Art In The Heart of Fruita
Rendering courtesy of FARM
From the lens of an iPhone camera, the background to the head and shoulders of Sarah Wood, co-owner of Grand Jun fermentation, is mostly concrete, drywall and wood beams. It’s industrial and raw for now, but this is just the soil ready to grow the incoming FARM.
FARM, an acronym for Fruita Arts Recreation Marketplace, is the brainchild of Allegheny Meadows, Gavin Banks and Sarah Wood. Fifteen years ago, Banks and Meadows started the Studio for Arts and Works in Carbondale in response to an overwhelming need in the Roaring Fork Valley from artists and creative professionals looking for space to work and run their businesses.
Wood was a tenant of Banks and Meadows in Carbondale and eventually moved to Fruita, but the three remained friends, so when the opportunity for a similar space in Fruita came up, Wood was all in. “Fruita as a community is the perfect mix of local agriculture, outdoor recreation and arts,” Wood says. “The arts scene has been siloed and private for a long time. Many artists work out of their homes and don’t have the opportunity to collaborate and work together.”
FARM is underwritten by Meadows’ philosophy of “conscious capitalism,” which, as Wood describes it, is “doing something that makes a profit, so that you can keep doing it but simultaneously meeting a community or social need.”
This conscientious approach can also be found in the design of the space as a whole. Plans for landscaping include functional pedestals that will host rotating art installations, bike racks, outdoor seating and crevice gardens — a landscape style Kenton Seth of Paintbrush Gardens in Grand Junction describes as “a historical novelty to grow mountain plants that have come in to wider use as features in xeric gardens and ecological alternatives to retaining walls or the disposal of waste concrete.”
The building itself will also seek to incorporate elements that integrate the natural world as much as possible, from solar gain on the south side to heat the building to maximizing the use of natural light via skylights and windows.
“We’re really being intentional about the way we move through downtown Fruita,” Wood explains.
Although there are still a few secrets in the works, FARM expects to host an array of businesses, which include a mountain bike instruction company, a bicycle shop showroom, culinary art businesses, creative art businesses featuring professions like oil paint, letter press, fiber arts, ceramic arts and tintype photography, and even an orchestral music archiving company. If it sounds like a deluxe variety pack of places, Wood wants to remind you that this is intentional.
“All of this planning and design has been done with the community in mind,” Wood shares. “It’s really born from the community of Fruita and what this community has expressed they want and need. As a project, we want to be flexible and build to suit and focus on curating this space based on the type of work people do and who they are.”
Originally published in the Summer 2022 of Spoke+Blossom.