Wheatfields of Gentrification
Last weekend, I had family in town so we went over to Bozeman to look for the Utah Peach Guys (couldn’t find them, it’s okay I don’t have time to make jam this year), and to see some art. My ex-stepmother is still a beloved friend, even 30 years after she and my dad divorced — and they used to come out to Big Sky in the 70s and 80s, so she’s always kind of interested to see the current rate of development in Bozeman. We noodled around, stopped in to see Jennifer O’Cualain’s work (her partner and I went to Beloit together and had a fun visit when he drove her work up from Arizona earlier this summer). We got chatting to the gallerist, who loves her job, but like everyone else I know is slightly stunned by the behavior of this year’s tourists, and can’t afford to live here. “I got offered a job in Jackson,” she said. “But that’s even worse.”
Then we headed over to see the new art space in what they’re calling the “Bozeman Brewery Historic District” — when I moved here, it was just the Peach Street neighborhood, and it was the last place in town where ski bums and artists and other weirdos who were happy to live in shacky old houses could live. Now? Well. Despite the realtors waxing poetic about the “historic nature” of the district, the cheap shacky houses have been torn down and replaced by brand new “luxury multi-use” developments and fancy new houses. If you look on Zillow, there’s nothing currently for sale in that neighborhood for less than $2.5 million dollars. For condos. But they’re luxury condos.
Sigh.
The gentrification of Bozeman has been well documented. Last month Montana and Idaho officially became the least affordable places in the nation to buy a home. The average person trying to buy a home in Montana makes $42K, while the average home price, across the whole state, is now $505,000. The average house price in Bozeman is $747,000. We’ve seen the spill over here in Livingston, where a very cute young couple with a new baby bought the house across the street from me for $725K (or their parents did, they’re both in their 20s) and thought it was a bargain. As I said to my hippie neighbor Mike, I didn’t move to Livingston to live with people who can afford houses like that, but here we are. My house is paid off. I’m Range Bound.
However, gentrification sometimes brings welcome amenities like interesting art spaces, and I’d been meaning all summer to get over to the Tinworks Art Center to see the Agnes Denes installation they’ve been growing. Agnes Denes is a feminist ecological artist I’ve been slightly obsessed with for a while, and that Tinworks kicked things off with a version of Denes 1982 installation: Wheatfield — A Confrontation was interesting. Called Wheatfield—An Inspiration. The seed is in the ground, the exhibition was meant to highlight the importance of wheat in Montana’s history, of the brewery district as both a place where that wheat was transformed into beer and the location from which it was shipped east, and to highlight the loss of agricultural land to subdivision development in the Gallatin valley. They planted about an acre and a half of Bobcat wheat, a strain developed by Montana State, and they gave little packets to people around town to grow in their gardens (although if you use as much straw as I do for garden mulch, um, you’re already growing wheat in your garden). By the time we got there, the wheatfield had been harvested, and they were beginning to mill it. Once the wheat is milled into flour, they’re planning to do a collaboration with Wild Crumb bakery, located in one of those high end mixed use buildings nearby, and bake some bread.
As a person who grew up in part on a commodity crop farm in Illinois, I’ve written about wheat and bread before. In April 2023 I wrote a piece for Dark Mountain in which I asked:
Does knowing your flour matter, or is it an affectation? As we watch the blockade at the Ukrainian ports, see the ripple effects of hunger from disrupted grain supplies, fussing over the brand of flour feels like the worst sort of first world problem. Is using local wheat one of those things we make important in our own minds so we feel that we’re accomplishing something authentic? My own sourdough. Made with Montana wheat. A bread that is rooted in place, a place where I did not grow up, but where I have deliberately built a home, and a garden, and a family, and a life?
Those big Ukrainian grain elevators, pouring grain into the holds of ships, there are elevators like that all across the midwest where I grew up, loading rail cars, or in Duluth, loading ships like the ones blockaded at Odesa. The commodification of grain is what made Chicago, my home city, a great industrial power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. … We were weaned on the early morning farm report, the first show on the television when we were small, the litany of wheat and corn and soy prices. The price of pork bellies. My grandmother explaining the hedged bets that were grain futures, deciding with her broker what price to sell the corn or soybeans off our family farm.
In his early work, Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon argued that commodification was the innovation by which natural products lost their ecological identities and were converted into capital. A standardised grading system and the rise of the grain elevator meant crops could be consolidated into a anonymous , almost liquid, substance, one that could be stored in elevators, poured into rail cars and ships for transport.
That commodification of course, is what turned crops like wheat into money, into fungible assets that could be hedged, and borrowed against, and bought and sold and bought and sold. It’s what brought us “The Pits” where our fathers all worked — not coal mines, but the commodity trading pits in the old Chicago Board of Trade building. The dads all got on the train in our fancy suburb, went downtown, yelled and waved chits of colored paper and bought and sold real crops that had been reduced to abstract concepts, concepts that were just money, and then they got on the train, drank their way home, rolled off to be picked up by the wives in the station wagons, and did it all again the next day.
This kind of financialization is also what’s at the root of our current housing crisis across the country. On his Substack, New Means, Joshua P. Hill interviewed Tracy Rosenthal, a founding member of the LA Tenants Union. Rosenthal noted that:
Just as the suburbanization of the country required government intervention (to lure white people to the suburbs) so does gentrification (to lure them back to cities). Geographer Neil Smith called gentrification a “back to the city movement by capital,” situating it after the broad, post-1970s economic restructuring, in which capitalists found there was more money to be made through speculation rather than production (making money by betting on housing and stocks rather than making things). Since 2021, homeowners have made more money a year just from their property values going up than workers get from working the average job.
The financialization of commodity crops is still big business, but in the 50 years since I was a kid, speculation has become the basis of most wealth in this country. And a lot of those fortunes have been transmuted into Montana real estate. In the case of the people who own the Tinworks space, the new commodities trader is a venture capitalist.
There wasn’t anything at Tinworks about the transmutation of grain into money, or that history, or how pivotal it was to the history of the United States. There wasn’t anything about Ukraine and the Russian grain embargoes that are still happening. The focus seemed to be on the kind of gauzy, metaphorical idea of wheat that Denes (who is currently 93) described to the New York Times as: “… holding people together, beyond politics, beyond diversions. It’s something real. It’s true. It’s as human as it can be.” There wasn’t even any practical information about Bobcat wheat or the work of the MSU agronomy department and how they’ve developed specific strains of wheat for specific locations in order to avoid having to use the pesticides and fungicides that are both poisonous and expensive. There wasn’t even info about why this wheat was only knee high in comparison to the strain Denes used in 1982, which came up to her hips, and looked so beautiful in that iconic photo. As far as this project was concerned, this was generic “wheat,” wheat as backdrop, wheat as very basic metaphor.
In 2023 Tinworks hired Jenny Moore, who spent nine years as the head of the Chianti Foundation in Marfa Texas, another small town that has struggled with gentrification in the wake of being turned into a sort of art mecca in the early 2000s. Moore said in an interview: “That iconic image of Agnes standing in the Wheatfield with the Financial District behind her, holding a staff in her hand like this feminist ecological artist warrior, has long lived in my mind.”
For me, this is the crucial problem with the wheatfield project. When Denes originally did this project, in the shadow of the very new World Trade Center towers, the center of exactly the kind of fungibility and trading that I grew up around in Chicago, it was an act of resistance. It was an act of defiance in the literal shadow of the place where everything was reduced to its fungible value. That iconic image was one of resistance, a reminder that financializtion relies on the products of the natural world.
The Bozeman installation of Wheatfield, by contrast, seemed like a psychological screen for what’s actually happening in this valley and in the rest of the state. A wheat field built on land that venture capitalists have chosen to spare, for the moment, from development, a wheat field described in the most sentimental and suburban terms, in the heart of a neighborhood devastated by those same venture capitalists seems like the worst kind of artwashing. It’s as if the World Trade Center itself had sponsored Denes original project.
It’s not an act of resistance anymore, it’s an act of appropriation.
Patronage of artists by the rich is as old as the western history of visual art, and so cranky as I was, it was a deep pleasure to discover three astonishing works by Lucy Raven, on display, and that the space was providing necessary art work experience for a charming and knowledgeable young docent, who, it turned out, was an artist and recent MSU grad (and knew several of my favorite former students). The Lucy Raven pieces were comprised of clay silt suspended in a very sheer silk matrix, stretched between wooden frames and suspended away from the walls on a series of very clever metal brackets. They were simultaneously geological and sheer, sedimentary and dynamic. I was thrilled by them, and my conversation with the young docent about this work, how it works, how Raven made it, how they hang and maintain it, and what it meant to them was one of the most engaged and interesting conversations about art that I’ve had in this area in years. In the next room, we had a similarly engaging discussion with Wills Brewer, the current artist-in-residence, about his ceramics, and the mud brick project he’s working on, and about the ongoing struggle to make art and keep a roof over one’s head.
The scene in that whole neighborhood, despite the gentrificiation, was equally engaged, and engaging. I have a friend, a dear friend who I love, who is one of the people who have gentrified the neighborhood. They bought an old house in the neighborhood, tore it down and built a fancy new modern house. After fifteen years of being an hour or more outside of town in Colorado, she loves living in that neighborhood. She can walk to get coffee, or buy wine or charcuterie from the engaged and interesting people my stepmother and I chatted with, people who are deeply invested in local and artisanal foods, and who are starting exactly the kind of small businesses that make neighborhoods vibrant. I am deeply happy for my friend. She’s a person I love and a person who suffered enormous loss early in her life and deserves all the happiness.
That she’s wound up in this vibrant neighborhood is a joy. I’m so happy for her that she’s landed in a place where everyone I talk to who’s working in one of these little artsy spaces is making art or making artisanal sausage or opening an interesting little wine store full of natural wines, all of these incredibly engaged and interesting thirty-somethings who like the art workers over at Tinworks would have no other opportunity to pursue their craft in gentrified Bozeman if it was not for these spaces.
It’s important to distinguish between gentrification as a social process and gentrification on an individual basis. Would I have torn down a “shitbox” house people were renting and replaced it with a modern concrete house, even one as well-designed and energy efficient as the one my friends built? Probably not, but that’s both because despite having grown up among the wealthy, I’m actually not one of them, and because I still approach most buying decisions through the lens of anti-consumerism. Most decisions I make about what to buy are decided by a binary of: does this purchase encourage/normalize consumerism? Or does it resist that? In this, I keep discovering, I am now an ancient fossil, a hippie throwback, and, so I’ve been told, kind of a drag.
Again I’m thinking of Joshua Hill’s latest essay at New Means, and Tracy Rosenthal‘s good quick explanation of gentrification:
Gentrification is displacement and replacement of the poor for profit. This is the definition the founders of the LA Tenants Union came up with to name the process of gentrification by its outcomes: tenants are ejected from their long-term communities or onto the streets, landlords and real estate investors get richer and hoard more of the places we can live. Gentrification is a collaboration between the real estate industry, politicians, and police.
This is what’s happened all over Bozeman. When we were in the first gallery, the one where my friend’s partner’s art was hanging, along with the good art there were these inexplicable paintings. Giant, like 6 feet by 3 feet, of movie stars? Not even repros of movie posters, but just rando groups of “Western” stars in a painting? And they were expensive — 10-20 thousand dollars. “Who buys those?” my stepmother asked, once we’d gotten really chatting with the gallerist (there was no one else there so she could let loose). “They buy them for their home theaters,” she said, with the exhausted voice of a service worker at the end of a brutal tourist season.
Aside from simply pricing people out, gentrification flattens artistic possibility, replacing it with the kind of suburban values that think a giant, expensive, unironic painting of movie stars in your “home theater” is cool. Sarah Schulman, in her foundational book Gentrification of the Mind, a book that connects, in great detail the financial and social costs of gentrification, notes that:
Gentrification in the seventies, eighties, and nineties replaced urbanity with suburban values so that the suburban conditioning of racial and class stratification, homegeneity of consumption, mass-produced aesthetics, and familial privatization got re-situated into big buildings, attached residences and apartments. This undermines urbanity and recreates cities as centers of obedience instead of instigators of positive change.
While there was real creativity going on in that Tinworks neighborhood, which made it an exciting place to spend an afternoon talking to younger people who are making art, and artisanal food products, and importing odd little wines, and making leather goods, without housing, how long will any of these people be able to hold out? When you’re that dependent on the tastes and whims of rich people, how long can you keep doing your own thing before you tweak it just a little bit, make a couple of changes to move more units, slowly chipping away at the edges of your art because you have to make a living?
There’s a little moment in the NY Times article about this installation that I keep thinking about:
For those who tend furrows for a living, the symbolic crop is more amusing than inspiring. Mac Burgess, a sunburned assistant professor at M.S.U., 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.
A Montana moment of gentrification. Pointing out to the plant-blind New York Times reporter that wheat grows wild all over that neighborhood. Not planted as a recreation of a once-revolutionary artwork, but because wheat is still actively farmed, and harvested, and transported through these neighborhoods, because people use wheat straw as mulch, so it’s gone feral, so it’s still there.
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It’s nuts. I live in Salmon, ID, just enough off the beaten path that there are only transient late-Spring to early-Fall tourists passing through during hunting, fishing and rafting seasons. To support growth, there are no other businesses other than a tiny regional hospital, thus no population growth over the past decade (just 10 people!). And yet, there is almost no affordable housing, especially for the large majority of people in our area with well below-average incomes. I honestly don’t know how people survive here. We are three years into severe drought. Trees and shrubbery in town are struggling and and dying in our dessicating environment, and here in central Idaho, fire seasons have become pervasive and explosive. My unease has grown so much that a few months ago I realized I have been doing environment and health checks every morning when I awake. How does the air seem? What do I smell? Am I ready to face the day? Can I start thinking yet?
I have had to travel to Missoula three times in the past few months, the first time in two-to-three years, and have been shocked at the rampant growth. You should see the difference between the Idaho Falls of today versus 20 years ago. I am reminded of the horror I felt reading Stephen Donaldson’s first and second trilogies in my early 20s… the rapacious growth, rapacious death. I never thought a couple lazy weekends reading fantasy fiction would leave me with any memories.
Can you share more about the tourists in Bozeman this past year? You alluded to something, but were non-specific.