Long before the THINK POTATO INSTITUTE existed, Jeffrey Allen Price was growing potatoes.
For more than three decades, potato cultivation has remained a continuous part of his artistic practice, extending beyond exhibitions, lectures, collections, publications, and research into the seasonal rhythms of planting, tending, harvesting, cooking, and sharing potatoes with others.
The relationship began in the early 1990s while living in Springfield, Missouri, where potatoes were planted and harvested alongside the activities that would eventually lead to the First Annual Potato Festival in 1996. What began as a simple garden gradually evolved into a lifelong practice that paralleled the development of POTATOISM and the Think Potato Institute itself.
Since that time, potatoes have been grown in backyard gardens, community spaces, farms, exhibition sites, and temporary potato plots established for special projects. During The BIG POTATO Invitational and Think Potato Festival V in 2016, Rexer’s Crossroads Farm in Huntington, New York provided a dedicated growing area known as The BIG POTATO Patch, allowing visitors to experience potatoes not only as cultural artifacts, but as living plants.
Over the years, seed potatoes have been shared with friends, family members, students, artists, and collaborators, extending the practice beyond a single garden and encouraging others to participate in the cultivation of potatoes. Potato planting has also accompanied travels and research activities, including plantings outside the United States.
Hargrave has been planting 100 pounds of Red Potatoes for over 60 years.
For Price, growing potatoes has never been separate from making art. The garden itself functions as a form of living artwork—part sculpture, part performance, part research project, and part act of stewardship. The potato plant serves simultaneously as subject, collaborator, historical artifact, food source, and cultural symbol.
Potatoes harvested from these gardens have frequently found their way into exhibitions, festivals, lectures, community meals, and public events. In many cases, the cycle of planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and sharing potatoes became as important as the artworks themselves.
Today, more than thirty years after planting his first potato gardens, cultivation remains one of the most direct and meaningful expressions of the Think Potato Institute’s mission. While exhibitions may end and collections may expand, each growing season offers a renewed opportunity to engage with the potato as a living material, a cultural companion, and an enduring source of artistic inspiration.