Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes is an American artist/scholar of international renown.  Her work involves ecological, cultural and social issues, and are often monumental in scale. Perhaps best known for Wheatfield-A Confrontation (1982), a two-acre wheat field she planted and harvested downtown Manhattan, a work that addressed human values and misplaced priorities. In 1996 she completed Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule in Finland, a massive earthwork and reclamation project that reaches four hundred years into the future to benefit future generations with a meaningful legacy. In 1998 she planted a forest of 6,000 trees in Melbourne Australia and is presently creating a 25-year Masterplan [the Nieuwe Hollandse Waterlinie project] for a 85-km area in the center of the Netherlands. Agnes Denes has had over 350 solo and group exhibitions on four continents, including Documenta VI in Kassel (1977), three Venice Biennales (1978, 1980, 2001) and “Master of Drawing” Invitational, representing the U.S., at the Kunsthalle in Nürnberg (1982). She has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, and in 42 other museums on four continents. In 1992 she had a major retrospective at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, for which five art historians contributed catalogue essays.