Monday’s Muse: Agnes Denes

“The issues touched on in my work range between individual creation and social consciousness. . . . Making art today is synonymous with assuming responsibilities for our fellow humans.”

Hungarian-born, New York-based American conceptual artist Agnes Denes is known for her work spanning over a wide range of media – from poetry and writings, to visual philosophy (complex hand and computer rendered diagrams) and sculpture. However, it is her environmental installation Wheatfield – A Confrontation, a two-acre wheat field planted in downtown Manhattan, that has a particularly resounding effect.

Created during the spring, summer, and autumn of 1982, Denes, with the support of the Public Art Fund, planted a field of golden wheat, set among the cold steel skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. Denes believes her “decision to plant a wheatfield in Manhattan, instead of designing just another public sculpture, grew out of a long-standing concern and need to call attention to our misplaced priorities and deteriorating human values.”

Now, nearly twenty years on, the conscious weight and significance of her work is substantial and the reminder is needed more than ever.