Sky High Farm Biennial: does it close the gap it reflects?

Set in the unassuming pastures of Germantown New York, The Sky High Biennial establishes a portal to an internationalist kunsthalle culture which is at once monumental and momentary. The tone of the show is deliberately “big city”: curated by Gagosian-represented artist Dan Colen, the star-studded exhibition map boasts the names of Anne Imhof, Rudolph Stingler, Nan Goldin, Ann Craven, Pia Camil, Carroll Dunham, Ryan McGinley, and Banks Violette, among others. However, the site itself is resolutely rural and agricultural, and the proceeds structure is pointedly nonprofit: artists choose how to split any sale between themselves and Sky High Farm’s food-justice mission. The question is whether the show’s structure and scale genuinely stitch two art worlds together, or simply stage their difference under one roof. Can Colen's project engage the region's infrastructure, landscape, and people on substantive terms, or does it merely stage a city performance using the history and culture of Germantown as props and set?

Though the former warehouse still resounds with the scent of the apples once stored inside, the show itself quickly transports the visitor into an altogether different (and markedly non-agricultural) dimension. The first room exhibits the work and collection of the late Ben Wigfall, a local painter, educator, and community builder memorialized through his Communications Village project in nearby Kingston, New York; a para-canonical painting by the renowned techno-noir liturgist Anne Imhof haunts the corner of the room, foreshadowing the hard turn into downtown-art-world verbiage which lingers around the corner. 

Indeed, despite this local nod and the overall painter-printmaker cadence of the introductory gallery, within moments of stepping into the exhibition anyone familiar with the local art scene will identify an immediate break from the bucolic oil paintings which adorn the well-lit walls of typical Upstate art galleries. A sound installation of choreographed audio bites extracted from interviews between Wigfall and his father envelops the viewer upon entrance. The audio, in concert with the room on whole, grapples with institutional legacies of transatlantic slavery. Only a couple miles down the road, a large house is decorated—with a level of craft not unparalleled within the Farm’s high-brow exhibition—“TRUMP 2025”. The contrast here is not incidental; it clarifies the stakes. What audience is being addressed here, and on what terms?

Within this juxtaposition lies the divide which the blockbuster show throws into such sharp relief. As the New York intelligentsia continues to undulate through the quaint Metro-Proximate Hinterland, it brings with it a cultural dialect unrecognizable–and at times even anathema–to its exurban neighbors. 

Context matters. Though the seasonal migrations of wealthy New Yorkers have characterized the culture of exurban towns since the Gilded Age, the pandemic triggered a second-home and relocation wave across Columbia and Ulster Counties, as well as Litchfield County and the Berkshires. Inventory plunged, prices spiked, and the mid-market thinned. The second-home crescent surrounding the Hudson line, like its counterparts in the Berkshires and rural Connecticut, increasingly performs the role of “Weekender Commons”: land, housing, and cultural venues have shifted to provide a shared amenity for urban visitors. Oftentimes, this comes at the expense of local affordability and continuity. 

Towns within this commutable countryside are themselves rich with art history, and increasingly with contemporary art infrastructure; however, the dominant small-town gallery vernacular still leans on representational landscape, pastoral scenery, and regional “views.” These spaces are beloved and serve their publics, but they signal a market and visual culture quite different from a mirrored floor and a crate labyrinth. By contrast, “Trees Never End and Houses Never End” imports a curatorial grammar of site-specificity and immersion that local audiences usually encounter at a handful of large-scale (and largely institutional) destinations, if at all. 

What makes the Sky High Biennial different is not just the marquee roster; it’s the friction between the region’s prevailing “view painting” economy and a show calibrated to an international contemporary discourse. Imhof’s improvised corridors recalibrate how you move through a rural warehouse; Stingel’s mirrored floor literalizes the doubled image of viewer and environment until the farm building’s scars play across the artwork like a second projection. As a curatorial device, these choices insist on an urban exhibition tempo while refusing to erase the site’s industrial-agricultural history. The effect is powerful. At the same time, Colen’s project also poses the central test: does this tempo create a shared commons where rural patrons and urban weekender-collectors actually meet? Or does it, like Stingel’s mirror itself, return our gaze with a clarified picture of the wealth gap, by concentrating cultural capital in a small, mobile public while the rest of the region reads as “provincial” by default?

For now, the biennial functions as both proof-of-concept and stress test. It demonstrates that rural context can carry urban-scale complexity without dumbing it down, and it does so with a revenue model aimed at social good. Sky High’s aims prove noble, and its efforts seem genuine: food insecurity here is not abstract, and the entry mural cataloging Sky High’s community work signals real intention to embed. But philanthropy and signage don’t, by themselves, answer the ethical question if the town functions as a set for a performance of urbanity. The art language on view, Chelsea/Berlin/London in accent and scale, remains largely inaccessible to the broader public; for many neighbors, it may read as a closed circuit that passes through on weekends and leaves on Monday. The test, then, isn’t whether the work becomes “simpler,” but whether power, authorship, and benefit travel locally: who is commissioned, who fabricates and is trained, who is paid, what persists in the off-season, whether schools and civic groups have ongoing use of the space, whether there are genuine points of entry beyond the opening. If those commitments move from wall text to structure (recurring local hires and apprenticeships, co-authored projects, programs that outlast the install) then the exhibition behaves like a bridge. If not, the farm’s ethics risk stopping at donation, and the place remains scenery for a traveling public.