Tinworks Art is pleased to announce a public harvest celebration of Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield – An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground on Sunday, September 8th. The community is invited to participate in a free, day-long event that will include demonstrations of traditional hand-harvesting techniques by students from Montana State University’s Plant Sciences Department, as well as threshing, cleaning, and milling wheat at a small scale.
In addition to being harvested for milling, a portion of the Bobcat winter wheat grown in Tinworks’ field will be collected into small packets that will be given to the first 300 guests in attendance. The packets serve as a memento of the artwork or can be planted in the fall, as a continuation of Denes’ invitation to the Bozeman community to plant wheat in any fallow piece of land in solidarity with Wheatfield – An Inspiration.
Later in the fall, wheat harvested from Tinworks will be processed into flour and baked into bread by acclaimed Bozeman bakery Wild Crumb. The bread will be sold to the public and distributed throughout the community in partnership with the Gallatin Valley Food Bank.
photo by Blair Speed
A groundbreaking, internationally acclaimed figure in the conceptual, environmental, and ecological art movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s, Agnes Denes continues to defy easy classification. She engages science, philosophy, math, linguistics, technology, engineering, music, and poetry in visionary works that explore environmental consciousness and humanity’s impact on the planet. One of her most recognized and influential works is Wheatfield – A Confrontation, from 1982, in which Denes planted a two-acre field of wheat in prime New York real estate in Lower Manhattan. It is widely considered to be one of the first public ecological artworks.
Wheatfield – An Inspiration is the first time the artist has accepted an invitation to reposition the work in the United States. Reimagining Wheatfield in Bozeman was particularly compelling for Denes because of the significant role wheat has played in Montana’s economy, the increasing loss of farmland in the rapid urban growth of the region, and the opportunity to reclaim another valuable piece of land through an artistic ecological intervention.
Wheatfield – An Inspiration was seeded on-site at Tinworks in October 2023 and began to sprout in the spring. While the sprouts were dormant in the winter months, the project expanded through the circulation of Questionnaire, a work Denes first produced in 1979. With Questionnaire, Denes engaged the public by inviting them to answer questions about humanity, artificial intelligence, global warming, and more. The questions will continue to be accessible to the public by a QR code on the plaque that marks the piece at Tinworks’ site and responses are continuously saved to the cloud.
Denes’ Wheatfield is the inspiration for Tinworks’ 2024 season exhibition, The Lay of the Land, which also features work by James Castle, Layli Long Soldier, Lucy Raven, Stephen Shore, Robbie Wing, and artist-in-residence Wills Brewer. The exhibition is on view through October 19th with open hours Thursday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm.
For more information on the public harvest celebration, visit www.tinworksart.org. •
