Wheatfields of Gentrification

Art, agriculture, real estate and commodification

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. …

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