#agnesdenes

Happy Earth Day!

Art has the power to foster emotional connection and deeper understanding for people with what is happening to our planet. For Earth Month, the Fine Arts Library is highlighting artists whose work center on the environment, ecology, climate crisis, and climate action in our special display, Calling for Action: Books for Earth Month!

One of the early pioneers in the Ecological art movement was Agnes Denes (b. 1931), who began working on ecological projects in the late 1960s. Her best-known work was Wheatfield - A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan (1982), which addressed larger issues around social, economic, and ethical practice on land. Denes planted, grew, and harvested wheat on a 2-acre lot located in a landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty.  On August 16, 1982, the crop was harvested, yielding over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat. The work addressed greed and misplaced priorities, highlighting the mismanagement of land, food, waste, world hunger, and ecological concerns.  

This publication entitled Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis highlights the ways in which artists seek to reframe and deepen our psychological and spiritual responses to the Earth, ecology, and the climate crisis. As Nigerian-born visual artist Otobong Nkanga says, “caring is a form of resistance.”

Untitled from Fragmentation, Agnes Denes, 1998, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

Gift of Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro Size: page 13 15/16 x 9 15/16" (35 x 25.2 cm) Medium: Etching from an illustrated book with six etchings

Artist of The Day

Agnes Denes

Model for Teardrop—Monument to Being Earthbound

2019

A Hungarian-born American artist, Agnes Denes (b. 1931) is a pioneer in environmental, ecological, and conceptual art. Her family survived the Nazi occupation in WWII and migrated to Sweden before settling in the United States.

In 1982, Denes planted a 2-acre wheatfield on a landfill in Manhattan two blocks away from the Wall Street and the World Trade Center. Against the backdrop of Wall Street, this golden wheatfield stood for four months and mesmerized many New Yorkers. Denes said in regard to this work, “… the work had to have a meaning, a strong message, and, of course, the paradox. … the work turned out to be one block from Wall Street, facing the Statue of Liberty, for which this country stands, in the middle of traffic in a bustling city. A large golden field of grain on land meant for the rich, on expensive real estate.” (From an interview with Ulrich Obrist)

Today, more than forty years after she created this monumental work entitled “Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan,” her vision touches even more deeply given the ever-increasing degradation of our environment, the ongoing mismanagement of land and food systems, and the widening divide between the poor and the wealthy—all the result of corporate capitalism, as well as geopolitical control of resources.

Denes said that this work represented “food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics” and referred to “mismanagement, waste, world hunger.” She also said, “My decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan, instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of the longstanding concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.”

At the age of 88, Denes finally had her retrospective at the Shed in New York in 2019. This publication presents more than 130 works from the exhibition, spanning the artist’s entire 50-year career.

Dialectic Triangulation: Into Symbolic Logic, Agnes Denes, 1970, MoMA: Drawings and Prints

John B. Turner Fund Size: composition and sheet: 21 15/16 x 17 5/8" (55.7 x 44.8cm) Medium: Monoprint