BOZEMAN, MONT.- As youthful wheat shimmied in the Montana breeze, it looked a lot like grass. Logically, I knew wheat is a grass, cultivated to yield the plump, glutinous makings of pasta and beer. But it took an encounter with living crops to understand.

This revelation is a testament to a new artwork by Agnes Denes in the burgeoning mountain micropolis of Bozeman, Montana. Titled “Wheatfield — An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground,” the project hinges on an acre of wheat planted at Tinworks Art, a fledgling exhibition space in a gentrifying, postindustrial neighborhood known as the Brewery District, after a demolished beer factory.

Tinworks hopes to reach Bozeman residents where they live. The symbolic crop gathers the anxieties of a quickly changing community in the Gallatin Valley, where open space is disappearing, and focuses urgent conversations around themes of land use, water conservation, loss of agricultural land, lack of housing, development and food scarcity.

“It’s about human survival,” Denes said of the Bozeman wheat project, on view through Oct. 19. “It’s about hope.”

When I visited Bozeman in July, the heads of grain at Tinworks were knee high and starting to cure down, mottled green and brown, as each stalk reflected subtle differences in the gravelly soil. A year ago, the wheat field was a parking lot and a dumping ground, full of railroad ties and trucks. On Sept. 8, it will be harvested.

Standing in the wheat, you can see 100 years of the city’s history. To the north, purple mountains rise behind the low-slung factory sheds converted by Tinworks into galleries, offices and an artist studio. To the west is the historic Misco Mill (the grain mill’s top floor is for rent on Vrbo). Across the street to the south is the new Bozeman: luxury apartment buildings clad in dull corrugated siding, as if trying to blend in.

“You have the mountains here,” Jenny Moore, the inaugural director of Tinworks, said while a train whistled in the distance. “But in this neighborhood, very quickly there’s not going to be a lot of open space.”

In recent weeks, Moore had been weeding relentlessly, but patches of thistle and bed straw marred the plot. That picturesque monochrome gold remained elusive.

Such variation is normal, said Kenny VanDyke the young Montanan farmer who’d seeded the Tinworks field with six-inch rows of hard red Bobcat winter wheat. (The gaps, where VanDyke’s machinery couldn’t fit, had been hand-seeded with an ancient spring variety of grain called Kamut.)

“You got good, you got bad, you got middle. You got pretty clean patches, you got a little bit dirty patches,” VanDyke said. The license plate on his pickup truck has a picture of wheat.

VanDyke’s parents were second-generation cattle ranchers near Bozeman. When their ranch went belly up, he and his brother switched to wheat. Bozeman’s gorgeous big sky has drawn transplants for years, but the rush intensified during the pandemic. And Bozeman’s fertile fields are prime real estate for developers.

“My wife and I bought a house during COVID,” VanDyke said. “And from the time we went under contract to the time we actually moved in, which was like six months, the house had gone up like 20%.” They’ve gradually shifted their operation northward, where farmland is more affordable.

The acre crop at Tinworks is a token; quarter-section plots you see quilting the landscape from your airplane window are typically 160 acres. The VanDyke farm is around 8,000. But there used to be far more wheat here. VanDyke said there were once 27 grain elevators in Gallatin Valley. Now he counts two.

The crop begs a question, Moore said: “Are we growing food, or are we making an artwork? Because there are a lot of folks who are like, why are you planting wheat and not lentils?”

‘Wheat Is Holding People Together’

Denes lives in Manhattan, and visiting her SoHo loft in February was like stepping into a lost bohemia through a veneer of Lululemon and Nike stores. She was born in Budapest in 1931. Her family fled the Nazis. In 1953 she moved to the United States, where she studied at the New School and Columbia University. When we spoke, she sat at her desk ensconced in a nautilus of boxes and papers. The winter wheat in Bozeman was waiting under the snow.

She has built environmental sculptures with rice and trees, envisioned teardrop-shaped pyramids and hotdog-shaped globes, and at 93, her mind still overflows with plans, but she’ll likely be remembered for her wheat fields.

In 1982, Denes raised 1.8 acres of Minnesota white durum spring wheat in Lower Manhattan, on a thin layer of soil trucked onto the landfill dredged from the Hudson River, soon to become Battery Park City. Photographs show Denes thigh deep in golden grain and the Twin Towers stark in the background. Volunteers helped weed and water. “I wanted the harvest to go the old-fashioned way, with scythes,” she recalled. “But I realized people would cut their hands off. So we had a harvester come through Wall Street.”

Denes titled that work “Wheatfield — A Confrontation.” She wanted to remind urbanites that food, not red-hot stocks, was still the basis of civilization.

Such grand symbolism reflects her thinking. “Management versus mismanagement, abuse of food, abuse of resources,” she said. Wheat underwrites history at the scale of empires. “This total confusion we feel is one stage of the pendulum.” It will swing. Meanwhile, she said, “The wheat is holding people together, beyond politics, beyond diversions. It’s something real. It’s true. It’s as human as it can be.”

Denes has no plans to visit Montana, as her health makes travel difficult. She seems content to provide purpose and direction from afar but leaves the details to the Tinworks team. Her life’s work has been to improve humanity through what she calls “benign solutions.” Which means her art must propagate without her.

The Bozeman acre is the second wheat field that Denes has planted in the United States, but fifth overall. Crops have sprouted in London (2009), Milan (2015) and Basel (2024). With the exception of the Basel wheat — rooted in wooden planters on an asphalt plaza — each one has occupied vacant but costly real estate.

It’s a stubborn gesture, a protest. Sure, build your buildings, make your millions — but first, the wheat.

‘You Become Part of the Art’

Tinworks was the brainchild of Greg Avis, a venture capitalist, and his wife, Anne Avis, a philanthropist. They’ve had a ranch in the Bozeman area for three decades. Both have served as trustees of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and thought Bozeman could use something similar.

The Avises’ investment group, Bangtail Partners LLC, had purchased the Tinworks site to build affordable housing. In 2019, they hosted a pop-up art exhibition on the grounds. The response was so positive, Avis said, that the answer seemed obvious: The old tinworks would be their kunsthalle.

The land that Tinworks now leases from the Avises, according to the Montana Department of Revenue, is worth over $3.3 million. “We get calls from developers that want to buy it from us,” Avis said. “We just say no.” Bangtail Partners also acquired the former brewery site, where they hope to build a modestly priced residential and retail complex.

In 2023, Tinworks hired Moore from Marfa, Texas, an art mecca where she’d been director of the Chinati Foundation for nine years. When she took the Tinworks job, she had a Denes wheat field in mind, she said. “It’s been amazing to have a situation where something that is familiar opens up a space for people to think about it differently.”

A big part of that is the “solidarity fields,” patches of spring wheat sown by Bozeman residents and local organizations. This spring Tinworks gave out Kamut seeds in burlap satchels, with tags showing a photo of Denes handling Manhattan wheat. “By participating, you become part of the art,” it reads.

Roughly a dozen families and organizations planted their yards and gardens. Some plots fared better than others — the spot at the public library boasts a couple of sprigs, while wheat provides ample ground cover at a local architecture firm. A thick patch swishes by the driveway of the historic Craftsman home built by a brewery magnate and slowly being restored by new owners.

‘What We’re Paving Over’

Mary Stein, a retired teacher who helped start a sustainable development program at Montana State University, maintains a preternaturally lush stand of wheat in a raised garden bed for the Denes project. Growing wheat yourself, she said, means contemplating “our place as it relates to the rapid pace of development and what we’re paving over and what we’re retaining for not just food production but for wildlife habitat, for biodiversity, for all of those things that make this such a special place to be.”

For those who tend furrows for a living, the symbolic crop is more amusing than inspiring. Mac Burgess, a sunburned assistant professor at MSU, who teaches field crop production, has also been consulting on the Denes wheat. He admitted he’d been skeptical. “There’s wheat over there, too,” he observed dryly, pointing seemingly at random.

His students ran soil tests on the Tinworks land, and were surprised by its viability after so many years as a junkyard. They’d chuckled at the notion of an artist’s tiny wheat field. “But it got them thinking about, ‘Oh, wow, once upon a time, the Gallatin Valley was very agricultural.’”

Growing wheat only makes sense at scale because the margins are so thin. Denes wrote in 1982 that the Manhattan plot yielded “1000 pounds of golden wheat.” That’s around 8 bushels an acre. The acre of Bobcat at Tinworks should produce around 40 bushels, Burgess reckoned, which at current prices nets around $200. “But it produces 2,400 loaves of bread, which are, what, what’s a loaf of bread cost? Seven dollars over there.” He nodded toward Wild Crumb, an artisanal bakery in a nearby building styled to look old. In September, volunteers will cut and gather stalks by hand, run them through small threshers and mills, and Wild Crumb will bake it.

Burgess led the way to one of the MSU research fields where Bobcat wheat was developed. Unlike other staple crops, he explained, which are often patented, wheat varieties are bred by public universities and specialized to their respective regions. This was grain in all its splendor, rooted in soil 20 feet deep: tight ranks of rectangular plots, each yielding a single loaf of bread, where the minutely varied hybrids stand in contrast with their neighbors — two inches shorter here, longer whiskers there and dozens of subtler attributes invisible to those who can’t tell wheat from barley.

Next to the field was a tract of new single-family homes. The developers had planted a hedgerow of hazel along the property line, blocking the idyllic crops from view.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.