Lenard Smith – Refuge

Perched amid thirty-three acres of redwoods, two miles inland from the remote Mendocino Coast in Northern California, Salmon Creek Farm is a place like few others. Originally established as a countercultural commune in the early 1970s, today it exists as a kind of communal, longterm, living art project – a queered commune, farm, and homestead, open to artists and others curious to its potentials. On June 4, 2020 – in the week following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer – Salmon Creek Farm’s current custodian, the architect and artist Fritz Haeg, posted a callout to social media offering one of the farm’s cabins as a sanctuary for BIPOC artists, with no expectations, expenses or obligations. The photographs that arose from Los Angeles-based artist Lenard Smith’s time on the land the following month – the same images that populate Refuge.