When I first encountered the Great Salt Lake and was introduced to the complex issues that are affecting the lake, I asked myself what art could contribute to the discussion,
In 1982, conceptual artist Agnes Denes transformed a barren landfill near Wall Street into a two-acre wheat field for her project *Wheatfield - A Confrontation*. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the work involved months of labor, including soil preparation, hand-digging furrows, and planting seeds. Denes and her team maintained the field through irrigation, weeding, and fertilizing, ultimately harvesting over 1,000 pounds of wheat.
Across the expansive 140-acre grounds of The Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, six contemporary artists have been invited to create site-specific works engaging with the property's meadows, trails, and woods, while highlighting their individual practices. Sculptures by Yō Akiyama, Laura Ellen Bacon, Aboubakar Fofana, Hugh Hayden, Milena Naef, and Javier Senosiain dot a variety of sites, from manicured parkland to open fields to groves of trees.
Cloud's Memoir is a multimedia stage installation that merges poetic narrative with environmental data systems, exploring how Earth's atmosphere is shaped by historical forces.
'There is a big problem here: there is a mushroom with a disease that came in the trees, and they will die in a few years. We don't know exactly when, and if we don't find a solution for this mushroom, so we have to cut down all the trees.'
Hayes uses color, translucency, and composition to radically reshape the way viewers experience architecture and nature through large-scale, site-specific installations.