We are an artist and fabricator team partnering in life and in work.
Christine Corday Powers
b. Fort Meade, Laurel Maryland.
Christine is a multidisciplinary artist known for monumental concepts and installations. Recent project 'Sans Titre' culminated in Art as the thirty-sixth nation and final global contributor to the material build of a star on Earth, ITER [Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France]; as well as ongoing solo museum exhibitions and public works in civic collections worldwide.
Her material-based practice focuses on temperature, pressure and material states of atomic elements in close collaboration with Nobel laureate astrophysicists; EarthShot finalist biochemists; National Academy-awarded engineers; and a broad range of material sciences, cultural anthropology, chemistry, and phenomenology.
Christine’s projects are informed from her astrophysics internship at NASA/SETI (1991) as well as classical training at the piano. Her solo exhibitions include the New York High Line (2008), Director-commissioned solo exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2014) and Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2019), and selected by Architect Michael Arad to create the color and surface for The National September 11 Memorial, Ground Zero (2011). Corday was nominated for United States Artist Fellow (2016); awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts (2019); Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2019); Brian Wall Foundation (2019); Robert Lehman Foundation (2019); Lannan Foundation (2015); and invited to participate in two shows within Venice Architecture Biennale (2021).
Christopher Nicholas Powers
b. Beacon, New York
Chris is founder and co-owner of KC Fabrications. For thirty-two years, he has created, installed and managed large-scale international projects of National Medal of Arts-awarded Artists and Pritzker Prize-winning Architects. His clients include the United States State Department, Foundation for Art & Preservation in Embassies, New York Department of Environmental Protection, La Biennale di Venezia, and Metropolitan Transit Authorities among many others as well as international art museums, galleries, and other international art and architecture organizations.
He learned to weld at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, California during his service in the United States Air Force. After his service, he worked eighteen years at Tallix Art Foundry in Beacon, New York, beginning as floor welder in 1989 until becoming Director of its seventy-person company in 2004. He left Tallix during its merger with Polich Art Foundry in 2006 to create KC Fabrications.
In 2010, Chris was awarded fabrication and installation of the National September 11 Memorial Bronze Name Parapets of the North and South Pools at Ground Zero. He is the subject of the History Channel Documentary “The Making of 9/11 Memorial” (2011) and he and his team are featured in Discovery Channel Documentary “Rebuilding Ground Zero”(2011).
We are future concept farmers to seed, feed and power ideas for our community and beyond.
Our Pilot Farm and Demonstration Program involves studies and proofs of how Agriculture, Wetlands and Forest can share land and future in New York and the world. Nicholas Corday Farms is a Solar-run, Geothermal farm; Pesticide-free, Sustainable, Renewable Agriculture concept; maintaining Wetlands, Forests and Pollinators.
The land we steward has many histories and many futures.
18000 BCE
This plot of land was under the Hudson - Champlain Lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet; the final advance of ice from the last Ice Age.
Glaciation was a major factor in the shape and sloping of Hudson Valley landscape as well as influenced the location of New York farms.
The topography and geology of this farmland shows it was formed by the coming together of two glaciers pushed against each other.
10,000 BCE – 1740 CE
Paleo-Indians and the Munsee Lenape and Schaghticoke peoples lived and farmed this region until forced out by fraudulent treaties in mid-18th century.
Thousands of years of the Indigenous peoples ‘agro-food-forestry’ methods of no-till farming, natural fertilizers, rotational grazing and other regenerative agricultural methods are returning to today’s practices.
Munsee Lenape used ‘companion planting’ methods with their ‘three sisters’: maize, beans, and squash as well as cultivated their fields through slash and burn technique.
Lenape herbalists, primarily women, used their extensive knowledge of plant life to help heal their community's ailments. The Lenape found cures with use of the black walnut tree and persimmons. Three 200-250 year old black walnut trees remain on this land today.
1904 - 1992
Large regions throughout Hudson Valley were zoned as Agriculture. In 1904, the Caruso Family Farm known as “The Homestead” planted 30 acres of six different varieties of apple trees and a single variety of Concord Grape to harvest while the young apple orchard matured. Caruso Homestead apples were sold to local markets and their grapes into local juice.
During its farming, the land was drained of its wetland to create more arable acreage as common practice throughout all of New York, and an irrigation pond was maintained to water the farm.
The Caruso Farm sold in the early 1990s with its apple trees and grapes growing wild for almost forty years.
2022 -
Today, New York is presented with a creative challenge; as it must both maintain its wetlands as well as continue to farm.
Our farm collaborates with farming initiatives in the study, piloting and proof of sustainable methods to secure food production and bee health in a changing growing zones and climate.
We run the farm with a 34MWh Solar Panel Array, every tool, if not powered by our hand, is powered by the Sun.