Hudson Valley’s grain silos and dairy barns have been quietly mutating into art spaces for years, but Dan Colen is about to raise the stakes. On 28 June his not-for-profit Sky High Farm opens its first biennial—an exhibition as sprawling and unruly as the 560-acre property itself. Housed in a disused apple-storage warehouse on the banks of the Hudson River, “TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END” will run through 25 October 2025.
Why does this matter? Because Colen has persuaded more than 50 blue-chip and breakthrough artists to donate their imaginations to a show that merges art, agriculture and food justice. Expect Anne Imhof’s charged atmospherics, Tschabalala Self’s stitched-up bodies, and light works authorised by the Félix González-Torres Foundation, all staged amid hay bales, grain elevators and the scent of ripening fruit.
Colen himself calls the biennial “a love letter to the land and the labour that sustains us.” The curatorial through-line is ecology, industry and memory: how we occupy space, extract from it, and tell stories about it later. Installations sprawl from the warehouse out into working fields, so viewers will literally walk past rows of kale and heritage tomatoes on the way to see an Imhof video or a Rudolph Stingel floor piece.
Sky High Farm isn’t just a picturesque venue; since 2012 it has donated tens of thousands of kilos of fresh produce and pasture-raised meat to regional food banks. All ticket proceeds from the biennial cycle straight back into those hunger-relief programmes, making the exhibition both a cultural event and a social-impact engine.
Hypebeast
Why collectors should care: The Hudson Valley has become a laboratory for artist-led philanthropy, and Colen’s biennial sets a new bar for ambition and civic engagement. If you’re East-Coast bound this northern summer—or hunting for the next big institutional talking point—mark these dates. The show opens with a weekend of performances, farm-to-table dinners and a collector preview on 27 June.