Futurefarmers: Arrange
An Exhibition of Selected Projects from 23 Years of Work
October 4, 2017 – Feb 4, 2018
Hunter East Harlem Gallery
The Silberman School of Social Work
2180 3rd Avenue at 119th Street
New York, NY 10035
Gallery hours: Wednesday–Saturday, 12-5pm
Hunter East Harlem Gallery is pleased to present an arranged selection of past projects from the collective, Futurefarmers.
Futurefarmers is a group of artists and designers whose work is an intermingling of design, art, ecology and human systems created through projects that utilize collectivity, dialogue, play, and making. Founded in 1994, the collective started as a design studio and slowly moved into projects that involved robotics, gardening, and civic structures. Futurefarmers has hosted an Artist in Residence program since its inception, making up today’s geographic dispersion of Futurefarmers artists and collaborators. For the past 23 years, the group has collaborated with hundreds of specialists in various fields, exhibited at dozens of cultural institutions, and created ideologies that aim for an improved social existence.
The exhibition highlights specific projects from the past 23 years of Futurefarmers work and attempts to place the group into the canon of important socially engaged artists and designers. Arrange highlights key thematic threads within the collective’s practice and the viewer is thrust into the world of Futurefarmers where, like a small ecosystem, their projects intertwine art, science, design and the environment. The exhibition title harks to an inherent resistance to the typical retrospective exhibition model and also the collective’s interest in arrangement, organization, and non-hierarchical cataloguing structures. The viewer is guided through the exhibition where art objects act as props to the stories, interpretations, and phantoms of Futurefarmers’ past projects. The exhibition can be understood as an experience that grasps the temporal and interstitial moments of dialogue, conversation, performance, and collaboration - processes deeply rooted in the work of Futurefarmers.
Organized by Arden Sherman, Curator, Hunter East Harlem Gallery; Gund Curatorial Fellows Marie Coneys and Kristen Racaniello; and Hunter College Advanced Curatorial Certificate MA and MFA students.
Futurefarmers: Arrange is made possible by the generous support of the office of the President at Hunter College; the David Bershad Family Foundation; the Susan V. Bershad Charitable Fund, Inc.; Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg; and Agnes Gund in support of the Curatorial Certificate Program. This exhibition was developed in part over a semester curatorial seminar led by Arden Sherman and Paul Ramirez-Jonas.