Dear Julie,
I am writing with the hopes that SAFS students would be interested in joining us for a discussion here at the Broad. And to that end, we would be very grateful if you might pass this invitation on to the SAFS students.
The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum MSU has launched a new residency program called The Land Grant: Art, Agriculture and Sustainability. The project commissions artists to create work that addresses land use, food, and urban development, with a focus on sustainability. The first artist in this residency is Amy Franceschini and her group, The Flatbread Society. Flatbread Society is a growing assembly of farmers, bakers, artists, folklorists and scientists, aligned through a common interest in our long and complex relationship to grain. Flat Bread Society is a multi-part, ongoing project that investigates patterns of food production and consumption, class, daily life, religion and cultural exchange through the production of bread.
Because of dual interests, and with hopes for future collaborative opportunity, the Broad would like to extend an invitation to specific student groups to come to the museum for a special introduction by Curator, Alison Gass who will be giving an overview on this project that will also offer a platform for student voices to be heard as we discuss art, culture, sustainability, the history of food, hands on building and small scale farming as it relates to The Land Grant and Flatbread Society.
Please join us on Friday, January 24th at 4 pm at the Museum for the discussion.
Please RSVP to
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More on the Land Grant residency:
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The best art has always taken up the most significant issues of the artist's day and reframed vital ideas in ways that fundamentally shift people's awareness and perceptions of their own world. Echoing some of the major concerns facing a global world today, in recent years artists and architects have increasingly turned to food and land as a means of promoting social and political activism. "Social Practice" is the most common term for this kind of artistic output and demarcates creators whose work extends beyond the traditional boundaries of aesthetic/object based practice, but rather involves performance, community gathering, and ephemeral materials. Within a significant artistic framework, these projects educate participants and even instigate grass-roots remedies to major global crises-an artistic approach to thinking globally and acting locally.
Positioned against the great history of the Land Grant at Michigan State University and within the school's strong commitment to education in food, land, water, and energy, the Broad Art Museum at MSU is poised to be a leader in this newly expanded genre of art and architecture working with and around these issues, both inside the confines of the museums walls and across the vibrant and fertile university campus.
We are delighted to announce the creation of The Land Grant: Art, Agriculture, Sustainability, a commissioning program which will offer an extraordinary context for this kind of production. Throughout each year, artists, architects, or collectives will be invited to a residency on the MSU campus and will have the opportunity to delve into the rich academic history and current practice existing across the disciplines at the university. Working at The Broad Art Museum and through potential partnerships with the various schools and institutes both on campus and in the surrounding areas, the awardees will have access to a rare commodity in the art world: acres of land and a veritable think tank of leaders in the field.
This is a project about "In Between Spaces": conceptually these works exist in between art, architecture, urban development, agricultural studies, economics, political science and other disciplines; physically, these projects will fill and activate the interstitial spaces we move though everyday in the course of our lives.
