Agathe Snow's resumé includes everything from the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Biennial to a 2019 residency at the Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton.
It also includes, more recently, being co-proprietor, with her partner, Anthony Holbrooke, of Mattituck Mushrooms, a four-acre farm on the North Fork that sells to restaurants, at farmers markets, online, and to anybody who stops by the Sound Avenue property.
If that seems unusual, it isn’t for her. “The mushrooms and the art, it’s all one thing,” she said. Indeed, food has been a fundamental part of her life and art practice, starting in Corsica, where she was born in 1976. Her mother, Martine Abitbol, had a French restaurant on that island until 1987, when she moved with her children to New York City.
Ms. Abitbol opened a bread bakery on the corner of Prince and Elizabeth Streets that morphed into La Poeme, a French restaurant that thrived until the pandemic. Until recently, Ms. Snow’s brother, Alex Apparu, was executive chef at Tutto Il Giorno in Sag Harbor and Southampton.
Between 1987 and 1994, Ms. Snow spent six months each year on Corsica with her father, and six months with her mother in New York. In 1994 she enrolled at McGill University in Montreal, where she studied history and political science.
Upon returning to New York after graduation, “I had no idea what I was going to do,” she said. She flirted with acting, then fashion, because she liked making things to wear, and she made mobiles that were part of her clothing.
Meanwhile, living on the Lower East Side, and working in her mother’s restaurant, she began meeting people, including many of the younger generation of downtown artists. “People just cross-pollinated, it was a really fun place to be.” While some of her friends were going off to art school, being an artist “was not even a dream.”
Ms. Snow was living on Forsyth Street when the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened. Of the Lower East Side, she said, “The dream was to be in this little island below 14th Street, it was heaven, with all your friends. My friends were already artists, or starting to be, so it kind of made sense that I could do this, I could be an artist.”
She was part of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. “Reena was a fictitious character who had a gallery on the Lower East Side, and we were all ‘her.’ Back then I was doing mobiles and putting things together. Then I realized what we needed was food. What I really love to do is cook and also bring people together.”
She began to cook and take over random places, “serving food wherever I was — staircases, the Staten Island Ferry, people’s homes.” From 2003 to 2006 she created “Feed the Troops,” what Vogue magazine called “a guerrilla-esque catering concept” that drew from her circle of friends, including the artists Ryan McGinley, Nate Lowman, Rita Ackermann, and her ex-husband, the late Dash Snow.
“Chop Shop” (2006) was a holiday gift shop whose offerings included food kits with recipes and the ingredients for a meal. Food, community, and performance were the ingredients of her practice at that time.
Another iconic project was realized in 2005 when she threw a 24-hour dance marathon for her friends in an abandoned building two blocks away from Ground Zero. She filmed the event with nine different cameras that ran throughout the night.
According to her Los Angeles gallery, Moran Moran, “It was a goodbye party for a now-mythical era of the city’s downtown art world.”
Ten years later, after Ms. Snow had finished editing the film, it was shown on seven large screens during a 24-hour event at the Guggenheim Museum.
James Fuentes, who had a gallery in Chinatown, had attended many of her events and suggested she have a “proper art show with things to sell.” The 2007 exhibition, inspired in part by 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, was not exactly what the gallerist had in mind.
Using painted tarp, industrial cloth, rope, mesh, and foam core, she converted the gallery into the belly of a beached whale. “People would go through the back alleys and arrive through the back entrance into this room. And you would walk out through the front and be reborn. The idea was the apocalypse had happened and you would walk out and there was nothing to worry about.”
For that installation she also created assemblage sculptures using found objects that combined “natural materials like twigs and sand with household flotsam” that suggested “that in the future everyday items could well become as rare and valuable as art,” according to Mary Rinebold’s Artnet review. Many of the objects were acquired by the dealer Charles Saatchi.
She has exhibited regularly at Moran Moran since 2008, creating a variety of objects. One series from 2015 consisted of wall-mounted collage-like sculptures made from pegboard, acrylic, and steel bolts. For another series she combined steel bar, wire mesh, corrugated cardboard, zip ties, and other unusual materials into monumental circular mobiles that were suspended from the ceiling.
Her 2022 exhibition there, “One Enormous Day,” featured nine paintings in which lines of paint run north to south and east to west, over which she stitched lengths of colorful Mardi Gras beads. “The Mardi Gras beads give it a little three-dimensional thing. Because of the pandemic they hadn’t been used for two years, so I bought tons and tons of them. Katrina was a true apocalypse.”
Whether it’s food or pegboard or a life vest or rubber handcuffs or papier-mâché, Ms. Snow has a passion for materials and how to combine them in seemingly endless and expressive ways. Does that include mushrooms?
For a show last year at Willoughby in Southold, she exhibited drawings — “doodles” she calls them — on paper she made solely from pulp derived from mushrooms she foraged on her property. As she says, “Art and food are always the same.”
Speaking of mushrooms, Mattituck Mushrooms “was not planned,” according to Mr. Holbrooke. “The original seed began with Agathe’s sister,” Anne Apparu-Hall, who bought a mushroom “farm” that was located on the ground floor of a residential building in Park Slope, next to a carpentry shop and a guitar shop.
Once that farm hit its stride, because the space was so small, Ms. Snow’s sister brought the used mushroom fruiting blocks to the farm in Mattituck. “After a year there were mushrooms everywhere,” said Ms. Snow. “The colors were incredible.” When, after the pandemic hit, Ms. Apparu-Hall and her husband had to leave the city, they rented a house on the North Fork. “For two years we grew their mushrooms,” said Ms. Snow. When the house they were renting was sold, the couple moved upstate and opened another mushroom farm.
“So then we started Mattituck Mushrooms. We had had a lot of practice. Last year was the first year I was really a mushroom farmer. We just grow what grows on Long Island, and we try to stick to the seasons and separate them according to how cold they can get or how hot.”
She led a visitor into a refrigerated shed whose shelves were filled with mushroom blocks that were sprouting a variety of mushrooms. Tables in a nearby open shed were covered with mushrooms that were ready to be sold. “We have 16 varieties. Every year we try to add one. This year we added winter enokis.”
Ms. Snow, Mr. Holbrooke, and their 14-year-old son, Cyrus Night, have lived full time in Mattituck for 12 years. “We’ve learned a lot from other farmers. People care about food here, they want to eat right.”
As far as making art is concerned, it depends on if and when she gets an idea. “I know that it’s going to come back. Art’s going to happen, but it has to happen in its own time.”
