EAST LANSING, MICH.- The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (Broad MSU) has commissioned the Flatbread Society (FBS), a collective of farmers, oven-builders, astronomers, artists, soil scientists, bakers, and folklorists who explore humankind’s long and complex relationship with grain, to create a site-specific work that will be on view at the museum September 5 – October 12, 2014. FBS is the first recipient of the Broad MSU’s residency program, The Land Grant: Art, Agriculture, Sustainability, created for artists whose work addresses land use, food, and urban development, with a focus on sustainability. Through an exhibition, a variety of public programs and workshops (October 9-12), and a publication, FBS at the Broad MSU will explore possibilities for scaling down food production and keeping distribution local and will propose practices that encourage farmers to remain connected to their craft and more hands-on farming methods.

“Artists and architects are increasingly pushing the boundaries of traditional object-based practices to create socially engaged work promoting various kinds of activism,” said Michael Rush, Founding Director of the Broad MSU. “The physical and intellectual resources at MSU provide an extraordinary context in which artists can develop this type of practice. In this instance, the Flatbread Society will bring together various disciplines from the museum, the university, and the East Lansing community for an important conversation about agricultural practice and food production.”

Since 2012, the FBS has taken the form of temporary architecture and public programming, with hands-on workshops and dialogues to provoke discussions around patterns of food production, consumption, and broader concerns of class, labor, religion, lore, and history—all stirred by the production of flatbread. The history of the development of human civilization, from early technological innovations to cultural evolution, can be told through the story of grain. But that story is also a local story, and one that East Lansing and Michigan State University, with a long history of education in agricultural practice, knows well.

Led by San Francisco–based artist Amy Franceschini and the design studio and artists’ collective Futurefarmers, the FBS will bring to East Lansing a specific constellation of collaborators, including artists, architects, curators, chef, writers, and musicians. Their work together will draw upon the deep knowledge and experience of local Michigan farmers, ceramicists, folklorists, sociologists, musicians, and economists, in order to address issues surrounding grain—a ubiquitous economic and cultural commodity both in the East Lansing community and on a global scale.

The Land Grant: Flatbread Society will invite participants to think differently about the story of grain and to imagine new agricultural models in which farmers remain connected to their craft and knowledge of production. Inspired by the grain pit on the trading floor of the Chicago Board of Trade where grains are bought and sold through a complex language of hand signals and shouting called “open outcry,” the FBS will build inside the museum a sculptural replica—30 feet in diameter—of the Chicago grain pit. The octagonal shape of the structure, with its stepped recesses serving as benches, will physically draw visitors into the heart of this project and will become a space for dialogue surrounding the role grain plays as the basis of most human civilizations and driver of economic power. Beneath the pit will be a set of sculptures that elicit the processes of threshing, seed storage, milling, and baking.

In addition, the FBS will construct a temporary clay oven in the Broad MSU’s Sculpture Garden in partnership with the Paul Kotula, ceramicist and MSU faculty member. This collectively built project will be the site for a series of celebrations, workshops, and conversations centered on the actual physical practice of baking and making, echoing the social practices that will be held inside the museum space.

“The tactile nature of this exhibition blurs the line between the art and the audience, transforming viewers into active participants thinking through food production and social issues,” said Alison Gass, Show Curator and Creator of the Flatbread Project. “The installation will provide a platform for the types of discussions that can spark change, an echo of the ‘open outcry’ of the historic trading floor.”