You may have heard of the widely attended international art fairs put on by Art Basel, but try to herb your enthusiasm — North Fork inspired creations in an agricultural setting are in abundance at this weekend’s Art Basil 2025.
Treiber Farms, in collaboration with VSOP Projects, will host the fourth annual farm and food-adjacent art fair. On Sept. 27 and 28 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., stop by to see local artists’ film photographs, gorgeous cakes and baked goods, antique and modern folk art landscape paintings, blown glass character vessels and a pumpkin design showcase.
The fair is free to attend with art available for purchase.
This unique viewing experience came when two North Fork creatives put their heads together on how to combine the craft of farming and the gallery experience.
Jonathan Weiskopf, director of VSOP Projects, and Peter Treiber Jr., owner of Treiber Farms, are longtime friends.
Treiber, who worked in the art industry for six years before starting the farm with his father in 2016, showed his own work in Weiskopf’s Greenport gallery in 2019. Since then, he has had his work on display there regularly.
At the farm, Treiber taps into that same visionary viewpoint when designing gardens and orchards and choosing which produce varieties to grow.
“[Farming] engages all of the senses and lends itself to being really creative in a lot of different ways,” says Treiber.
For the fair, he produced work responding to the community prompt put out by Weiskopf calling for a primitive or rudimentary mask or silhouette.
Weiskopf has done an open-call community prompt each year of the fair. This year, 15 local creatives are participating, making masks or silhouettes to be hung in the barn.
In the past that strong basil scent may have taken over, but this year, despite the title, there is more of a pumpkin focus. In addition to jack-o’-lantern-like faces made for the community prompt, there will be an interactive pumpkin basketball free throw shooting contest in the barnyard.
The organizing pair’s priority is to keep that produce-art intersection alive and welcome a different vibe than the traditional exhibit experience while celebrating the environment where they as artists thrive.
“These kinds of community projects and offsite projects give me an opportunity to be exposed to the work of lots of artists that I typically don’t get to work with,” says Weiskopf. “This really kind of broadens my view of what’s being made here on the North Fork in the art community.”
