Curatorial text:
‘from where the grain itself can speak’ features artwork, historical and contemporary, that gives voice to the plant, human, and interspecies relationships that persist through and despite agricultural methods. The work of local and international artists featured here personalize the complex histories, politics, and ideologies embedded in industrial wheat farming. Their stories demonstrate the failure of monocultures of the mind to eradicate alternatives they make more difficult to thrive, as if pesticide-resistant weeds or the relentless reproduction of gophers in a field.

We live in a moment of increased food insecurity alongside an uptick in authoritarianism and resistance to acting on a climate emergency that threatens international and industrialized food systems. These artworks invite us to listen to the stories the grain itself tells us about possible alternative futures.