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In Germantown, N.Y., Anne Imhof’s industrial water tanks serve as both stage and infrastructure, framing an entire exhibition. These containers create a labyrinthine journey—an intricate maze of hallways and enclosures where artwork is framed, encapsulated and reshapes the open floor of a former apple warehouse left untouched. Human efforts to contain and appropriate water—symbols of purification but also opacity—open new pathways of meaning and dialogue. At the same time, they generate tension that is unresolved, disorienting and at times claustrophobic, transforming the space into a sculptural vessel of control and concealment. In resisting the age of overstimulation, these containers carve out a rare environment for the slow unfolding of art.
Sky High Farm is not a typical cultural venue but a mission-driven organization grounded in community-centered research and action at the intersection of climate, agriculture, food access and education. Founded in 2011 by artist Dan Colen, the farm was created to confront food insecurity while expanding access to fresh, nutritious food for underserved communities.
As the organization’s most ambitious initiative to date, Sky High Farm’s biennial—unveiled in June and running through November—is a powerful blend of art, land, farming and activism. It explores the fertile connections between local ecology, historical legacy and regional industry. “We wanted to share the ideas that undergird our work on the farm community —self-determination, a connected and interdependent relationship with nature, an awareness of historical inequity, erasure and marginalization throughout industrialization—with a larger public,” Sarah Workneh, co-executive director of Sky High Farm, told Observer. “Art and artists have the unique ability to convey and make personal the complexity of all of these ideas, and a show of this scale can reach a diversity of individuals and communities in order to bring them closer to our work.”
From the start, Sky High Farm has embraced broad-based, interdisciplinary collaboration as a way to reimagine solutions for entrenched structural problems. “The organization regularly partners with social service agencies, community organizations, biologists, ecologists and farmers, educators, but also with artists to collectively imagine and contribute to a healthier, more abundant, more connected shared future,” Workneh said.
That the farm is not a conventional art venue makes the list of the new biennial’s participating artists all the more striking, with hard-to-access names like Anne Imhof, Rudolf Stingel, Tschabalala Self, Rirkrit Tiravanija and the Félix González-Torres Foundation. The key lies in how the concept and works align seamlessly with Sky High Farm’s mission, which for Colen has become its own work of art—an artistic, ecological and social platform aimed at real impact.
“The exhibition, and all of the artists, gallerists, art advisors, installers, shippers, framers and fabricators, has helped us communicate our work to new audiences—doing what art does so well—inviting each visitor to find their own and myriad ways of connecting to the urgency of our work, demonstrates that there are ways to participate in the face of so many seemingly insurmountable problems,” added Workneh.
In her 2023 show at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles, Imhof used the same industrial water tanks to create a tense, red-lit, bunker-like environment for her paintings, videos and sound works. At Sky High Farm, these containers instead open up to interventions by other artists, generating a system of relationships, connections and dialogues that embody, both sensorially and spatially, the interconnectedness and entanglements explored by the biennial, titled “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END.”
The artworks in the show don’t simply occupy the space, but also feed into it, shaping and activating not only meanings and messages but also actions and reactions that extend beyond the exhibition itself. Imhof’s tanks, for example, will later be repurposed as compost bioreactors for local farms. Upstairs, a fountain installation by Mexican artist Pia Camil, built from grafted dead apple trees, rests atop Rudolf Stingel’s twelve-square-foot mirrored floor—a maze that unsettles space, perspective and narrative as viewers navigate the second floor’s multimedia choreography. Among the works, Portable Orchards by Environmental Art pioneers Harrison Studio emerges as a living sculpture—ordinary, natural presences that evolve in real time, adapting precariously to the harsh conditions of this windowless warehouse. Meanwhile, recycled water flows from Camil’s fountain as a promise of renewal, trickling down the trunks, through the floor and into Imhof’s tanks.
Each artwork, even when constructed from industrial elements, reveals itself as living matter in flux, forcing us to consider not only its lifecycle but also our responsibility for sustaining the fragile balance of any ecosystem. Across two floors, the exhibition stages an entire network of relationships and interdependencies, proposing new ways of engaging with art—recasting artworks as vessels, tools and participants in a more sustainable cycle of production and consumption.
What first appears as randomness becomes a randomatic system of co-dependence, unfolding between works as nature and the Anthropocene entwine, interexchange and collide in a consequential convergence of organic and industrial materials. The tension is palpable, yet there are glimmers of new harmonies and evolving resolutions. Some works heighten this tension dramatically, such as Stephen Lichty’s 2014 gray basalt monolith topped with a taxidermied cat, first presented in his debut at Foxy Production—a monument to the consequences of humanity’s interference with nature.
One feels immersed in a chain reaction of natural and anthropic elements, balanced on the edge of collapse or convergence. Much like Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987), this carefully orchestrated choreography reveals overlapping systems of cause and action—between human gestures and creations, between the built world and nature. It invites reflection on the transient qualities of all interventions and the relativity of human-made meaning and perception when set against a broader cosmic order.
Suspended upside down, a tree slowly revolves on its axis, guided—or forced—by a machine, its branches scraping the walls of a human-controlled interior. Fallen leaves scatter and accumulate in concentric circles across the floor, marking time with visible traces of decay and cyclical passage. Michael Sailstorfer’s FORST (2021) renders the slow erosion of nature under human intervention visceral, exposing the tension between machine-driven processes and natural cycles and the irreversibility of anthropic disruptions to ecological balance.
By contrast, Pia Camil’s Nature is not a Machine can be read as an effort to reassert that order—unveiling nature’s resilience and underscoring the need for multispecies exchange, for rethinking the nonhuman world as collaborator rather than resource. In this sense, the exhibition gestures toward a spiritual and solidaristic turn, embracing an earthly reality in which nature and culture are alive, intertwined and mutually sustaining yet profoundly vulnerable.
At the same time, the biennial celebrates virtuous stories of initiatives rooted in rehabilitation and social betterment. Entering the exhibition through the “Annex,” visitors encounter a resonant chorus of twenty-five African artifacts from the collection of Hudson Valley artist Ben Wigfall, curated by Lauren Halsey.
Working with Wigfall’s estate, the exhibition highlights his extraordinary achievement in founding Communication Village, a print shop and community center in Kingston, N.Y. His mission was to “explore formats which orchestrate traditional art and survival activities into one total expression,” particularly for Black American communities.
Together with his partner, Mary Wigfall, he also developed the Agri-Business Child Development project, a holistic school and resource hub for migrant children. Across the space, Wigfall’s audioworks amplify stories that confront the generational trauma of slavery and its lasting impact on Black Americans, particularly in the region. Mary Wigfall’s embroideries, textile narratives and recordings appear alongside Wigfall’s prints, weaving a layered and multifaceted story.
Another key artist in the show, Utē Petit, presents a large assemblage rooted in her commitment to land conservation, bridging cultural heritage with ecological sustainability. A former Sky High Grant recipient, the New Orleans-based artist narrates Black-Indigenous land traditions across visual and embodied mediums, merging art-making with environmental stewardship. Central to her practice is the conservation of ancestral land—she oversees her great-grandmother’s and three neighbors’ lots in New Orleans, seeking to rematriate family property once taken by the state of Louisiana. Through her work, Petit revives and preserves Black-Indigenous land-based traditions, fostering ecological resilience and cultural continuity.
In the exhibition, everything unfolds as part of an endless circle of causality and contingency. Change, flow, transformation and action emerge as more fundamental than form or objecthood. As its title suggests, “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” serves as an immersive essay on the inevitability of interdependent entanglement—organic life and human-made systems intertwined in ways that underpin daily survival.
Extending into the social and natural landscape beyond the farm, Félix González-Torres’ billboard work Untitled (It’s Just a Matter of Time) appears across twenty-four sites along the tidal Hudson River, from Troy to New York Harbor. Its ambiguity reads as both provocation and warning—a haunting reminder of self-destruction that resonates sharply amid today’s political and ecological instability.
Blending art, land, farming and activism into a single operational model, the biennial probes alternative relationships between culture, local ecology, historical legacy and regional industry—reimagining how art can not only state, document or claim but also directly generate community benefit.
Most participating artists have pledged a portion of sale proceeds to the organization, establishing a working model in which cultural production fuels justice-driven outcomes. In doing so, the exhibition becomes a dynamic infrastructure, activating a network of relationships that share resources and create new channels of value. All of this supports the nonprofit mission of combating food insecurity and expanding access to fresh, nutritious food for underserved communities.
Through these experiments in value creation, the exhibition opens new forms of shared economies and fundraising. Such models transform artistic value into economic and social capital and into a catalyst for action, driving sustainability and producing measurable impact. In the process, the presumed separation between art, farming and mutual aid is quietly upended.
While Colen’s background in the downtown New York art scene brings a distinct cultural edge and curatorial weight to the project, the biennial also marks a major milestone for Sky High Farm. It coincides with the organization’s expansion to a new 560-acre site and highlights its evolution from a grassroots initiative into a catalytic cultural force in the region.
“The problems we work to address—food insecurity, unequal resource distribution, climate change—will require broad-based participation to solve,” Sky High Farm co-executive directors Workneh and Josh Bardfield said. As Colen’s vision takes shape, artists reclaim their agency, contributing work that raises ecological awareness while actively seeking to restore balance between and beyond humans, with the understanding that survival depends entirely on collective effort and shared resolve.
“TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” is on view at Sky High Farm, 201 Main Street, Germantown, N.Y., through Fall of 2025.
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