Sam Van Aken, Tree of 40 Fruit: The Boulder Trees, 2023 Courtesy Longmont Museum
In addition to being home to Colorado’s biggest cities, the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains is a major farming region, and one that faces many of the same environmental challenges as the rest of the western US due to drought, development and climate change. agriCULTURE: Art Inspired by the Land (until 7 January 2024), an ambitious programme of exhibitions co-curated by Jane Burke from the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Jared Thompson from the Longmont Museum, spans both museums and features projects involving more than a half-dozen farms and agricultural groups in the region.
The artist Sam Van Aken, for instance, teamed up with the Boulder Apple Tree Project at the University of Colorado Boulder to plant four apple trees in the city. He then grafted more than 20 varieties of heritage apples to them, so that each tree will eventually produce a surreal mix of apples in different sizes, colours and flavours.
