Post-Agricultural Speculations

By Jeffrey L. Day and FACT

This project enacts the complex interrelationship of art, landscape, architecture and history in the rural context of Art Farm, a rural art residency, exhibition site, and laboratory for explorations of creative inhabitation of the land. The ongoing project demonstrates alternatives to the predominant land uses found in the Great Plains and it asks several questions: Can art form the basis of a post-agricultural landscape? Can contemporary design practice engage the multiple histories of rural settlement? Can art engage history, land, and global culture with the same gesture? Can creativity be farmed?

Art Farm and the design proposal for its expansion offer an alternative mode of resistance to the erasure of history found in the Plains. Opposed to nostalgic and sentimental attempts to preserve a lost narrative of inhabitation, Art Farm is a framework for new histories to be written on the land.

Jeffrey L. Day, AIA is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a principal of Min | Day, an architecture & design practice based in San Francisco and Omaha. Jeff also runs FACT (Fabrication And Construction Team) an academic/professional collaborative design lab.