Art and agriculture intersect, like hedgerows

Earlier this month, at the Magnolia Salon at Carlton's Oldenburg House, Annie Dugan presented challenging ideas on how art intersects with agriculture. She first showed a hilarious video of young farm kids riding various remarkable vehicles across farm fields and hillocks, and into ponds! Having fun.

Dugan began with this quote from St. Francis of Assisi:

"He who works with his hands is a laborer.

He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.

He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."

Dugan runs Food Farm, an organic family enterprise, with her husband Janaki Fisher-Merritt near Wrenshall. Janaki is the master farmer. Annie is an art historian who teaches at St. Scholastica and directed Duluth's Art Institute recently for four years.

Why art and farming?

"I began by reflecting on hedgerows," she shared. "They are the interstices, where change and encounters happen." She learned at a farming conference run by the Xerces Society that hedgerows are important habitat for native pollinators and beneficial insects that eat other insects.

For most of a decade, the couple has been hosting their Free Range Film Festival in late June - and, more recently, mid-summer art shows - in their magnificent three-story barn, built in 1918 and restored by Dugan's parents. Last summer's art show, called "farm trials," featured artworks that are like field tests and that can be scaled up. An example is Cecilia Ramon's work mapping ocean currents. Visitors were invited to walk the currents Ramon mapped on a path through the lawn surrounding the barn.

I call this work pioneering! It's not that easy to put art and farming together in your head. We think of farming as a large-scale and often capital intensive activity. Even crops like raspberries and pumpkins are harvested by farm crews working their way down fields. Farmers, Dugan explained, take the stage in the spring and again in the fall. They are designers: what shall we cultivate, how shall we plant it and make it accessible to care?

This resonates with me. I've been veggie gardening for 45 years on Cromwell land, taught by my Danish-born grandfather. My husband keeps our tillers and minimalist electric fence in shape, and my cousin Martha and I design it each early May, reflecting on what went where last year, how much of each, and how neighborly the various crops will be. There's surely an aesthetic dimension to this: what it will look like?! We mark the ends of each row with a spray of gold and deep red marigolds which help deter any deer that might intrude. But am I an artist?

Dugan, who grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., shares that she has long resented the idea that farms make food and cities make everything else.

"Thanks to Alice Waters (the acclaimed California natural food restaurateur), local food is now celebrated," she said. "But 'local arts' isn't that sweet. It's assumed that what artists do in smaller communities is less powerful than what happens in urban settings."

Dugan believes that the arts can help us explore ambiguity and deal with conflict.

"I see three areas of intersection," she shared. "Tension, observation, and wonderment. In agriculture, you don't want overgrowth. In art, it's the same."

Art and farming are both about observation, Dugan shared. "Farming is about pests, and weeds. You can see what's going on. You are observing all the time: before intervention, during the growth period, and as you harvest."

Art is about really seeing, she said, a truism that helps me understand how it differs from reading, listening to or creating music, and performance. Art is mainly about seeing, and perhaps that is what makes it so challenging and wonderful at the same time.

Dugan's talk was as much a conversation as a presentation. She bravely exposed the incompleteness of this project, a brilliant strategy for work in progress. Many visual artists work in isolation and exhibit their work only in their absence, forgoing conversations and insights that might be inspiring and useful. Hopefully, our questions and thoughts contributed in a modest way to Dugan's ambitious project to bring the aesthetics and practicalities of art and farming closer together.

And a big thanks to the Magnolia Cafe's Yvette Maijala and the Oldenburg House and its proprietors, Emily and Glenn Swanson, for hosting these salons.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot Board Member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband Rod Walli.