Final Vote: Let's Make a Rural Arts And Culture Map

Screenshot of projects already logged into The Rural Arts and Culture Map

Please consider casting your vote for The Rural Arts and Culture Map proposal within the Rural Digital Advocacy Grant crowd-source competition. Voting takes about 10 seconds and requires no login or user information.

Folks, we coming up on the last day of the crowd-source competition -- and all of us at Art of the Rural would like to thank the individuals and organizations who have voted to support this work and who have shared it with their friends and colleagues. Many thanks also to our collaborators at Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 art collective.

Today we're asking folks who may not have had a chance yet to vote or share this project to consider our proposal, and its accompanying video, which can be reviewed here. For the duration of this voting period, we are opening for public view the Rural Art and Culture Map project -- which will debut in a more developed form in a few weeks. 

In correspondence with Mark Lynn Ferguson of The Revivalist, I was asked how I would break down the necessity and the promise of this proposal into the simplest terms. Here's a few points:

• This map is 100% participatory. Rural people, and their urban advocates, drive this project.

• Art of the Rural will also collaborate with artists, writers, bloggers, and a host of organizations to create partnerships and increase the community within the Map project.

• PlaceStories is a gorgeous and infinitely resourceful mapping platform. We can post music, video, interviews, images, discussions, and documents -- as well as their handy "postcard" storytelling options.

• PlaceStories enables the Map, and its parts, to be embedded on other sites. With this, the Map becomes a vehicle for new connections.

• This is a great resource but, even more so, a place for people to meet and share ideas, a powerful metaphor for all kinds of campaigns to increase visibility and support for rural people.

• Plain and simple: contributing to a PlaceStories project is fun and immediately gratifying.

For a more detailed description of the process, please see our previous introduction to The Rural Arts and Culture Map and the crowd-source campaign. Here's our introduction to the project; for full image/sound credits please follow the vimeo link:

Your Vote Counts: The Rural Arts And Culture Map

This morning we are asking for your time and assistance in advocating for the necessity of a dynamic Rural Arts and Culture Map. 

Art of the Rural, in collaboration with the Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 Art Collective, is one of thirteen organizations under consideration for a Rural Digital Advocacy Grant provided by the Kellogg Foundation and the Rural Policy Action Partnership.

The Institute For Emerging Issues is currently hosting a crowd-sourced competition, whereby the grant application with the most votes will immediately receive funding. 

In short: every vote for this Map counts and puts this project closer to becoming a reality. Voting is open only for a few days, closing on July 19th. Voting is quick and easy -- no login or user information is required.

Please see the short project video below*. What makes all of us at AOTR so excited is that we have the opportunity to create this new map in collaboration with the PlaceStories mapping platform designed by Feral Arts. Much like the "open canon" philosophy of AOTR, PlaceStories encourages participation and open dialogue -- and it offers some dynamic ways for stories to be told, and then shared across the internet and beyond.

We are honored to count Appalshop and the M12 art collective as collaborators in the project; their guidance will be invaluable as we consider how to best reach out to diverse communities and cultures while also speaking across disciplines and considering rural-urban exchange.

Please find below a brief description of the project. Though the Rural Arts and Culture Map, under the careful stewardship of AOTR contributor and Digital Intern Rachel Beth Rudi, is currently in the process of completing a first phase of archiving material from rural sites, we are opening up the Map for the public to view during the duration of the voting -- and to get a sense of the exciting possibilities in working with the PlaceStories platform.

Art of the Rural, in collaboration with Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 Art Collective, is requesting a Rural Digital Advocacy Grant to administer the Rural Arts and Culture Map on the PlaceStories mapping platform.

With these collaborators’ expertise in media-making, design, and community-engagement, Art of the Rural will utilize this dynamic open source Map to present new perspectives from rural America, with a focus on rural youth, rural-urban exchange, and a sustaining interest in the changing face of rural America: the next generation, and their membership in diverse ethnic and cultural communities.

Most importantly, this project is driven not by any single organization, but by the people themselves. With opportunities to share video, audio, photography, and text, PlaceStories will give full agency to an audience ready to become active participants in a mission to create new rural narratives. Thus, the Map becomes a manifestation of direct, local, experience; a digital tool that transcends itself; a meeting point for conversation and shared ground; and a foundation through which to unite and motivate rural citizens across the country and contribute to the work of the National Rural Assembly.

This project acknowledges that powerful campaigns for equity and social change emerge from cultural imperatives. Artists and arts practitioners are often grassroots innovators and adept partners in media campaigns. With The Rural Arts and Culture Map, this community promises give a compelling voice, and a new avenue of communication, to a wide range of rural issues.

*Please find below more information on the images and artwork contained in the Vimeo clip. In many cases, multiple articles on these artists have appeared on Art of the Rural and can be found through searching the archives:

Music:

"Amazing Grace" - Oakland's Famous One Man Band

Images:

Jetsonorama:

http://speakingloudandsayingnothing.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/01/jetsonorama-panorama.html

Square dance caller T-Claw with the Hogslop String Band, Nashville. Photograph by Jennifer Joy Jaemson:

http://jenniferjoyjameson.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/06/introducing-new-series-notes-from-field.html

M12 art collective Campito and Black Hornet projects:

http://m12studio.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/02/m12-collective-ornitarium.html

The Wormfarm Institute:

http://wormfarminstitute.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/12/making-connections-at-wormfarm.html

Double Edge Theatre:

http://www.doubleedgetheatre.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/03/double-edge-theatre-and-grand-parade.html

Feral Arts and PlaceStories:

http://www.feralarts.com.au/

http://ps3beta.com

Chris Sauter

http://www.chrissauter.com/main.html

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/10/chris-sauters-rural-installations.html

Appalshop:

http://appalshop.org

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-work-from-appalachian-media.html

Carolina Chocolate Drops:
http://www.carolinachocolatedrops.com/
http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2011/07/in-brief-carolina-chocolate-drops.html

Eamon Mac Mahon:

http://www.eamonmacmahon.com/index.php

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/05/eamon-mac-mahon-landlocked-north-on.html

Wendell Berry:

http://brtom.typepad.com/wberry/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/04/wendell-berrys-jefferson-lecture-it-all.html

Yarn Bombing:

http://iybd.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/02/bringing-yarn-bomb-to-country_27.html

4wheelwarpony:

https://www.facebook.com/4wheelwarpony

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/03/native-american-skateboard-culture.html

David Lundahl:

http://newlightstudios.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/08/modern-rural-art-you-cant-make-that.html

Farmer of the Future and Harvest Public Media

Photograph by Alison Rose; Forgotonia

This morning the excellent team of reporters and editors at Harvest Public Media began a series, entitled Farmer of the Future, that considers how "technological, cultural and political forces are bringing immense change to those people who commit to building their lives around the land." 

Kathleen Masterson offers the first dispatch, a report considering how the northwest region of Iowa, with its recent population growth and cultural diversity, presents both a model for the future and set of complex questions. Here is the transcript introduction to "Blending of Culture May be Blueprint for Growth:"

Sioux County, in northwest Iowa, is known for its Dutch pastries. The landscape is dotted with Lutheran and reform churches.  But today, Catholic churches and tortillerias are creeping into the landscape — signs of the new residents joining this vibrant community.

In Sioux County, as in a scattering of communities across the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are working in meat processing plants, dairies, egg-laying facilities and hog barns. In fact, the majority of U.S. farm laborers today were born outside the U.S.

And while some parts of the rural Midwest are hollowing out, areas like Sioux County and its biggest city Sioux Center, are actually growing as immigrant populations move in to take jobs that otherwise employers cannot fill.

Sioux Center’s population has grown 17 percent and the county is up 7 percent over the last decade. Meanwhile, government figures indicate 91 of Iowa’s 99 counties have declined by about 9 percent over the last three decades.

No surprise, Sioux Center looks very different than many other rural communities in Iowa. But although this area may well offer a glimpse of the farming community of the future, the melding of cultures is not always easy.

Masterson continues in her piece to talk with folks from all sides of the Sioux Center community. We find that, for many farmers in the region, the rhetoric of immigrants "stealing American jobs" masks the pressing need for agricultural workers. Furthermore, these new residents are contributing to an expanding local economy, in contrast with other rural regions of the state.

Harvest Public Media also provides, embedded within Masterson's report, an interactive map illustrating the influx of hispanic immigrants within Iowa.

If we consider this news from Sioux Center alongside last week's "Readings" piece on Thomas Hardy's view from rural England -- as workers fled from the fields for industrial centers, in some cases to complete against English agriculture as newly-American farmers -- then we might see this news not as a political "hot-button" issue, but as part of a larger continuum, another element of a broader arc of international rural diaspora across the last two centuries.

Related Articles:

Readings: Rural Traditions Sunk Into Eternal Oblivion

The Farmville Files: Take Our Jobs

Mexican Migrant Workers, Vermont Dairy Farmers, and Local Artists

Visualizing the Importance of Rural Post Offices

U.S. Representative Nick Rahall delivering the mail; Jon Bolt

The post office itself is often the identity of small town USA, and when you close the post office, it’s literally the nail in the coffin for that community. People go to the post office not only to receive mail, which is sometimes could be prescription medicines or some form of communications. They also socialize with their family and friends at the post office, learn what’s on their neighbors’ minds, and they gather to support community projects or issues. It’s ironic that in order to have these required hearings on these post offices, the only place big enough is the post office.

That's West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall, sharing his thoughts with Greg Jordan of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph (found in yesterday's roundup in The Daily Yonder). Mr. Rahall was invited by Tim Thomason, a mail carrier and president of the West Virginia Rural Letter Carrier Association, to join him on his 90-mile 5-hour route this week--serving folks in some of the most remote parts of the state, folks that depend on Mr. Thomason for everything from prescription medications to NetFlix films. As The Daily Yonder has been covering for months, proposed cuts could drastically curtail the amount of USPS reach in rural America, and sever a vital social artery in these communities.

We might consider the outstanding video-mapping work below by Derek Watkins alongside Rachel Reynolds Luster's recent piece grappling with how we might faithfully map rural culture. When I watched this video for the first time, it was immediately clear that, as those little postal dots cross the continent, we are also seeing the spread of democratic representation, and the rise of a form of public discourse that undoubtedly made this country the predominant voice of the twentieth century--in the arts, sciences, business, philanthropy, and so on. In a cultural moment where we laud our technological "connectedness" just as liberals and conservatives can't even have a rational discussion with each other, we remove these physical and historical markers of community--and of democracy itself--at our own peril.

Here's Mr. Watkins's stunning visualization of USPS expansion. Much more information is available on his site:

Posted: Visualizing US expansion through post offices. from Derek Watkins on Vimeo.