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.

Rural Arts From The Rustbelt To The Artist Belt

Later this week, The Art of the Rural will take part in the fourth Rustbelt to Artist Belt conference, which is meeting this year in Saint Louis, Missouri -- which is also home to Washington University, the headquarters of AOTR.

We're pleased to welcome a phenomenal panel of artists, writers and cultural workers for the Re-Thinking The Rural Arts discussion at the Rustbelt to Artist Belt conference: Mary Stewart Atwell, writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013); Brian Frink, artist, professor, and founder of the Rural America Contemporary Art Institute; Rachel Reynolds Luster, folkorist, AOTR Contributing Editor, and founder of HomeCorps; and Richard Saxton, artist, professor, and founder of the M12 interdisciplinary art collective. AOTR Editor Matthew Fluharty will moderate the discussion.

In light of conference preparations and events, new articles will appear again on The Art of the Rural next week -- though we will be updating the Arts and Culture Feed during this time.

Please find the introduction to the Re-Thinking The Rural Arts panel discussion below: 

Rural America is undergoing a period of dramatic cultural and demographic change. Its people are poised to take agency over their own narrative, as new media is allowing for the open and decentralized sharing of stories – from next door to across the continent. In concert with this, interest in sustainable and local food systems has leant a visibility, and a cultural and economic force, to a rural landscape often relegated to distorting pastoral clichés.

These dynamic possibilities offer a moving and multi-layered metaphor for the kinds of work to be created in rural America, as artists and community members are working across disciplines to re-think and re-imagine rural America – and to make connections to their partners in urban and international locales.

This panel presents the work of four artists and community leaders who are offering a new vision for the role of the arts in rural America. By connecting across disciplines and across geographic regions, these practitioners are examples of how serious aesthetic work can also function as an engine for social change and community development.

A Louvre in the Ozarks: The Life And Art Of Tim West

Innocence; photograph of Tim West by Diana Michelle Hausam

By  Michael Luster

Bare feet and bicycle wheels transported artist Tim West (1938-2012) for most of his seventy-five years through the mountain roads and highways of Northwest Arkansas. The regionally celebrated yet reclusive West died April 2 just weeks before he was to be featured in his second major exhibition at Little Rock’s M2 Gallery.

Tim West was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1938, but he was very soon brought to live in the Ozark Mountains near the town of Winslow where his parents had long dreamed of homesteading and writing. His father Don West did write a fine novel Broadside to the Sun based on the family’s backwoods life which was published in 1946 by W.W. Norton. Those barefoot years were idyllic for young Tim, but interrupted by a move 22 miles north to the university town of Fayetteville where his father collected fiddle tunes for the Arkansas Folklore Society and his mother Muriel West earned an MA in English in 1952 with her own fine novel Under Every Green Tree. The Wests soon separated, Don relocating to the artist’s colony of Eureka Springs and Muriel taking a job at Southern Illinois University –Carbondale in 1958 when young Tim went there to study visual arts.

Untitled Sketch IV; Tim West, M2 Gallery

Tim West proved both an extraordinary artist and a troublesome young man. At age eighteen he mailed off a print and had it accepted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and he would soon send a pair of works off to the Louvre in Paris where they would also be accepted. His former instructors and classmates remembered both his ingenious talent – including a wall in his home constructed of bicycle wheels—but also his brushes with the law for everything from attempted robbery to skinnydipping. He earned his MFA there in 1962 and stayed on another eight years, drinking, making art, making mischief, and riding his bicycle about town, before he decided he’d had enough of Carbondale and headed back to the Ozarks in 1970.

For most of the next forty years, he remained a barefoot recluse on the old family place, scrounging for materials, making his art, periodically riding his bicycle into town. More sober if not more conventional, he became a part of the spectral fabric of the passing years, not often visually distinguished from the many latter-day back-to-the-landers.

That is, until one summer day in 2006 when Fayetteville photographer Diana Michelle Hausam was driving the backroads and came upon a fence constructed of deconstructed bicycles. She left a note asking if she could photograph there and in a few days received a telephone call from Tim West. He invited her down, instructing her to honk her horn three times and, as in a fairytale, he would appear. The two became good friends and she spent several months photographing the gray and leathery West, his work, and his environment.

Here I Am; Diana Michelle Hausam

This World; Diana Michelle Hausam

With her partner Greg Nelson, Hausuam began work on a documentary film about the artist entitled Westland and approached the M2 Gallery in Little Rock about an exhibition featuring West’s  paintings and sculptures and her haunting photographs of him. The exhibition was a resounding success bringing West much attention for his work, sales, and a platform for his thoughts and observations. In 2011 he was voted one of three top artists in the state by the readers of Arkansas Times. A Facebook page was created devoted to his work with images, old clippings, and reminiscences from both old friends and those who merely saw him along the road. His alma mater ran an article about him in their house publication. A Kickstarter campaign was launched to reshoot and expand Westland. One of his works, a rather disturbing image, was selected in January of this year for the prestigious Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center, and an expanded version of his solo exhibit was set to open next month at the M2 Gallery. 
 
 
Perhaps such townish celebrity proved too much for the old backwoods trickster, or perhaps his body simply gave out. Either way, he slipped away from this life the day after April Fool’s leaving us a passel of paintings, some enigmatic sculptures, and a spectral, transporting legacy.

Michael Luster is the Director of the Arkansas Folklife Program, a position affiliated with Arkansas State University and providing services to the Arkansas Department of Heritage, and he is also host of a weekly radio program, Hand Crank Radio.

The Affrilachian Artist Project

Remembering China Sparrow; Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier

We would like to start off this week with news of a effort that seeks to expand both cultural and artistic awareness: The Affrilachian Artist Project.  In addition to their mission, this project is also in the final stages of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to begin to film and document the work of some of the group's senior members. 

The Affrilachian Artist Project is seeking to establish "a sustainable community-building platform for artists of color from and inspired by the Appalachian region." As director Marie T. Cochran notes in the group's introduction, the term "Affrilachia" came about originally through the work of Frank X Walker, Nikky Finney and the vibrant Affrilachian Poets group that emerged in the early 1990's. Cochran originally presented work from the visual artists at the Affrilichian Poets' 20th anniversary celebration last year; during her time at that symposium, however, she realized that part of the larger narrative was missing:

Through an array of fragments, a pattern revealed itself. The Affrilachian Poets were the WORD, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were the SONG; yet sustained attention has not been given to the visual artists who create the OBJECTS and IMAGES of the people and the places evoked by similar life experiences. A third harvest should flourish in this fertile soil.

This harvest has already begun, first with an exhibit at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture entitled Affrilachia! Where I'm From, and, building upon that popular and critical interest, with an effort to begin filming, documenting, and sharing this work. These artists range in style from the environmentally-minded installations of DeWayne Barton to the mixed-media storytelling of Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, from the socially-conscious assemblages of Kyle and Kelly Phelps to the dance between abstraction and representation in the paintings of Valeria Watson-Doost. There's much more work to explore on the project's artists page.

As Cochran mentions in on the project's Kickstarter page, The Affrilachian Artist Project adds to "recent efforts celebrating the history of Appalachia [that] reveal the fact that the region’s inhabitants are as diverse as its terrain." Organizations such as Appalshop and The Hillville have expanded our understanding of this landscape; below, Cochran offers the four misconceptions about Appalachia illuminated in Jeff Biggers' book The United States of Appalachia:

Biggers identifies four paradoxical images that have persisted about the region. The pristine Appalachia, though it is touted a vacationer’s playground according to slick promotional brochures, it is a battleground of fierce clashes between environmentalists and commercial interests over timber, coal and a number of natural resources; Anglo-Saxon Appalachia, once defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as mountain region of “white natives,” despite its role as a crossroads of indigenous cultures as well as vast immigrant and African American migrations for centuries; backwater Appalachia, a “strange land of peculiar people” caricatured in thousands of popular culture formats from comic books to feature films, though the region has produced some of the most important thinkers and creators in the nation (including African Americans like Carter G. Woodson who established the first official celebration of Black History, Booker T. Washington, Bessie Smith, Nina Simone, Bill Withers, Nikki Giovanni and Henry Louis Gates to name a few) and pitiful Appalachia, the poster region of rural poverty, regardless of the tremendous revenue generated by its mineral resources, timber and labor force in the mines, mills and factories, and today’s tourist industry.

The Affrilachian Artist Project promises to help replace these "paradoxical images" with paintings, collages, and sculptures that speak from authentic experience and artistic practice. Please find the video for the project's Kickstarter campaign, which enters its final week today:

Bessie Harvey And Her Tennessee Roots

Untitled (Cobra).  23 1/2 x 18 x 19" paint on wood with beads

[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.

Bessie Harvey And Her Tennessee Roots was originally published on July 12, 2010.]

The American Folk Art Museum in New York City is currently featuring an exhibit entitled Approaching Abstraction, a survey of work from their permanent collection that counters the popular assumption that "contemporary self-taught artists work solely in a representational style, eager to engage in storytelling and personal memory." As the introductory materials to this show suggest, perhaps modern art audiences have been missing the ways in which these artists (from both rural and urban backgrounds) have been--while addressing the "social" content of their work--also thinking about the formal and aesthetic questions that we normally associate with the academic, insider, art world:

But while the narrative tradition often is a primary impulse, a significant number exhibit a tendency to be seduced by material, technique, color, form, line, and texture, creating artwork that omits or obscures representation.

The exhibition's insistence here is fresh, and in some ways vindicating. While Ken Johnson's review in The New York Times rightly suggests that we can't successfully separate the stories of these artists from the pure "form, line and texture" of their work, it also seems to reflect back on the industry and academy outside these pieces: how often, when viewing much modern and post-modern visual art do we find an absence and, indeed, a refusal of social content? It's refreshing then to watch AFAM curator Brooke Davis Anderson describe the exhibition below:

Ms. Davis spends a significant amount of time towards the end of this segment with the work of Bessie Harvey (1929-1994), an artist from eastern Tennessee who worked primarily with roots, though her art differs in profound and wonderful ways from the root club sculptures of Stan Neptune, who we discussed in March. The Bessie Harvey Homepage is the best place to begin discovering her work; it was written by The Knoxville Museum of Art in conjunction with local Austin-East High School, and it interweaves Ms. Harvey's biography within the developing arc of her sculpture. It's a story of uncanny perseverance in the face of cultural and familial obstacles, a triumph of the spirit and of a woman's faith in her religion and her own abilities as an artist. As the Approaching Abstraction exhibit would suggest, her own relationship with her artistic medium--though in a different time and place--bears an intimacy that we might associate with great masters of abstraction such as Mark Rothko. Here's an excerpt from the Homepage:

After resonding to its form, Harvey often sought its identity by speaking to it directly, asking, "Who are you?" For the sculpture Birthing, however, the artist's initial indentification proved to be incorrect: "I went out into the yard and I found this piece and to me it looked like an old man leaning on a walking stick." After bringing it into the house, Harvey was shocked that her vision had suddenly and dramatically changed to that of "an African girl; she's a queen, and she's giving birth to a baby, and the baby's head's already out." As with Birthing, Harvey often was struck by the fact that her imagery sometimes seemed disconnected from her life experience, as if extracted from a previous lifetime on another continent: "I get the feeling that I been in the world before, and I think it was in the darkness of Africa," and "There are some things that I know and some things that I do that I can't understand how I know these things if I haven't been here before."

The Rural America Contemporary Artists: Making Nowhere into Somewhere, Making A Statement

from the Recalcitrant Mimesis installation at the David B. Smith Gallery, Denver; Liz Miller

[Today we are excited to present Brian Frink's curator's statement to the Rural America Contemporary Art show alongside work from the artists included in this exhibit. Please visit the RACA Facebook group for more information, as well as the artist's sites, where larger, high-resolution images are available for viewing.]

Rural America Contemporary Art (RACA) started as a Facebook group.  The idea was to create a forum, a virtual place, where rural artists could connect, share work and promote their various activities.  The name of the group implies a certain irony.  The words “contemporary” and “rural” are not always seen as equivalent concepts.  For a long time progressive ideas moved from urban areas to rural areas.  In early and mid-twentieth century America the term “regionalism” was applied to artists that did not live in urban centers such as New York City.  For many artists the term was a disparaging label.   It usually meant, “behind the times.” 

Archival Structure Five installation, 4Real4Faux exhibit, Truman State University; David Hamlow

Population density in urban areas contributed to this.  More people living in close proximity promoted a rapid exchange of ideas, attitudes, styles and fashions.  The result was innovation based on the mutations these exchanges fostered.  Rural areas are less dense having less frequent random interactions.  So the classic model of innovation in visual art is, progressive ideas form in urban centers of culture then migrate out to rural communities.

Corpus Corvus Corrallary, cast iron, scale model accessories, scenery and pigment; Karl Unnasch

More recently economics, population growth and the advancement of university art education have brought many serious artists to live in rural communities.  The cost of setting up a studio in urban areas has become prohibitive.  The numbers of individuals who define themselves as artists has exploded.  University art departments are now prevalent in even the smallest rural community across America.  These factors have contributed to the incredible growth of rural contemporary art.

Blazer, pencil on paper, 22" x 30"; Brian Frink

Yet, culturally speaking, we still function under the old notion that progressive innovation comes from urban areas migrating outward to rural communities. 

I believe the web and social media has changed this dynamic. 

furnace (first painting of the year), acrylic on panel, 36"  x 24"; Benjamin Gardner

I would like to propose that social media platforms like Facebook allows for a level of interaction and cross-pollination of ideas that might be similar to living in an urban environment.   Trends or theories that in previous generations would have taken years to migrate are now accessed instantly.  For an artist living in relative isolation, there is power in this new dynamic. 

prelude to a claptrap/prussian field, oil on birch, 61" x 97"; Andrew Nordin

These contributing factors may be creating a new paradigm.  A new paradigm where the previous model no longer applies.  Progressive, contemporary ideas, trends and fashions can now move from rural to urban areas.  Artists can live in rural areas and still be progressive and innovative.

    

Seeking Shelter lightbox 23" x 33"; Erik Waterkotte

RACA’s slogan is “Making nowhere into somewhere.”  Of course this motto is also a wry commentary on the fact that those who live in rural America already know it is “somewhere.” So part of the RACA mission is to connect, highlight and validate the immense community of artists that has always sought the solace, inspiration and beauty of rural America.  It is also RACA’s mission to assert that the art made by rural artists is relevant.

held within what hung open and made to lie without escape installation; Gregory Euclide

This first exhibition, curated by the Institute for Rural America Contemporary Art, exemplifies what is going on in our tiny corner of rural America.  The artists collected here are not just creating work that echoes what they see in New York or Los Angeles.  These artists struggle to make highly original and innovative work.  They view themselves as equal voices with their urban peers.  Cognizant and dynamic, their work speculates on the paradoxical nature of life in twenty-first century America.  These artists are Rural America Contemporary Art.   

Brian Frink
Institute for Rural America Contemporary Art

Horizon/Marks #2, mixed media on paper; Lisa Bergh

Crystal Bridges, Alice Walton, and the Occupy Movement

Crystal Bridges; Mike Pirnique, InArkansas.com

As the 11-11-11 opening date for The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art approaches, many high-profile articles on the site and its guiding spirit, Walmart heiress Alice Walton, have begun to appear across the airwaves and the internet. 

Just this morning Elizabeth Blair reported on NPR about the museum and its relationship with its local cultural and natural environment. As has happened across much of the media coverage, Ms. Blair's otherwise excellent overview characterizes the Bentonville area as being small-town, though the region's statistics suggest otherwise; please see Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster's previous piece on "Art & Identity In a Not-So Rural Corner of Arkansas" for a deeper discussion of Bentonville and Walmart's place in this expanding corner of the state. 

Across Ms. Blair's piece, as well as Martha Teichner's feature from CBS Sunday Morning below, Crystal Bridge's rhetoric on the synthesis of art, architecture, and nature is taken at face value - with no consideration of how rural culture (let alone Ozark culture) comes to inform the space. Ms. Teichner's piece is a success in many other ways -- as it humanizes a figure vilified by certain segments of the art world -- even suggesting, if we read between the lines, a kind of rural-urban narrative within the reactions to an Major American Museum built in the Ozarks. However, the emphasis on "nature" over local culture allows for another piece of reporting on Crystal Bridges that offers the Museum as a pastoral retreat. Ultimately, this does a disservice to Ms. Walton's vision, and to the more engaging discussions that could emerge from such journalism. 

[Unfortunately, CBS disables the YouTube embedding for Sunday Morning; please follow this link to view the 9 minute feature.]

Both of these pieces do succeed in suggesting that the story of Crystal Brides is complicated -  and that a knee-jerk reaction against the museum or its founder misses the unmissable fact: that most major art museums, art institutions, and, indeed the art world itself, is motivated in large part by the largesse of such individuals and their corporate partners. While many citizens might criticize Corporate America's business practices, they gladly partake in the latest Impressionism exhibit. 

Such interconnectedness suggests the argument the Occupy movement has not yet made forcefully enough to its followers: that they are implicated in the very structures they critique. (For instance, the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr page displays the extent to which the movement is energized by frustrated arts and humanities graduates.) A self-examination of where the 99% and the 1% might converge, or at least have shared values or interests, could do profound good for the cultural and political atmosphere in this country - much more so than Guy Fawkes masks on one side and the cartoonish reporting of Fox News on the other.

I find it interesting that this weekend the media will provide dispatches both from the opening of Crystal Bridges and from a new weekend of Occupy events across the country. As these demonstrators begin to feel the effects of winter, as their figures march across the screen, we will also be presented with images of the stunning architecture of Crystal Bridges - a museum set in one of the most caricatured and misunderstood regions of America. Both of these stories suggest that our easiest and most impassioned arguments may not, in the end, bring us any closer to understanding what we might learn, and what we might have in common.

The 2011 BIG FEED

Photograph from a previous BIG FEED; Richard Saxton

Next month (October 15-16) the M12 art collective will host their annual BIG FEED celebration at the Yuma, Colorado Fairgrounds. Readers of our site may already be familiar with the M12 artists and Richard Saxton's work with his students in Yuma (please see the links below), so we can be certain that this event will be in keeping with the ethos of these artists' work: creative, playful, and forward-thinking.

It's an honor for me to share with everyone that I will be presenting on The Art of the Rural at this year's BIG FEED. I've been asked to offer a kind of "best of" contemporary rural arts and culture, and the invitation will present the opportunity to reflect on what we've covered here on the first two years of the site (two years!). As our coverage of the M12-related work has hopefully demonstrated, I have great respect for these artists and scholars' vision of how aesthetically-adventurous art and architecture can interact in a meaningful and sustainable way with communities. I look forward to sharing more of their artwork, ideas, and connections on this site when I return from Yuma.

I'll include below a list of this year's participants. The full BIG FEED program can be viewed here, and it contains much more information on each artist and presenter. As the schedule demonstrates, there's going to be an extraordinary range of perspectives shared during this two days, so, if folks live in the area, this will be an event not to be missed. That Saturday evening will come to an exciting close with a performance by the legendary alt.country group Blue Mountain.

The BIG FEED: Saturday, Oct. 15-16 at the Yuma County Fairgrounds, Yuma, Colorado.The entry to this event is FREE with a $5 donation and one food item to share!
  The BIG FEED is an annual event and action held by M12. It is a celebration of the regional landscape, experimental art and architecture, food, music, culture and community. It is a forum to connect community members and artists in a casual atmosphere, as well as an opportunity for the larger public to learn more about the groundbreaking work presented by the attending community members, artists, musicians, critics, and curators. Landing somewhere between a family reunion, potluck dinner, symposium, and festival, The BIG FEED is held every second weekend in October. The event is open to the public and free with a $5 donation and one food item to share. For more information on the event and the organization please visit the M12 website.

Saturday, October 15:

2:30PM—DJ Rockcrusher, Maiden Rock, WI (DJ, Country & Western 78’s)
3PM—Vic Anderson, Estes Park, CO (Country & Western, Yodeling musician)
4PM—CU Art Students, Boulder, CO (Visual Art Presentation)
4:30PM—Yuma County Rodeo Queens, Yuma, CO (Presentation)
5PM—Gregory Hill, Joes, CO, native (author of East of Denver)
5:30PM—The Art of the Rural Presentation
6:15—Eric Steen (artist) & Ro Guenzel (Head Brewmaster, Left Hand Brewery)
6:45PM—The BIG FEED (with spit-roasted bison) with music by 4H Royalty
7:30PM—Mimi Ziegler, Los Angeles, CA (editor of loud paper; author of Tiny Houses, New Museums, )
8:15PM—4H Royalty, Denver, CO (full set)  
9:00PM—Blue Mountain, Oxford, MS (full set)

Sunday, October 16:

9:30AM—PANCAKE FEED

10AM—Jami Lunde, Lyons, CO (full set) 

Related Articles:

The M12: A New Vision For The High Plains

Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes

Introducing The Yuma Project

The Yuma Project: Adrianna Santiago

The Yum Project: You Jin Seo

Rural International: Turning A Town To Art

The Firebird at Nikola-Lenivets; photograph by Nikolay Polissky. *Full description below

We are fashioning this life from scratch. Go, find a stick, and make something. 

Over the last two weeks I've tried to offer some examples of how we can use art to expand what we talk about when we talk about the rural. Here is our first international model (next week: the Luk Thung release by Dust-to-Digital).

Too often we tend to segregate artmaking along geographic lines: urban art is cutting-edge and "contemporary" while rural art is folksy and "traditional." Of course, you can find examples that prop up this cliche--but it ignores the whole field of urban folk art and turns its back on rural artists who are combining the traditional and the contemporary to stunning effects.

Nikolai Polissky would have something to say about this. This Russian artist has spent the better part of a decade transforming his village of Nikola-Lenivets into a town brimming with art--and with citizens who consider themselves art-makers. Depressed after the collapse of the town's state-run agriculture commune, local morale had hit rock bottom. Mr. Polissky's vision, while greeted with skepticism at first, has led to the village becoming an international art destination and even opened the door for the artist and the villagers to travel beyond their home to create their massive site-specific installations (most recently at the Venice Biennale) that balance folk practices with commentary on contemporary life. Below, Sophia Kishkovsky tells the story in The New York Times:

“I lived here for 10 years,” said Mr. Polissky, a native of Moscow who arrived in Nikola-Lenivets in 1989 as a painter and a member of Mitki, a whimsical Soviet underground art collective started in Leningrad, where he studied. “Then I was pulled into the actual landscape.”

The village is in a national park called Ugra and had just a handful of surviving full-time residents before Mr. Polissky arrived, accompanied by the Moscow architect Vasily Shchetinin. Many people there and in surrounding villages were left without work after the collective farm fell apart. Vodka became a main distraction.

“Everyone drank,” the artist said of village life before 2000, when the art projects began. “People were simply dying off. It was like a strike against the authorities.”

Now, works made under Mr. Polissky’s direction of logs, branches, twigs and metals are scattered along nearby riverbanks and fields. 

I don't think I need to spell out the direct parallels between Nikola-Lenivets and the situation facing many rural communities, many rural towns that have been hurting since the farm crisis of the 1980s. My feeling is that if Mr. Polissky is accomplishing this in Russia, we can do the same here -- we can take what we see as challenges and work to transform them into assets. Folks are already doing this valuable work--please see our previous writing on The Art Farm and The Wormfarm Institute, and please send us other examples that fit this framework as well.

Here's a few examples of what's happening in Nikola-Lenivets, with many more projects available to explore here:

Hunting Trophies, 2010

The Rooks Have Returned, 2008

Snowmen, 2000

*Mr. Polissky's caption for the Firebird image above, from ArtReview: At Shrovetide 2008 Nikolay Polissky presented a project which is a continuation of the ideas in ‘Borders of Empire’: a Firebird made of metal. Of enormous size — as big as a house, — this metal two-headed eagle with a built-in stove lit up in a terrifying fashion, flared, filled the whole field with back smoke, and then started to give out tongues of flame, and itself changed colour from black to dark red. The damp air and wet earth underneath the bird started spitting with the heat. In the course of just 20 minutes, the bird consumed two large lorry-loads of wood. All in all, this was an impressive image of the Russian state.

The NEA And Creative Placemaking In Rural America

selection from the cover to the NEA Arts Magazine

On Monday we discussed Double Edge Theatre, a visionary laboratory theatre group that can help to expand the dialogue of what's happening--and what's possible--in rural America and the rural arts. This effort continues today, and is aided by the recent issue of the NEA Arts Magazine, which is entirely devoted to how rural arts and culture organizations are enriching their local and regional places.

Rachel Reynolds Luster and I will be covering each of these organizations in greater detail, but I wanted to make sure that our readers had heard of this issue's publication so that they can peruse it and send the Magazine around to friends and colleagues. Following the link above will lead to a pdf, as well as a wealth of online features--including some well-produced videos. Here is the NEA's introduction to this publication; I'll include links to each organization:

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the United States has turned from a mostly agrarian, rural country into an urban, industrialized one. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, nowadays only about a fifth of the population live in rural areas, even though those lands comprise more than three-quarters of the country and are a major source of the nation's resources, culture, and traditions. Rural America may be more connected than ever before -- through the Internet, better phone services, and improved transportation systems -- but it still faces unique problems. As populations moved from rural to urban/suburban communities -- and metropolitan areas expanded into areas that had been rural -- serious problems have been left in their wake: aging and inefficient infrastructure, lack of employment, increased poverty.

This issue of NEA Arts looks at the creative approaches rural communities have been taking with the arts to help improve their communities socially, aesthetically, and economically. In Vermont, the Orton Family Foundation is bringing artists into the community planning process, while in the middle of Arizona's Sonoran Desert, the International Sonoran Desert Alliance has turned an abandoned school into artist housing, leading to new economic growth for the small town of Ajo. Two rural towns in Washington State take different approaches to utilizing the arts to revitalize their communities. On the Fond du Lac Reservation in Minnesota, art is used in a health clinic to promote the Native culture as well as for its healing properties. And in North Carolina, HandMade in America has shown that the traditional arts are a viable, important part of the local economy as well as the local culture.

The NEA Magazine and its web features also consider Donald Judd and his influence in Marfa, Texas (via the Chinati Foundation), the NEA Our Town program, Dave Loewenstein's mural projects, and The Wormfarm Institute in Wisconsin.  (Folks can read our previous articles on Mr. Loewenstein here and Wormfarm here)

The term "creative placemaking" is discussed at great length in an excellent paper by Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa; Creative Placemaking can be downloaded from the NEA here, and there's also a video that offers further information on the concept and its relevance to our current arts discussions: 

In creative placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities. Creative placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired.

There will be much more soon on all these ideas and these inspiring examples from rural America. Until then, we can enjoy the Magazine and the NEA video work.

The Yuma Project: Adrianna Santiago

Adrianna with Yuma residents in Shop All; Richard Saxton

Today we have the honor of presenting Adrianna Santiago's work from Yuma. Below we'll feature Ms. Santiago, in some excerpts from our email correspondence, describing her project and her collaborations with the community. For more information on the work of Richard Saxton and his students in Yuma, Colorado, please see our introductory article.

Listening is an important part my artistic process of engaging with any community.  In the case of Yuma, I began with the Yuma Historical Society Museum.  I investigated and researched the history of Yuma, as it relates to agrarian traditions surrounding food.  I curated a small exhibit from the museum collection and presented a small display in the context of the Shop All Grocery Store, also a historic site.  Those historical objects guided our conversations and interactions.  

From there, I spoke directly with community members as they shopped.  The main 
interest from the audience at the Shop All came mostly from the elderly, who recognized and could contribute to the topic of Yuma history and traditions.  The influence of these individuals was essential to the making of the work.  I initiated the creative process through conversation and invited collaborative engagements that were defined by the community. I also asked Shop All patrons to nominate community members who could teach me, through hands-on experience, about Yuma's traditions.

The most inspiring aspect of this work centered around those close community connections. While I began by meeting Judy Rutledge in the Shop All, who nominated her son, the web of connections became very apparent as I embarked upon new lessons with different community members. Organic popcorn planting, cattle herding, wood carving and butter churning were the focused situations that I experienced.

Working in the public space of the Shop All was most eye-opening.  I expected that the display of historic objects would surprise and draw people in, however, many completely overlooked my presence.  This experience caused me to reflect on the idea of being outside of the community.

Communities have become less connected, even in rural areas; the progression of technology has watered down the quality of relationships people have with each other. The family traditions and collective histories embedded in the identity of a locale are becoming mere memories spoken by elders. 

The individuals who founded The Yuma Historical Society Museum (YHSM) in Yuma, CO are dedicated to preserving the history of their farming community; they can be found leading efforts through their work at the YHSM. Founders and members of the YHSM share and archive first-hand narratives about times such as the depression era, stories about land development and the lineage of common families. Ms. Doris Mekelburg and other YHSM members want to ensure that younger generations of the town take responsibility and continue to preserve the cultural identity of Yuma.

I am intrigued by how quickly cultural knowledge seems to be disappearing, despite all “advances” in technology over the past decade. My work in Yuma will begin a journey focused on seeking knowledge and establishing a network where resources can be shared. I want to incorporate new technologies with old practices, without losing ties between people and the land. Eventually, I’d like to create a practical guide book that’s easily accessible for others to take part in so that they may create wholesome communal ties that preserve traditions in their own communities—Yuma, Colorado is the first stop in this process.