ARE

WE

REALLY

THAT

DIFFERENT?

Designed in collaboration with artist and food activist Linda Goode Bryant, the installation Are we really that different? included a fully operational urban farm located in the middle of a New York City art gallery. Presented alongside a new video that reflects on the legacy of Just Above Midtown — the gallery founded by Bryant in 1974 was among the first to focus on work by artists of color — the installation brings two chapters of the artist’s fifty-year career into dialogue. The urban farm was conceived as a prototype for Project EATS, the organization established by Bryant in 2009 to give every person the opportunity to “live healthily and to thrive.” The installation converts the sanitized space of the gallery into a site of agricultural production.

Art galleries are highly controlled environments in which levels of sound, humidity, temperature, and light are precisely regulated to preserve the art on view. Though ideal for artwork, these conditions are inhospitable to plants, which enjoy ample sun and water. The challenge was to reconcile the logics of the farm with the logics of the gallery — two programs at odds with one another.

An existing gallery skylight — a feature typically used to showcase art — serves as life support for a “sliver farm” nestled in a sixteen-foot-tall structure suspended below it. The structure holds soil beds planted with a variety of edible plants. The water line of a nearby janitorial sink is extended to the farm, irrigating the soil with a nutrient mixture delivered by intravenous-drip bags. Buckets positioned beneath the sliver farm capture any errant water, which is returned to the irrigation system. Produce is harvested daily and made available on the gallery walls. Visitors are allowed to eat the artwork. The farm yielded more than five hundred pounds of food during the exhibition’s three-month run. Vegetables and edible flowers were harvested weekly, on Monday mornings, and donated to residents of New York City.

Are we really that different? was created for the group exhibition Social Works, curated by Antwaun Sargent, at Gagosian.