On the Map: The Lexicon of Sustainability

Family at a Lexicon of Sustainability pop-up art show; Douglas Gayeton, KQED blog

By Rachel Rudi, Digital Contributor

In this week's update from our Rural Arts and Culture Map, The Art of the Rural is pleased to share two videos posted by Alejo Kraus-Polk, a researcher with The Lexicon of Sustainability: "This is the Story of An Egg" discusses with California farmers the uncomfortable truth behind marketing catchphrases like "cage-free" and "free-range," and the promise of "pasture-raised" eggs; "Foraging" chronicles society's straying from eating with the seasons and leaning heavily on conventional agriculture, then follows present-day foragers into North American forests and waters. Both videos focus on the original definitions and gradual manipulations of agricultural and culinary words and terms, the subtle power of language and the empowerment that comes from dissecting it.

We have written about The Lexicon of Sustainability before, as we're continually struck by how their work promotes the above ideas with an elegant balance of sharp photography, handwritten words and flowcharts, and enhancing audio. Tejal Rao of Grist magazine detailed the creation process:

[LS Founder Douglas] Gayeton got the idea for the Lexicon project about two years ago, in the middle of a dinner party, when a guest butchered the definition of "food miles." If Gayeton could define and build out the language of sustainability, he thought, he could give people the tools they needed to bounce around real ideas. To make a change. Gayeton identified 100 key terms and began visiting the farmers, fishermen, foragers, and chefs across the country who could help him define them. "I simply spend time with them. I don't know what I'm doing in advance and I don't storyboard anything. I just listen." 

The artist shoots an average of 1,000 photographs with each of his subjects. He then prints the photos out, cutting and pasting up to 100 of them together to create a massive collage (the smaller pieces are four by five feet; the larger ones cover a wall). From here Gayeton takes the stories of his subjects – their thoughts, recipes,ramblings – and writes them down on a sheet of glass, which is layered on the collage and shot again, the text floating dreamily above the image. This painstaking process, even with the assistance of a small team, takes Gayeton about three weeks.

Each still shines, and the films shimmer. Crisp presentation grounds the stories, philosophies, etymologies, and we watch ideas and reclamations build on screen. Ultimately, the Lexicon of Sustainability brings us all to square one and irons out the words we use, or have heard, or haven't heard, or have mispronounced, before handing us our language back, newly accessible, meaningfully enhanced, and wrinkle-free.

Be sure to explore the Lexicon of Sustainability's website, and to follow Mr. Kraus-Polk on the Rural Arts and Culture Map for more posts. Below, "This is the Story of An Egg" and "Foraging." Enjoy!

Lexicon of Sustainability: This is the Story of An Egg from lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.


Lexicon of Sustainability: Foraging from lexicon of sustainability on Vimeo.

Britten Traughber: Hawaii Beyond The Postcards

Local Ads, 2010; Britten Traughber

Photographer Britten Traughber was born and raised on the plains of Central Illinois, though her current work has placed her in a locale thousands of miles from that landscape. Traughber, who studied with Rhondal McKinney at the MFA progam at Illinois State University and has created a series of extraordinary projects in this region, has turned her eye to a part of the world that some folks from Lincoln's Land escape to during the winter months: the islands of Hawaii. 

Britten Traughber's mission of uncovering the story of cultural and economic shifts beneath the romanticized vision of the Hawaii has recently received generous coverage in Terrain: A journal of the Built and Natural Environments. The photographs from her Hawaiian Paradise Park series foreground a sense of transition, a quality of standing in a temporal space at once indebted to the past and suggestive of a radically changed future. This shared rural condition is also brought to light in her series of photographs from Moweaqua, Illinois.

Here's the introduction to her feature in Terrain. Please find larger, high-resolution images by following the the links above:

On the rainy eastern side of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, the cycles of destruction and regeneration in Hawaiian Paradise Park (what locals refer to as HPP) are impossible to ignore, almost like watching a time-lapse video on fast forward.

Physically, economically, and culturally, the forces of change in such a raw environment always remind you: this land, the sacred ‘aina, will reclaim itself—from the lava below to the invasive Albezia trees above, from the rust and mold to the vigorous growth of plant life—it’s a matter of when, not if.

Said to be the second largest subdivision in the United States, HPP sits on over four square miles with more than 8,800 one-acre lots, though only around half of the land is actually developed. Given that scope, just exploring this neighborhood has been a fascinating study in the unique qualities of island living. This is not the postcard paradise you see in travel brochures. That’s part of what makes it so interesting to live here.

Britten Traughber has also sought to engage on a local level through the creation of RIPE "a collaborative community project of interviews and photographs based on the real stories of real women, living in the REAL Hawaii. Through interviews, talk story sessions, dinners, emails and chance encounters, our experiences are being shared and documented - showing the reality that being female in Paradise is not what it seems." Folks can join the conversation here. 

Arts Funding 2.0: Dust and Grooves

Frank Gossner, of the Voodoo Funk blog, in Ghana; Eilon Paz, Dust and Grooves

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Today we introduce a new weekly series, Arts Funding 2.0, that will highlight an arts-focused “crowd funding” campaign each week.

Perhaps fittingly, those new to the term can turn to Wikipedia to learn that crowd funding is "the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their resources, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations." Kickstarter, Indiegogo, ArtistShare, and PledgeMusic are only a few of the crowd-funding sites online.

Without a doubt, crowd funding has become a major force in supporting individual artists and arts-oriented collaborations and community efforts. In an announcement that generated a great deal of conversation and debate, Kickstarter recently estimated that it will raise more funds for arts organizations and artists this year than the NEA, setting an estimated $150 million to be distributed compared to the NEA’s $146 million. While this assertion has been challenged by a number of writers and arts commentators, and may not accurately represent the intricacies of the arts funding ecosystem, sites like Kickstarter have become a presence in these national conversations on the arts and their audiences.

We find two aspects of crowd funding particularly interesting. Donors, supporters, or pledgers are able to vote with their wallets, in small to large amounts, for projects they want to support. This not only democratizes the process of arts funding but also allows more fluidity and individual expression in the projects that receive funding. In addition, unlike granting systems, these projects are not required to be affiliated or structured as non profits and are not subject to reporting requirements that are mandated by other, more formal, arts-funding structures.

We hope that you’ll send us your suggestions for campaigns that we should feature in the series, and we hope you’ll support these projects! You can send suggestions to luster@aol.com.

Our first Arts Funding 2.0 project is Dust and Grooves:

Dust and Grooves is a photography and interview project documenting vinyl collectors in their most natural and intimate environment: the record room. Dust & Grooves maintains the integrity and history of vinyl, as well as the musical heritage that goes along with every record in these collections.

Photographer and documentarian Eilon Paz has traveled around the world and across the country collecting the stories of vinyl collectors. According to the description on their Kickstarter campaign page, “Together, words and images tell the story of the love affair between collector and collection, and preserve a record of music that otherwise might be lost."

The Redeemer: John Baird's Everyday Art

all photographs by Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field editor

I have a few friends who were recently married—the kind of friends who first told me about the art environments of Grandma Tressa Prisbrey, of Kenny Hill, and the kind I found myself convening with after visiting Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens for the first time. In celebration of their union, I hoped to find a gift for them that was not just handmade, or unique, but something that has a particular redemptive quality to it. These are friends who recognize the beauty and immense potential in everyday objects, places, sounds, and stories that have otherwise been thrown away or seen as worthless. So, in keeping with this orientation to the world, I was glad to use their wedding gift as an excuse to get in touch with Middle Tennessee sculpture artist and gospel singer John Baird.

I came to know about the multi-form creative works of John Baird last summer in Nashville. I was assisting folklorist Evan Hatch, who was coordinating the Tennessee Folklife program at the 73^rd National Folk Festival – an annual, traveling festival produced by the National Council for the Traditional Arts. Evan, who has documented John’s art and music for years, invited him to exhibit and sell his metal sculptures at the festival. Over the course of the 3-day festival, I found myself regularly breaking from duty by chatting with John and his wife Ruby, a talented fiber artist. I even convinced John to sing a few of his original gospel tunes for me—songs that he performs from time to time at churches near their home.

The Bairds reside in Kittrell, Tennessee, in the countryside of Rutherford County—just down the old 70 Highway from Murfreesboro, the college town of Middle Tennessee State University. John grew up in rural Rutherford County, first learning to weld as a young man in the Future Farmers of America. He did not regularly create works of visual art until the 1980s, around his retirement from a long career working as a farmer, a salesman, and a truck driver. For years now, he’s collected scrap metals of all kinds and crafted them into animals (or animal-type-creatures), people, or whatever potential John sees in the mismatched shapes of his mounting collection of thrown-away metal parts. His sculptures range in size and subject from miniature motorcycles or water pumps, to oversized spiders measuring about 4 feet, to a free-standing take on the Eiffel Tower (titled the “Awful Tower”), to a cowboy made of old horseshoes. After last year’s festival was over, I got up the nerve to ask John how much it would be to purchase the bird made out of antique sewing machine parts. I bought it, and proudly perched the bird on my mantle, where it reminds of the ability to form new and lovely out of old and odd.

On the afternoon that Evan and I rode out to the Baird home in Kittrell, John and Ruby kindly poured us tea and toured us around some of the finished works. In examining John’s sculptures, I moved back and forth from a sort of drop-jaw awe in response to the skilled craftsmanship of the pieces, to keeling over at the clever and lighthearted spirit of the artwork. John was pleased to find me laughing.

When I asked John if he draws influence from the landscape or his community, he wasn’t too sure what to say. However, it strikes me as a rather intuitive application of both landscape and community in making such use of his surroundings—these being the scraps that he finds at yard sales or junkyards, and the metal bits friends and neighbors regularly give him with the intention of use in his art.

The front and back yards of the Baird home are covered in painted roses as tall as Ruby, and lined by a wall made from rocks John has hunted with a neighbor of his. In the backyard, John and Ruby have, together, built a rock garden out of flowers and wagon wheels, featuring rocks shaped like animals that I could have sworn John carved himself. Instead, he looks for rocks in their natural form, which happen to be in the shape of rabbits or deer—a skill John uses in coming up with ideas for his metal sculptures. He told me, “If I come across a scrap of metal, I see if it’s like something…maybe a head for [an animal], or a grill for a car [sculpture]. I just start from one piece and go from there.” To me, this speaks to his ability to see great possibility for human communication through the careful bricolage of the discarded and the ordinary. This is the redemptive understanding, the aesthetic worldview that I knew the Bairds shared with my soon-to-be-wed friends.

Bringing It To The Table

Arkansas State Folklorist Mike Luster at the Roundtable; Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Last month Art of The Rural joined a host of artists and cultural workers from around the country in Fox, Arkansas for the 2nd Annual Meadowcreek Roundtable. The gathering brought together people working in the fields of folklore, literature, film, ethnomusicology, ethnobiology as well as others with an interest in community action, bioregionalism, social justice, and local food systems.

The original concept for this retreat was born from conversations following a panel presentation at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2010 where I, my husband Mike Luster, and our friend and colleague Meredith Martin-Moats of The Boiled Down Juice presented a panel entitled, Community Based Folklife Practice.

We called for an interdisciplinary holistic approach to community renewal and sufficiency, and a lively conversation followed for nearly an hour after the panel. That discussion bore an online component, the Community-Based Folklore Practice Facebook group, which broadened the conversation to include additional artists as well various voices from around the nation and across multiple disciplines ranging from community-engaged design to peace and justice activists alongside the many folklorists working in the public sector, and the Meadowcreek Roundtable was created to serve as the physical manifestation of that open conversation.

We call it the Roundtable because we firmly believe that some of the best conversations come at the table, or in preparing and enjoying meals. For three days we gather, we talk, we cook, we eat, we play music, we walk and swim. This year we enjoyed several wonderful films including Witch Hazel Advent by Fayetteville, Arkansas, filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel. There are babies and dogs there too.

Angel Band by The Meadowcreek Singers by joyamerica

More than anything, we try to identify what we see that we’d like to change in terms of cultural practice and/or its impediments, the funding structures that dictate what work is fundable, how culture (whether it be rural/urban, fine/traditional) is represented in media, where we might draw inspiration from one another and those “doing it right” across the country and how we can contribute to, in Gandhi’s phrase, being the change that we want to see. And then we go home and set out to do it, renewed and inspired. This year was no exception.

The American Folklore Society has generously supported the retreat for the past two years. This year, The Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University and that school’s Heritage Studies Department sponsored the event as well. Thus far, we’ve been able to keep the gathering free for attendees including registration, lodging, food, and childcare. We prepare the meals together from scratch and everyone chips in to do whatever else needs doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing in a lovely place. The Boiled Down Juice has also posted a story about the Meadowcreek Roundtable that offers a more in-depth discussion of the Meadowcreek property and its history and links to many of this year’s gathering’s attendees, their organizations and their work.

Here's two of this year's participants reflecting on the experience:

For me, the Meadowcreek Roundtable has been an incredibly important resource. The meetings have fostered invaluable and directive conversation with peers and senior colleagues that have stayed with me long after the weekend of the roundtable. For two years, I've come in with ideas and questions about how to carry out meaningful cultural work. Each time, I have come away with substantial mentorship, leading me to ask deeper questions about the intersections of folklife and cultural sustainability, and encouraging me to proceed boldly. - Writer and Folklorist Jennifer Joy Jameson

I came away from the Meadowcreek Roundtable retreat inspired and full of new ideas. In fact, on the drive home, a fellow attendee carpooling with me and I conceptualized a creative collaboration for our own community which we are in the initial stages of implementing. Without a designated time and place for such creative incubation to occur, I doubt we would have seen this project materialize, let alone make it to fruition. - Filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel

If you and your organization would like to support or participate in next year’s gathering please contact us. We’d love to have you at the ‘Table.

Readings: A New Definition Of Landscape

Grain Elevator from Measure of Happiness; Frank Gohlke

We offer this Readings selection from John Brinckerhoff Jackson's seminal text Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. The New York Times called Jackson "America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies." His work has influenced generations of artists, designers, and writers.

••••••••••

As far back as we can trace the word, land meant a defined space, one with boundaries, though not necessarily one with fences or walls. The word has so many derivative meanings that it rivals in ambiguity the word landscape. Three centuries ago it was still being used in everyday speech to signify an expanse of village holdings, as in grassland or woodland, and then finally to signify England itself--the largest space any Englishman of those days could imagine; in short, a remarkably versatile word, but always implying a space defined by people, and one that could be described in legal terms.

This brings us to that second syllable: scape. It is esentially the same as shape, except that it once meant a composition of similar objects, as when we speak of a fellowship or a membership. The meaning is clearer in a related word: sheaf--a bundle or collection of similar stalks or plants. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, seems to have contained several compound words using the second syllable--scape or its equivalent--to indicate collective aspects of the environment. It is as much as if the words had been coined when people began to see the complexities of the man-made world. Thus housescape meant what we would now call a household, and a word of the same sort which we still use--township--once meant a collection of "tuns" or farmsteads.

From this piece of information we can learn...that the word scape could also indicate something like an organization or a system. And why not? If housescape meant the organization of the personnel of a house, if township eventually came to mean an administrative unit, then landscape could well have meant something like an organization, a system of rural farm spaces. At all events it is clear that a thousand years ago the word had nothing to do with scenery of the depiction of scenery.

Landscape; Albert Pinkham Ryder, 1897

We pull up the word landscape by its Indo-European roots in an attempt to gain some insight into its basic meaning, and at first glance the results seem disappointing. Aside from the fact that as originally used the word dealt only with a small fraction of the rural environment, it seems to contain not a hint of the esthetic and emotional associations which the word still has for us. Little is to be gained by searching for some etymological link between our own rich landscape and the small cluster of plowed fields of more than a thousand years ago.

Nevertheless the formula landscape as a composition of man-made spaces on the land is more significant than it first appears, for if it does not provide us with a definition it throws a revealing light on the origin of the concept. For it says that a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community--for the collective character of the landscape is one thing that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon. A landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature. As Mircea Eliade expresses it, it represents man taking upon himself the role of time. 

Open Space; M12 art collective

In the contemporary world it is by recognizing this similarity of purpose [between civil engineering and landscape architecture] that we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our history.

Eamon Mac Mahon: The Landlocked North, On The Edge Of Great Change

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon

Many thanks to artist Richard Saxton for leading us to the work of Eamon Mac Mahon, a photographer raised in a mining community in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, at the precipice of the massive expanse of boreal forest. 

Mac Mahon's photographs of this place have received much attention in recent years, and for good reason. They balance a strong compositional eye with a sensitivity for cultural nuance and an awareness of the threats posed by expanded natural resource operations. An argument for environment and indigenous culture coexists with these stunning visual elements; in the hands of a lesser artist, this material would seem overly political, a strident kind of photojournalism. Instead, they alternate between wondrous and stark evocations of the landscape we would otherwise never encounter.

We will reprint below Mac Mahon explanation of the Landlocked series, alongside a few further images and an excellent multimedia piece on the work produced by Daylight, a photography magazine. The artist also places his work alongside the environmental threats to the region in a moving photo-commentary in The Walrus. Please find larger, high-resolution examples of this work on Eamon Mac Mahon's site.

This series of photographs is part of a larger project that began in the autumn of 2004 with a series of extended journeys by bush plane into the Canadian wilderness. Since that first journey, I typically spend three months each year in the north with a bush pilot in a two-seat airplane built in 1946. We set off in the autumn, at the end of the pilot's season, when we have the skies to ourselves.

In the beginning I was drawn to the boom and bust resource towns scattered throughout northern Canada. I wanted to know what happened in these places: what the people were like and what it felt like to be in a place that is surrounded by so much uninhabited, wild land. It would sometimes take weeks to make our way to these remote villages. Along the way we camped in wilderness, took shelter in fire towers, and were often taken in by strangers. When we finally arrived in an isolated community we would often get stuck waiting for the weather to change, or a shipment of fuel to arrive, or parts for the plane. Most of these communities had no access roads and had generally experienced reckless growth or stagnation, and then decline.

The surrounding wilderness has a deep effect on the inhabitants of these towns and, in turn, the towns have a great impact on the wilderness. And in these small isolated communities, it is possible to see clearly how individuals have made each community vastly different. I have become increasingly captivated by the wilderness between lonely settlements. Vast areas of land not yet exploited, or briefly plundered and left uninhabited. Growing up in western Canada on the edge of the boreal forest, I had vague impressions of mysterious and wild, yet monotonous places. I thought of the north as an endless expanse of homogeneous forests, lakes and tundra. I was wrong. I have been astonished by the variety and complexity of these landscapes. These photographs show a wilderness of increasing importance to the world, on the cusp of great change.

What If All The Natural Gas In The United States Was In Urban America?

Photograph by Les Stone

An open question for consideration: suppose that the United States' massive natural gas reserves were located exclusively beneath urban sites. Would these regions encounter hydraulic fracturing? Would the practice exponentially increase across the metropolitan areas of Dallas or Boston as it has in rural America? 

Would the political and cultural rhetoric which unites both sides of the "fracking" debate assume a different shape? What might this tell us about the place, and the value, of rural America within these debates?

Feel free to join this hypothetical discussion on our Arts and Culture Feed. 

Many thanks to Les Stone for permission to reprint his extraordinary work; please find larger, high resolution examples of these images at his photoblog and also at his official site, which presents a range of work from West Virginia to Haiti.

Related Articles:

The Language of Natural Gas Leases

Affirmed: Nathan Salsburg and the Kentucky Derby

Photograph by Tim Furnish

This weekend's Kentucky Derby offers a fresh chance for folks to revisit the work of musician, writer, and editor Nathan Salsburg. As many readers may be familiar, last autumn saw the release of Affirmed, a record of eight solo guitar compositions that meditate on the lives and afterlives of Kentucky Derby horses -- from Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner, to Eight Belles, a filly that won second in the 2008 Derby only to be euthanized minutes later after fracturing her ankles. The songs speak to these contexts, but ultimately exceed their references, in lines that modulate between grief and joy, the terminal and the transcendent.

Thanks to NPR Music's Tiny Desk Concerts, we can give a listen to "Affirmed" and "Eight Belles Dreamt the Devil was Dead:"

Though references to John Fahey accompany many reviews of solo guitar records, Amanda Petrusich writes eloquently of how Salsburg's music resists such commonplace comparisons. "Affirmed," she wrote in The Onion, "is more a counterpoint to Fahey’s rhythmic early work than an explicit homage: Bright and elastic, his songs are less concerned with pulses and scales than with the ripples they kick up in your gut."

This video for "Sought and Hidden," created by cinemanonymous, works in concert with that quality in Affirmed, here combining "amateur Kentucky Derby footage shot on 8mm in 1936 and 1947 and Super 8 in 1973 and 2000." Like these songs, an expectation of nostalgia gives way to something more surprising and direct:

Related Articles:
Root Hog or Die
Hamper McBee: The Good Old Fashioned Way
Alan Lomax and the Southern Journey

The Tree That Bursts Through The Silo

Tree In Silo; Ken Wolf

Many thanks to María Arambula for sharing on our Arts and Culture Feed A.G. Sulzberger's latest rural dispatch for The New York Times, "Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos." The image of these trees bursting from disused farm structures unifies an arc of how the last century has dealt with rural place as an aesthetic ideal.

To begin, here's Mr. Sulzberger discussing this phenomenon across Kansas and Missouri:

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas. 

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles. 

“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.” 

Mr. Wolf's photographs present these tree-silos are a kind of vernacular architecture, not consciously assembled structures -- though they suggest this aesthetic through neglect and abandonment. As the photographer surmises, we're in the presence of a symbol heavy with historical and cultural weight.

It's jarring, then, to consider the image of this tree just one hundred year's ago, in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. In "Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation," Yeats laments the passing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency who even, before the Easter Rising, were seeing their large estates broken up into smaller holdings and dispersed to local farmers. Yeats's position on the matter would be akin to many modernists, who envisioned their art free from the demands of (or condescensions to) popular audiences; the Nobel laureate saw in the destruction of an estate's "big house" a metaphor for the loss of what he would call (in another poem featuring a tree-symbol): "custom and ceremony." After decades connecting rural folklore to national literature, Yeats displays the anxieties of his class and his cultural standing -- worrying if these same people, so often portrayed by him as the spirit of the nation, would really be careful stewards of the land and its culture. He laments what is lost by allowing a tree to flourish in the place of a symbol of high cultural wealth. 

In Mr. Wolf's phtography we find a drastically different situation but, nonetheless, a structure in ruin and a landscape in transition. What is contested is what narrative we ascribe to the branches breaking free from the silo's concrete hold; is this a reclamation or a commentary on industrial agriculture, a scene of "rural decay" or something that transcends economics and cultural cliches? Is this a preface or a postscript?

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

How should the world be luckier if this house, 
Where passion and precision have been one 
Time out of mind, became too ruinous 
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? 
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow        
Where wings have memory of wings, and all 
That comes of the best knit to the best?
Although  Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these 
To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech 
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

Silo With Tree; Ken Wolf

Photographing Rural Maine, Beyond The Vacationland

Gregory Gives his Cousin Lori a Rose, 1983; Steven Rubin

This month TIME Magazine's Lightbox photography section highlights the work of Steven Rubin and his 30 year project in Somerset County, Maine -- the fruits of which are currently on view at the drkrm gallery in Los Angeles. 

Tara Godvin, writing in Lightbox, outlines the dimesions of this extended meditation on place and culture which began with a hitchiking ride to rural Maine in 1982: 

A graduate from Reed College with a degree in sociology, Rubin had originally come out to the East Coast from Oregon to enroll at the then Maine Photographic Workshops (now the Maine Media Workshops) in Rockport. After documenting the effects of the early 1980s recession on families nearby, he wanted to see how the economic downturn was being handled by locals far from the highways, historic lighthouses and second homes of the Maine coast. On a tip from a friend, Rubin headed inland and settled upon an abandoned shack as his home base and a schedule of hitching four to eight hours between the countryside to take pictures and Rockport to develop them.

Taking prints back to his subjects as a thank-you for their time and trust, Rubin was eventually let into the lives of local families—as well as some of their homes to crash on floors and couches—as he continued his work throughout Central Maine.

What he has witnessed is a part of the country largely unbuffeted by the usual economic ups and downs seen elsewhere. For many in the area times are always tough. According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, per capita income has been increasing in Somerset County but has ranked at or near the bottom among Maine’s 16 counties throughout the many years of Rubin’s project. Residents get by through resourcefully cobbling together seasonal and part-time jobs, hunting, fix-it know-how and the support of their communities.

“When I met some of these families, I was completely in awe of them in many ways,” said Rubin, now an assistant professor of art in the Photography Program at Penn State University. “I think as an outsider and someone who didn’t have the background that they did, I was really quite taken by how they survived, by their strength, by their resourcefulness.”

Please find Tara Godvin's full article, with a generous slideshow of Steven Rubin's work, at TIME Lightbox. Many thanks to Alyce Ornella of the Spindleworks Art Center in Brunswick, Maine for leading us to this work

Where The Mountains And The Movies Meet

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Batesville, Arkansas sits nestled in the Ozark foothills. The town is small with a population hovering between nine and ten thousand and is primarily known as the home of NASCAR driver, Mark Martin, and the nearly-famous alternative metal band Mutha’s Day Out. However, the town also hosts what Arkansas Times editor Lindsey Millar suggests “may very well be the best small festival in the country.”

With the slogan Where the Mountains and the Movies Meet, Ozark Foothills FilmFest offers five full days and nights of public screenings as well as workshops and forums on all aspects of the art form. Filmmakers and actors are often in attendance, and audience members are treated to lively question and answer sessions following each viewing. While festival organizers have used the event to encourage and promote a home-grown film industry, the festival is a bonafide international event with filmmakers coming from as far away as India. The festival hosts many films and filmmakers showcased at more recognized film festivals such as Cannes and at SXSW.

The Ozark Foothills FilmFest was the brainchild of husband and wife team Bob and Judy Pest. Bob had been working for AETN, Arkansas’s public television network, and the couple also worked with Arkansas’s other world-class film event: the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. They formed a local non-profit in 2001 and went to work, against all odds, as Bob Pest explained to me, to encourage and “grow their own” film community in the state. The pair partnered with the local colleges as well as other community partners including local banks to “float” the festival in those first years with a mission of supporting emerging young filmmakers in Arkansas and the surrounding area -- and creating a world-class event in the state.

The restored Landers Theater in Batesville, one of four Filmfest locations in town

In 2007, the festival received a crucial boost when it became one of the supported models for expansion for a creative economy study funded by the Arkansas Arts Council and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. The program offered additional funds to bring in consultants, including filmmakers and organizers from Appalshop, and to develop T-Tauri: a two-week camp for aspiring filmmakers, actors, editors, and screenwriters between the ages of 7 and 18. The organization also created a year-long presence for T-Tauri through the T-Tauri Galaxy, an online collaborative site where students can post their work and contribute to the work of their colleagues as well as a bank of public domain material that anyone can access through the online galaxy space. T-Tauri loosely translates as “new star.”

There’s a large contingent of young filmmakers present at the festival as well, a scene that’s been nurtured by both Bob and Judy. Not only has the festival supported young filmmakers by featuring their work, but it also offers funding to support their projects --  a unique opportunity for emerging artists,  especially those from rural places. In addition, there are sessions which deal directly with the challenges of making films in Arkansas, Texas, or Louisiana, for instance, rather than Los Angeles. There’s a young and devoted class of filmmakers dedicated to making the movies they want to make where they want to make them, knowing that this often means little distribution or support from investors.

Jonathan Hicks, Robyn Rebecca Lynn, Mandy Maxwell and Juli Jackson outside the Festival

The Ozark Foothills FilmFest offers two screenwriting awards for best short and feature length screenplay, and they offer three $30,000 production grants for films that are required to use at least 75% Arkansas cast and crew. This year's works in progress were all screened at the festival. Follow-up articles will highlight two of them: Witch Hazel Advent by Sarah K. Moore and 45 RPM by Juli Jackson, who not only was production grant recipient also has been an enthusiastic volunteer for the festival for the last few years. The FilmFest also partners with local arts agencies to support a competition for emerging visual artists to create the festival’s yearly poster design and exhibit their work in a local gallery during the festival. This year’s poster competition winner was Mandy Maxwell.

Bob and Judy Pest have proven masterful at not only having the vision to create such an event in a rural Arkansas town, but also at building the community partnerships that are necessary to maintain and expand the project. Despite hundreds of thousands of dollars of foundation funding, the FilmFest is still headquartered out of the couple's home; they have chosen to thrust the funding support back into the festival, their youth engagement programs, and the community. The Ozark Foothills FilmFest has encouraged a coalition of local cultural non-profits, and worked with their local Main Street program and regional tourist council, to demonstrate how film can serve as a significant tool for cultural (and economic) development in Batesville, the state, and the region.

Poet Laureates, Hall of Famers, and Opening Day

Bill Mazeroski, after his home run to win the 1960 World Series: James Klingensmith

Today is Opening Day for Major League Baseball, that turning of a cultural season to match the Spring's turning of the fields. 

Above we feature a legendary photograph of one of baseball's finest moments: Bill Mazeroski's walk-off home run in the 1960 World Series, the year that the Pittsburgh Pirates improbably defeated the mighty New York Yankees. Born in Rush Run, Ohio, this All Star second-basemen and Hall of Famer has continued to make important contributions to his home region of the Ohio Valley long after he stepped off the field.

This iconic photograph was taken by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette James Klingensmith, who passed away last summer.

Below please find one of our country's Poet Laureates, Donald Hall, discussing Opening Day at Fenway Park -- alongside an equally, though differently, eloquent Red Sox blogger. Mr. Hall has lived for decades at Eagle Pond Farm in rural New Hampshire:

How The Rural Could Save Contemporary Art

Last Chance installation; Erik Van Lieshout, Art Basel

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some new projects related to our mission.

How the Rural Could Save Contemporary Art was originally published on July 6, 2011. For more information, we recommend a visit to the Rural America Contemporary Artists organization.]

Last week, on the morning before The National Rural Assembly, I had the privilege of attending a roundtable discussion on rural arts and culture hosted at the Bush Foundation in Saint Paul. This conversation was cosponsored by the Arts and Community Change Initiative, the Arts and Democracy Project, the Center For Rural Strategies, and InCommons -- and these organizations brought together an inspiring cohort of artists, scholars and arts practitioners working to cultivate the cultural life of their rural communities.

A profound number of challenges and solutions were raised in those discussions; while I will offer a more detailed summary of the events soon, a few persistent questions emerged and then re-emerged across the morning's conversation: How do we create and share art that speaks from our local cultures, yet also reflects the modern economic and global realities of our places? What is the tension between  traditional and modern (university-endorsed) notions of art-making? Is there a way to integrate these practices into the stories a community tells about its past, present, and its future? How does the community's access to technology (especially broadband) alter this work? And, importantly, how do we impart all of these concerns to the next generation--how do we offer a narrative of place and culture inclusive to rural youth?

Though these are large questions, and their solutions will be years in the making, I was ultimately struck by how different these discussions sounded than those that revolve around the contemporary art world, or even its adjacent academic community. While there are daunting imperatives in the preceding paragraph, its content is surely not rural-specific. However, because of the host of pressing issues facing rural America, many of our artists and arts organizations must directly engage with these questions of representation and equity, and with art's tenuous position in communities dealing with crises in health care, housing and education. Because our work takes place on a smaller scale, we turn from these issues at our own peril. As a preface to the roundtable discussion, Dee Davis, president of The Center of Rural Strategies, offered this timely line from W.B. Yeats: in dreams begin responsibilities. 

So, how could the rural save contemporary art? 

I'd like to offer below three recent editorials by respected art critics, writing for respected arts publications. Each writer, upon returning from the major summer art shows (here, the Venice Biennale and Art Basel), identifies specific symptoms of a general sickness in the art world. On one hand, it's heartening to hear these writers articulating some of very same concerns of folks engaged in rural arts and culture; on the other hand, the sickness diagnosed here seems to beg not only for greater equity and inclusion along economic and geographical lines, but also for a wider sense of cultural inclusion. I'd like to offer these three articles, and then suggest that folks consider the rural artists they know (or those we've highlighted here on in our links and map resources): from the traditional to the avant-garde, how would a broader discussion of these artists help to make the contemporary-art-body whole and healthy?

Writing in New York Magazine, Jerry Saltz laments "Generation Blank," the coterie of recent university-trained artists who are "too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, [and] not really making their own work." Here is how Mr. Saltz begins his editorial:

I went to Venice, and I came back worried. Every two years, the central attraction of the Biennale is a kind of State of the Art World show. This year’s, called “Illuminations,” has its share of high points and ­artistic intensity. (Frances Stark’s animated video of her online masturbatory tryst with a younger man hooked me; Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which captivated New York earlier this year, rightly won the Gold Lion Prize for Best ­Artist.) Yet many times over—too many times for comfort—I saw the same thing, a highly recognizable generic ­institutional style whose manifestations are by now extremely familiar. Neo-Structuralist film with overlapping geometric colors, photographs about photographs, projectors screening loops of grainy black-and-white archival footage, abstraction that’s supposed to be referencing other abstraction—it was all there, all straight out of the seventies, all dead in the ­water. It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of aesthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements. 

Sixth Still Life installtion; Katharina Fritsch, Venice Biennale

In our second arts clipping, András Szántó of Artworld Salon returns from Art Basel and offers two examples of "interesting disconnects" in recent art news:

First, between the ebullience of the art fair and the dark financial clouds roiling over Europe, where states teeter on the edge of insolvency and people are taking to the streets. There is a yawning chasm right now between the revived luxury spending boom and the malaise that grips the bottom ninety-eight percent. The subject kept coming up, quietly but persistently, at parties around town. 

Second, during an Art Basel Conversation I moderated on the future of museum collecting, a London-based curator from Bangladesh pressed the assembled directors, and in particular Chris Dercon of the Tate Modern, when and how they will genuinely engage his community and others like it—not just through occasionally showcasing artists, but in a deep way. All agreed that, good intentions and planned initiatives notwithstanding, we’re a long way from making art institutions truly inclusive.

Away From The Flock; Damien Hirst

In "We Don't Own Modern Art - The Super Rich Do," Jonathan Jones of The Guardian recasts Szántó's question with an eye on the mainstream middle-class audience that still grants contemporary art its cultural legitimacy:

But who are they, these people? I would genuinely like to know. The popular assumption seems to be that today's art collectors are "Russian oligarchs". Certainly the spectacle of Roman Abramovich's yacht drew attention to the oligarchic presence at this year's Venice Biennale. One thing is certain – the big-time buyers of art are people in the financial sector who are weathering our troubled times a lot better than high street businesses, nations picked on by Standard & Poor's, or public sector workers.

And yet, for the last couple of decades, contemporary art has flourished through an alliance of the rich and the not-so-rich. It is the same educated, probably public-sector-employed middle class (many of whom marched this week) that enthusiastically visit galleries and art fairs. It is these fans of modern art who have helped, by their acclaim, to generate the charisma that makes it apparently worth so many millions.

Of course, we're already seeing an urban, university-educated, DIY arts movement that is helping to provide the response to these writers' concerns; this DIY culture, which is beginning to make inroads to rural artists and organizations, carries an aesthetic and a sense of empowerment that we all should observe and then integrate into our work. Further, as advocates for rural arts and culture, we should consider what we can bring to broader discussions like those above--and not cultivate an anti-modern art, anti-intellectual stance that only denigrates urban and rural audiences alike.

After reading these pieces, and after an inspiring roundtable discussion, I take away two beliefs. First, by including to a greater extent the voices of rural arts and rural groups within our contemporary arts dialogue, we will make all of the Arts more healthy--and more relevant to more people. And, lastly, the rural can save contemporary art in much the same way that contemporary art can come to the service of the rural: by working across those rural-urban lines and recognizing our shared responsibility to each other.