Tennessee artist and gardener Craig Nutt has a long-standing relationship with Punxsutawney Phil, so he detoured to Gobblers Knob yesterday on his way to a Friday talk in Pittsburgh.

"I love that stuff," Mr. Nutt said by phone, noting that agrarian festivals are becoming rarer.

A dozen years ago, an Alabama gallery crawl Mr. Nutt was involved with fell on Groundhog Day, and at his request the Punxsutawney folk issued a proclamation declaring it an official Groundhog Day event. The local newspaper and TV weathermen covered the crawl and it was a big success.

Mr. Nutt's fanciful work is in such prestigious collections as the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery and Atlanta's High Museum of Art. His path to becoming a nationally acclaimed furniture maker and sculptor has been eclectic.

He was born in 1950 in Belmond, a small farming community of about 2,000 people in north central Iowa that was surrounded by "a vast cornfield that stretched to the horizon." While not farmers, his family was immersed in farm culture. An uncle owned a farm where Mr. Nutt would occasionally go and "run through the rows of corn. You could get lost out there."

His classmates were mostly farm children. One night a week the stores would stay open late and all the farmers would come into town. "It was exciting. It's not that dynamic now."

Something else Mr. Nutt noted was the change in farming itself.

"The farms had animals, a variety of crops, pasture land. There was always a lot of corn, but not like now. It's becoming a big mono product, refined in ways we couldn't have even imagined when I was a kid."

The corn raised now has been genetically modified by cross breeding and more recently by splicing in animal genes to make it resistant to herbicides, Mr. Nutt said. The seeds are all patented.

"[The farming] has kind of turned sinister, kind of turned Wall Street. It's a different thing; it's hard to think of it as being pastoral."

Those observations seeped into his aesthetic. His flying vegetables, for example, are meticulously crafted and finished, "partly mechanical, closer to airplanes ... a product of industry and a product of nature," like the corn, he said.

Mr. Nutt earned a bachelor's degree in religious studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where he became a part of the early 1970s free improvisation music scene. Immersed in Surrealism and Dadaism, young artists and musicians confounded the university community with avant-garde artwork and sounds, occasionally scraping enough money together to press low-edition, now collectible vinyl albums.

Mr. Nutt, using a pseudonym, founded the group Ron 'Pate and the Debonairs. At the same time, he was working as an antiques restorer and gaining admiration for what people had accomplished with "hand skills," before sophisticated machinery was available. Through trial and error, he perfected his own woodworking techniques. And one day he began his first oversized vegetable sculpture.

"It was a 3-foot-long bean for a show. I figured it would be a one-time thing. It was so absurd that somebody should do it, and, if not me, who would?"

Then he realized the pieces could be political.

"I could layer commentary on, create a vocabulary that I could say other things with. And the color combinations that you'd never think to put together, and here they are in nature."

There was also something "very American" about them that he liked, conjuring county fair giant vegetable competitions and seed catalogs that pitched vegetables that "could do everything but fly."

The balance of whimsy, commentary and what he has in the past referred to as "the ethic of craftsmanship" is very important to Mr. Nutt. While he finds it "fun to play in those gray areas," he emphasized that if he "dashed off the vegetables they'd just be cute. Cute is definitely not what I'm going for."

When he began making furniture, Mr. Nutt also started doing some serious gardening as a "survival strategy" to supplement his not very lucrative profession. He continues to garden at his home outside Nashville, but stops short of calling himself a farmer. However, his wife keeps bees and has begun raising chickens with the intention of selling eggs.

Mr. Nutt said he likes the aesthetics of a garden, but also "[the food] has a special quality. It gains a special significance. The food you grow, the fish you caught, is fresher.

"It's hard to go back to store tomatoes after you've grown your own. We're motivated to grow things organically to know what goes into them. We like the older varieties like heritage or heirloom tomatoes. We're very keen on black tomatoes."

When he speaks at 5:30 p.m. Friday at the Society for Contemporary Craft, Mr. Nutt will describe his process and intent, but he also will talk about the corruption of what was "once a venerable foodstuff of the Americas [that] has become a symbol of the transformation of farm into factory" ($5 suggested donation at the door).

Likening himself more to Michael Pollan than Michael Moore, Mr. Nutt said he can't consider himself an environmental activist. "I haven't paid those dues. But it's in my work and my lifestyle."

He does hope that local activists will be among audience members and contribute to the dialogue about the evolution of food production, art-making and the role of artists in America today.

Craig Nutt's sculpture remains through March 20 at 2100 Smallman St., Strip District. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Admission is free. For information, call 412-261-7003 or visit www.contemporarycraft.org.

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