Jine Dine, The Wheatfield (Agincourt), 2019
Gray is pleased to announce that works in sculpture and installation by Theaster Gates, Jaume Plensa and Jim Dine will debut in Field of Dreams, the Parrish Art Museum’s inaugural sculpture exhibition. The extensive outdoor installation, which responds to the landscape and architecture of the museum’s 14-acre grounds in Water Mill, New York, opens August 20, 2020, featuring ten artists of international renown.
“Our meadow has been patiently waiting for this opportunity to become a true extension of the museum, allowing the Parrish to fulfill its responsibility to provide an opportunity to interact with art during the pandemic that is safe, socially distant, and rich with potent and timely meaning,” said Parrish Board President Mary E. Frank. “Field of Dreams is a space to conjure the carefree days of summers past or to dream of what the future might hold.”
Field of Dreams also marks the first appearance of two bronze sculptures by Jim Dine: The Hooligan, 2019, and The Wheatfield (Agincourt), 1989-2019. Standing at nearly nine feet tall in Parrish’s Entry Meadow, The Hooligan draws inspiration from the iconic Venus de Milo. A prominent motif across Dine’s media-spanning practice, the repetition and seriality of the Venus in Dine’s compositions has been seen as an act of subversion, exacerbating its status as an icon.
Exhibited in the Great Meadow was Jim Dine’s The Wheatfield (Agincourt). First conceived in 1989 and reworked in 2019, this monumental assemblage expresses a life’s work of collected signs and symbols. Tools, branches, parrots, Venuses, Pinocchios, apes and cats, and one large skull cover the axle of an enormous piece of farm equipment, imagined from those seen in the grain fields surrounding the artist’s home and studio in Walla Walla, Washington. Offering a visual timeline of the artist’s most celebrated motifs, the present and newly expanded version of The Wheatfield was one of Dine’s most ambitious works to date.
Field of Dreams is part of the Art in the Meadow initiative created to activate the Parrish Art Museum’s outdoor spaces with performances, screenings, and sculpture.