Dan Colen is the biggest, nicest, most marvelous artist farmer you’ll ever meet

I dropped by Sky High Farm on the eve of its inaugural biennale for my monthly Harper’s Bazaar column

Imagine your craziest friend from college–the guy who drank the most, stayed up the latest, and partied the hardest. Now picture him 10 years later, sober and a super successful artist. Now, picture that same guy 10 years after that, living in upstate New York, and building a farm community as an extension of his artistic practice, with the sole purpose of helping to feed parts of New York that face nutritional insecurity.

Did I mention he’s 6’6”, scruffy and handsome, and gives the best bear hugs?

That’s my pal, Dan Colen, and the utopia I’m talking about is his Sky High Farm.

For my DISPATCH in this month’s Harper’s Bazaar, I packed up my kiddos, Grace and Noah, for a pilgrimage to see Dan, his partner Lexie, and their two kiddos at the farm. We chased cows, played with chickens, brought home the freshest possible eggs (straight from the coop!), and talked about Dan’s biggest adventure yet. In a culmination of the art world and farm country, he launched the first-ever Sky High Biennale. Without further ado, here’s my column:

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!”

Colen founded Sky High Farm in 2011 with a mission of sending 100 percent of its crops to parts of the state where people are struggling with food insecurity and don’t have regular access to healthy food. Last year, Sky High Farm donated more than 25,000 pounds of produce, 7,500 pounds of meat, and 44,000 eggs to community-based food-access partners in the Hudson Valley and New York City. Its grant program distributed $350,000 to support 28 individuals, grassroots partnerships, and small nonprofits historically excluded from access to loans and grants. “We’re envisioning local solutions for existing and long-entrenched structural issues pertaining to health and autonomy,” Colen says. “It is one of the most direct ways we work to promote food sovereignty.”

This summer, Colen will be inaugurating the first Sky High Farm Biennial, “Trees Never End and Houses Never End,” which opens June 28 in nearby Germantown. The exhibition will take place in a 50,000-square-foot warehouse and feature artists such as Anne Imhof, Rudolf Stingel, Nate Lowman, and Jonas Wood. The biennial will also showcase the work of Ben Wigfall, a Black American abstract painter who lived and worked in the Hudson Valley and died in 2017. “A big part of the project is also uplifting the recognition of the Ben Wigfall estate,” Colen says. “We feel like he was underappreciated, and we want to get behind him.”

The artists and their generosity are the central force of the show; they’ve pledged millions of dollars worth of work to Sky High Farm. But they won’t be sold via a charity auction, which can disrupt an artist’s market; instead, they’ll be available through a new model the farm designed for this exhibition, with artists each contributing a percentage of proceeds based on their individual financial situation. In addition, trade partners, including framers, fabricators, shippers, and installers, have committed $300,000 in in-kind labor to help produce the event.

While many assume livestock is merely Colen’s side hustle, it’s become a central part of his life and work. He was born in New Jersey, just over the Hudson River, far from farm country. “I grew up on the other side of the George Washington Bridge. I could have walked into Manhattan,” he says. As a boy, he fantasized about being a professional basketball player: “The dream was real, but at a certain point I realized that art was the only position of power I could muster up, the only tool that I had to actually state my point of view.”

After college, he and close friends and fellow artists Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley became art-world famous for their in-your-face works and raucous lifestyles. I’ll never forget Colen and Snow’s “nest” installations, which they would create in hotel rooms and gallery spaces by drinking booze, taking drugs, and shredding everything they could, as if they were hamsters in cages. In 2007, New York magazine ran a cover story on the three of them that appeared with the cover line “Warhol’s Children,” with a portrait of them sharing a dingy bed in Snow’s Bowery apartment.

Snow’s death from an overdose in 2009 served as a wake-up call for Colen. He got sober and began to focus on his career. His work matured. Mega galleries and blue-chip collectors called. But as that world homed in, Colen felt the urge to get out. By 2011, he had moved upstate and purchased the farm. “I didn’t want to root my life in the center of the art world, which is so complicated to navigate,” he says. “The farm, which happened in this very intuitive way, without any grand plan or rough reference point, was also a way for me to figure out how to expand my art practice or my creative practice so that it could operate not solely in the art world, but also in other worlds.”

The name came just as instinctively. “There was a sign when I moved here that said Sky Acres Farm. We twisted that into Sky High Farm,” he recalls. “We had our own joke about it. It spoke to the heaviness of everything, but it was also such a bright and optimistic-sounding thing.”

Though Colen lacked any meaningful farming experience at the time, he had a sense right away of what he wanted to do once he got the farm up and running. “I started making food donations immediately,” he says. “Literally, every single thing we’ve ever grown or raised has been donated to communities that do not have access to a fresh, nutritious diet.”

In hindsight, Colen sees a connection between his desire to break down barriers in his art and advocating for everyone to have access to healthy food. “I’ve always dealt with the concept of equity,” he says. “A big part of what I’m processing as an artist is the way in which I feel the world is imbalanced.”

Sky High Farm was run through Colen’s art studio until he transitioned it to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2016. “I didn’t see any of this coming,” he says. “Then to turn it into an operational, public, not-for-profit organization was even wilder.” Colen was an idealistic child. “When I was young, maybe I thought, ‘Oh, how do I help make the world a better place?’ ” he says.

But the level of his involvement with this particular kind of work continues to surprise him. One of my fondest Colen memories is when the two of us worked with Citymeals on Wheels in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy to bring food to vulnerable New Yorkers. Elderly folks in high-rises weren’t able to use the elevators, so we hiked up flights of stairs with nonperishable foodstuffs. “I think that the most surprising thing is just how moved I’ve been by the project and how much of my life I’ve put into it,” he says. “This has really consumed me in a way that nothing else I’ve ever done has.”

In 2022, Colen partnered with Daphne Seybold, a marketing executive and veteran of Comme des Garçons, to create Sky High Farm Universe, a fashion brand that helps finance the farm and has collaborated with the likes of Balenciaga, Nike, Levi’s, and Dover Street Market on workwear-inspired collections. “Basically, the brand exists to generate more income for the farm and to promote the farm’s work in more of a popular cultural space,” Colen explains.

Is it weird to be identified as an artist, a farmer, and a fashion designer? “It’s even confusing for the people I work closely with,” Colen says. “I see it worry certain people, and I see it excite others.”

An enormous portrait of Smith breastfeeding Days dominates Colen’s studio. Smith’s gaze in the painting is soft and maternal, and our view back at her feels intimate and optimistic. “The series of paintings I’m working on now feels like the most direct relationship to the farm,” he says. He created Sky High Farm as his version of utopia. “The Greek root of the word utopia is ‘no place,’ not an ideal place, so it’s almost like a place that cannot exist or a place that does not yet exist. In that way, the farm is what you imagine it can be. You’re trying to bring what can be to life.”

Thank you for reading all the way to the bottom of this newsletter. Pick up the newest issue of Harper’s Bazaar wherever you buy your magazines. (If you can find a place, that is.)

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I’ll be back again this week, so see you soon.

Derek C. Blasberg

PS. AND ANOTHER ANOTHER THING: For anyone who’s curious, Dan is responsible for the wall of stud paintings in my old New York apartment. We had to move out of this apartment when we had kids, but this wall—which felt like a punk rock disco ball—was one of my favorite things in the world.