Bountiful basket at the Broad

‘Farmland’ serves up a cornucopia of art, history and food

Posted

Don’t let the lounging cows give you a false sense of security. “Farmland: Food, Justice and Sovereignty,” a major new exhibit on view at the Michigan State University Broad Art Museum through July 27, is packed with images of barns, potatoes, carrots, colorfully clad gardeners and such, but it’s no county fair corn fest.

A rich bounty of old and new art, along with historic photos and documents from the MSU Museum, delves into the mixed legacy of land grabs, unequal access to resources, food commodification and other awkward threads that dangle from the folksy, Lincolnesque tapestry of MSU’s land grant history.

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse 
Broad assistant curator Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez (pictured) co-curated the “Farmland” exhibit with former associate curator Teresa Fankhänel.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse  Broad assistant curator Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez (pictured) co-curated the “Farmland” exhibit with former …

It’s a bold show, especially at a time when advocacy for social justice is being tarred left and right, and the tangled roots of the past are being plowed under from coast to coast to sow a corn-syrupy MAGA monoculture.

Is the Broad biting the land grant hand that feeds it? There may be a nibble here and there, but it’s more accurate to say that “Farmland” feeds the mind that beholds it — not only by serving up a visual feast but also by serving up food for thought on how and why land and food are sliced and diced, and who gets a seat at the table.

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
Tiny harvesters wrangle veggies almost as large as themselves in “Cosecha de Zanahoria” (“Harvest of Carrots”), a 1987 fabric and appliqué work by the Huamani de la Cruz family.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse Tiny harvesters wrangle veggies almost as large as themselves in “Cosecha de Zanahoria” (“Harvest of …

Hyperlocal

Many recent exhibits at the Broad have enlisted collaborators from the mid-Michigan community and focused on local concerns, but “Farmland” may be the most local yet, with more than 70 community organizations, farms, archivists and artists involved.

“Harvest,” a rich canvas painted in burnished browns and blacks by Lansing artist Julian Van Dyke, glows darkly from a gorgeous wall of images devoted to food production. (It’s also fun to see Van Dyke’s name on the exhibit’s artist list, next to Andy Warhol’s.)

As soon as you enter the first- and second-floor lobbies, huge blown-up photos immerse you in the early landscape of Michigan Agricultural College, the predecessor to MSU, circa 1913.

This is as local as it gets. It feels like a lost world of dirt roads, barns and horse-drawn vehicles, but it’s the very land you’re standing on.

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
A 1990 print by Sue Coe graphically depicts the average American’s food intake over a decade.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse A 1990 print by Sue Coe graphically depicts the average American’s food intake over a decade.

“I’m not trying to do a history exhibition,” Broad assistant curator Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez said. “I’m not a food expert or an agriculture expert. I work with art. But I do start with the agricultural story, and there’s history peppered throughout.”

Combing through the Broad and MSU Museum collections, Álvarez and former Broad associate curator Teresa Fankhänel, co-curator of “Farmland,” unearthed a wealth of images and objects that tell
story from multiple angles. The visual feast is augmented by new art commissioned especially for the show.

“A specialist will ask, ‘Are you telling a story about food or farming or agriculture?’ I’m telling a story that ties it all together,” Álvarez said.

If you want that story in a nutshell, look no further than the familiar block letters used in the logo for the exhibit.They’re identical to the ones used in the famous “Hollywoodland” sign perched in the Hollywood Hills. (The “land” was removed in 1949.)

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
A table in the second-floor gallery invites patrons to interact with dishes that ask questions about food and farming, with the answers (or prompts to further thought) underneath.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse A table in the second-floor gallery invites patrons to interact with dishes that ask questions about food and …

The message is clear. In Farmland, as in Hollywood, things are never what they seem.

The first painting the viewer sees upon entering the gallery is a serene image of grazing cattle, Mathias Joseph Alten’s 1914 canvas “Michigan Pasture with Cows.”

It’s a sly opening gambit. A vintage photo of roaming American bison, positioned next to the cattle, reminds the viewer that bison were all but wiped out by the end of the 19th century, even as European settlers imported non-native livestock that changed the face of the land they grabbed.

The idea that the land was just sitting there, unoccupied and waiting to be farmed, is one of several illusions Álvarez and her colleagues seek to dispel.

“There’s this idea of the expanse of American land that’s just there for you to use, that there were no people here before,” Álvarez said.

John S. Coppin’s lush 1954 pastel drawing of pioneering MSU botanist William J. Beal, surrounded by students in a sunset-hued garden, evokes warm feelings for the school’s agricultural heritage, but it comes with a caveat. Contrary to a plaque that stood for years in the eponymous Beal Botanical Garden, Beal was not the first person to hybridize maize (corn). North American Indigenous peoples developed maize from teosinte, a wild grass. (The error was corrected on the plaque in the garden.)

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
Abraham Rattner’s 1955 canvas “Potato Farmscape with Figure #5” glows with September sunshine.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse Abraham Rattner’s 1955 canvas “Potato Farmscape with Figure #5” glows with September sunshine.

Warhol and peas

It takes a bit of lingering and rumination to connect the many dots embedded in “Farmland.” One intriguing swath of wall space brings together a crazy quilt of etchings, prints and political cartoons by artists as diverse as Thomas Nast, Francisco Goya and Sue Coe, most of them critiquing the excesses of 20th-century food production. A 1990 print by Coe depicts a blob man with a huge mouth devouring in one go the average American’s food intake over a decade: “144 fishes, 185 chickens, 8 turkeys, 7 pigs, 1 lamb, 2 cows.” A tiny print depicting a can of Campbell’s wonton soup (by Warhol, of course) speaks volumes on food commodification and cultural homogenization in the 20th century.

One unusual case contains 30 absurdly specialized modern kitchen tools, including a chestnut clip, a potato spiralizer and a butter curler. All of them, according to the information provided, do things an ordinary kitchen knife can do.

The display dramatizes how food production and consumption have strayed from their simple roots and raises the point that specialized tools like these encourage the production of uniformly sized, mass-market produce. As a bonus, it also sorts out the two kinds of people who live in this world: those who will sigh in disapproval at all the capitalist excess and those who will look at the gadgets, watch the accompanying video and say, “Wow, I need to get one of those.”

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
Imani Badillo of SPACES art gallery in Cleveland joined a discussion Saturday (Jan. 25) at the Broad about Ohio-based farmers who are removing chemical fertilizers from their farming methods. A series of talks by local farmers, artists and other exhibit partners will continue through July.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse Imani Badillo of SPACES art gallery in Cleveland joined a discussion Saturday (Jan. 25) at the Broad about …

A stark contrast to the outrageous kitchen gadgets is provided by a centuries-old black-ash wood splitter, used to make baskets, from the Niishode (Two Hearts) Indigenous Art Collective. The splitter was given to the collective by a Saginaw Chippewa elder, who inherited it from his father.

The elegant, almost devotional-looking tool, in the shape of an elongated “A,” sang out to Broad interim director Steven Bridges when he made a pass through the exhibit before it opened on Jan. 18.

“For me, it has this incredible aura, this presence — the number of hands, the number of baskets, the number of trees that have passed through it,” Bridges said. “The more people can slow down and take in the presence of these objects, the histories they embody — there’s powerful lessons and information to be gained there.”

The exhibit also includes three documentary films, produced by MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences, on urban farming in Flint.

“They’re incredibly captivating and well done,” Bridges said. “I hope people take the time to watch and listen to them.”

Bridges credited Álvarez and Fankhänel for weaving such a generous basket of collaborators from the community, inviting them to participate in the exhibit and “building a community around this work.”

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
Artist Mila Lynn’s second-floor panorama depicts a young urban gardener confronting the asphalt dragon of the Interstate 496 freeway, which wiped out a thriving Black neighborhood in Lansing.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse Artist Mila Lynn’s second-floor panorama depicts a young urban gardener confronting the asphalt dragon of the …

“In the old days, museums were ivory towers removed from these wider engagements,” Bridges said. “We’ve really shifted our working process, not only speaking to our audiences but including them in the process of making the exhibition.”

 

Serious and silly

“Farmland” reaches outside MSU to follow the threads of food production and land-use questions into the Greater Lansing community. Among the many local collaborators enlisted by the curators is the Justice League of Greater Lansing, a grassroots group working with local churches to increase wealth equity for African Americans in Greater Lansing by building an endowment fund for scholarships, business startups and home ownership.

The legacy of land-use choices that disadvantaged African Americans in Lansing is dramatized by a large, three-dimensional piece by artist Mila Lynn depicting the crosstown Interstate 496 freeway as a dragon snaking through a once-thriving Black neighborhood. The freeway comes to life, swatting homes into the air left and right, as a young girl with a wagonload of vegetables confronts the monster.

A vintage photograph from another collaborator, the Historical Society of Greater Lansing, shows a father and daughter from the I-496 area carrying a giant cabbage grown in the area that was destroyed. Other photos from the historical society depict sugar-beet farming and processing in north Lansing in the early 20th century. Nearby is a display celebrating centennial farms that are adopting sustainable farming practices, like Zeeb Farms in DeWitt, another local collaborator on the exhibit.

Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse 
A potato storage barn is one of several detailed miniature structures built under the auspices of the Public Works Administration in the mid-20th century.
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse  A potato storage barn is one of several detailed miniature structures built under the auspices of the Public …

Some of the artifacts on view are just plain fun. A custom-made, one-of-a-kind box displays dozens of bird eggs, from huge specimens of rhea, ostrich and emu eggs the size of soccer balls to tiny finch eggs no larger than your thumbnail.

While combing through the MSU Museum collection, Álvarez found two strange and wonderful prints, apparently dating from the middle of the 20th century, in pristine condition. Produced under the aegis of the International Harvester Co., they depict mechanized implements with Art Deco features and streamlined styling that shout “farm of the future,” as it was imagined 75 years ago.

“They’re kind of comical,” Álvarez said. “Nothing wrong with silly. I like silly.”

Born in Puerto Rico, Álvarez has been working at the Broad for four years. She’s familiar with the Midwest, having lived in Chicago and Iowa.

“The Midwest inspired this exhibition,” she said. “It was kind of inevitable for me.”

As an undergrad, she attended another land (and sea) grant university, the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

“It was also originally an agricultural and mechanical arts college, same as MSU,” she said.  “I can relate a lot to MSU, even though I later went to the University of Iowa.”

Courtesy MSU Broad Art Museum
“Three Sisters,” a clay sculpture by Tammy Tarbell-Boehning, celebrates the “three sisters” (corn, beans and squash) practice of companion gardening first developed by Haudenosaunee communities in the Great Lakes region.
Courtesy MSU Broad Art Museum “Three Sisters,” a clay sculpture by Tammy Tarbell-Boehning, celebrates the “three sisters” (corn, beans …

Her personal and family background in Puerto Rico shaped her interest in agriculture and food production.

“We have such a rich agricultural history, but we have a big problem with food distribution,” she said. “Because of the Jones Act, all food that goes to Puerto Rico has to go through a U.S. port first, which is Florida.”

The protectionist act places many other costly restrictions on shipments of goods to Puerto Rico.

“That causes our food to be very expensive and not as fresh, and we don’t have as much control over our agricultural production,” Álvarez said. “I also come from families that have farms. So, there’s a lot there that inspires all this.”

Comments

No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here

v


Connect with us