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ND farming part of Guggenehim Museum’s new exhibition

Submitted Photo These installation images by David Heald, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, show the new exhibition, “Countryside, The Future,” in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Several North Dakotans were interviewed during research for the exhibition.

“Countryside, The Future,” an exhibition including farming models taking place in North Dakota, opened in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Feb. 20.

This is the first time the Guggenheim has ever shown a research exhibition of this magnitude.

The overall exhibition explores radical change in the world’s nonurban territories.

“Countryside, The Future” addresses environmental, political, and socioeconomic issues through the lens of architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal, director of AMO, the think tank of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). A book, “Countryside, A Report,” was published to coincide with the exhibition’s opening.

The core of the research on North Dakota is a summary of 15 hours of interviews with local farmers and people from the agriculture business including Mark Watne, president of the North Dakota Farmers Union in Jamestown; Mark Hovland, general manager of Fessenden Co-op Association; Paul Overby, regenerative agriculture, consultant and education, Lee Farms at Wolford; Lanny Faleide, founder and president of Satshot, Fargo, and others, according to OMA information. The main topics are precision farming, monopolistic practices, cooperatives, regenerative farming, no-till farming and the implications of rail companies in agriculture.

Submitted Photo These installation images by David Heald, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, show the new exhibition, “Countryside, The Future,” in the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Several North Dakotans were interviewed during research for the exhibition.

As the exhibition unfolds, it addresses questions about the development and role of the countryside over time, said Guggenheim information.

Outside the museum’s entrance on Fifth Avenue is an airtight industrial grow container that cultivates tomatoes under pink LED lights and a high-tech, state-of-the-art Deutz-Fahr tractor used in industrial farming.

The street-level rotunda of the museum has a small imaging satellite, an industrial-size bale of hay, and a COTSbot, a predatory starfish-killing underwater drone, paired with a reproduction Roman sculpture of a fisherman.

The first level and High Gallery includes an animated map identifying the geographic scope of the project, images from advertisements, fashion, campaign, toys and country music to illustrate fantasies and stereotypes of rural life created by journalist Niklas Maak with students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Other levels of the exhibition examine the modern conception of leisure, large-scale planning by political forces, climate change, migration, human and nonhuman ecosystems, market-driven preservation, artificial and organic coexistence, and other forms of radical experimentation that are altering landscapes across the world.

The exhibition will continue through Aug. 14. Programs are planned in conjunction with the exhibition and listed at guggenheim.org/calendar.

For more information about the exhibition visit guggenheim.org, then go to “Exhibitions.”

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