosting this spring.
Art has the power to bring people together and inspire a wide range of conversations, said Tinworks communications director Kate Belton. The project aims to build bridges between the agriculture and art communities in Montana to talk about important topics like land loss and food sovereignty.
The events are loosely structured and will be formatted as an organic conversation between the host and guest, Belton said. It won’t be a lecture, and there will be an opportunity for the audience to ask questions at the end.
Last Wednesday marked the first of three evening events. “Healing Our Connections to Food and Place” featured a conversation with renowned Montana author Liz Carlisle and former MSU professor and director of Montana Institute on Ecosystems Bruce Maxwell.
The sold-out event featured Carlisle discussing her latest book “Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming” and the worldview that everything in the world is connected — and food and plants are our relatives, not resources.
There are three other events planned over the next few months, all at the Rialto downtown at 10 W. Main St. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the programming starts at 7:30 p.m.
The next event, to be held April 17, is called “The House of Food: Stories from Montana Kitchens.” The conversation will be between MSU professor emeritus and food historian Mary Murphy and Red Ants Pants Founder Sarah Calhoun.
The other events on May 15 will focus on Indigenous food sovereignty, and the final June 19 event will be a discussion about the work of Agnes Denes.
Tickets are $12 and available to purchase on the Tinworks Art website.