Betting the FARM

DEREK C. BLASBERG talks to his longtime friend, artist DAN COLEN, about the winding road that led Colen to create SKY HIGH FARM—the NONPROFIT he founded to help battle FOOD INSECURITY, which will stage its first ART BIENNIAL this summer—and why it's all, on some level, about SELF-DISCOVERY

- DEREK C. BLASBERG

Above: The author with Dan Colen in Colen's upstate New York studio in front of a painting by Colen of his partner, Lexie Smith. Opposite, from top: The team at Sky High Farm tends to the crops, which are donated to people struggling with food insecurity; Colen with Blasberg's kids, Grace and Noah; Sky High's chicken coop.

It's a sunny spring day at Sky High Farm, a 40-acre spread east of Rhinebeck in New York's Hudson Valley. Its proprietor, artist Dan Colen, is giving me a tour. “Every day, you witness things sprouting out of the ground. You see animals giving birth,” says Colen, 45, who is six foot six inches tall and ruggedly handsome. We pass by baby cows and new chicks. “The cycles of the seasons and the processes that exist between the sun and the soil and the rain...” He tugs on his thick, scruffy beard. “It’s all happening up here on the farm!”

It’s both surreal and heartwarming to see Colen in his Farmer Era, as well as in his New Dad Era: He and his partner, the writer and baker Lexie Smith, are parents to Days, nearly three, and Mickey, nine months.

Colen and I met more than two decades ago, when we were each living younger, dumber, more hedonistic lives as new New Yorkers. I was a journalism student at NYU, and he had just graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paths crossed at Lot 61, a now defunct but once devastatingly trendy nightclub, at a Fashion Week party to which, it turned out, neither of us had actually been invited. Memories of that night, like most of my memories of the early 2000s, are fuzzy. But back then, it wouldn't have occurred to either of us that one day we'd be walking our children around Colen's very own working farm in the tranquils of upstate New York.

“Well, you know what Matty Matheson says?” Colen asks, referring to the tattooed, irreverent chef from The Bear. “Farming is the new punk rock!”