From Bulgaria to North Carolina, Following The Song

Alison Krauss, an early favorite in Rachel's house  

By Rachel Beth Rudi

Editor's Note: Today we welcome our intern Rachel Beth Rudi to The Art of The Rural. As she begins her work here, we offered her the chance to introduce herself to our readers.

I was born in small-town Vermont and raised in a farmhouse on a hill. My flatlander parents were art students of moderate means who moved east in the ‘80s, and had the privilege to choose what sort of lives they would lead. My mother was a full-time social worker, my father a stay-at-home husband. 

In his twenties, my father developed an obsession for music. For two- or three-month periods he would devote hours upon hours to studying one genre or another and, by the time I was born, the large living room speakers boomed with sounds from around the world. I soaked in the spectrum as I crawled through the house: minimalist music, ‘90s pop radio, West African drumming, Qawwali, classical, country, Gregorian chant, jazz, show tunes, blues, each with their own phase, our world converting to theirs. We would sing along, or dance along, or stand in front of the stereo with arms crossed, brows furrowed, legs in a strong stance, letting the sound give us a good washing. After we’d drunk in something new, he’d take my arm and sit me down on the sofa, look at me intently, and ask,

“What did you think?”

When I was small, I’d likely reply with “It’s good,” or “It’s not very good.” A few years later, he pressed further. 

 “Why?” 

 “Why what?” 

“Why wasn’t it good?” 

“I didn’t like the singing.” 

“Why?” 

“I didn’t like her voice.” 

“Why?” 

Anne Azéma, Artistic Director of The Boston Camerata

The conversations overflowed into lunchtime, and our over macaroni and cheese he taught me to justify my instincts on quality, consider the story of a song before making up my mind.

In high school, I joined a vocal ensemble called Village Harmony, an organization whose participants study and perform community-made genres from Corsica, South Africa, Appalachia, Caucasus Georgia, Eastern Europe and the Deep South. For one or two weekends a month, thirty of us would come together in some New England church and rehearse, twelve hours a day, in a large circle. In the spring, we toured from Maine to Ohio, from North Carolina, to most states between, easily loving each other and learning how a community’s history is contained in its songs.

Twenty-five of us traveled to Bulgaria in 2005, flying from Boston to Sophia and arriving at our rehearsal space in the Rhodope mountains on a tour bus. I had been listening to Bulgarian field recordings for three years by then, and had come to learn how to grasp the right timbre. I was told I was a good singer, but I found my own voice displaced and rootless, an ungrounded interpretation of intangible, digitized traditions. 

Petrana Koutcheva

On the evening of our arrival, we gathered in the rehearsal room and arranged ourselves in a circle on the floor.  Petrana Koutcheva walked into the center. This woman, our instructor for those three weeks, is known across her country as one of the finest Bulgarian singers in the world, heavily invested in the preservation and perpetuation of her culture’s music. She stood quietly; we sat curiously. She sang.

This was the instant I became a singer. She taught me every lesson I’ve ever needed within the course of those seconds; nothing before or since will ever matter so much. Watching her chest fill with kinetic music, her eyebrows and the corners of her lips reach for a peripheral ornament, watching her memories, experiences, hopes carve a landscape for her voice to travel. After that I have never forgotten, never will forget, how to sing.

I moved south for college, leaving my northern singing family behind in the shifting toward early adulthood. But I strove to start fresh, and came to Warren Wilson College in western North Carolina. The new home felt more organic, less of a cultural hybrid, and although I missed singing in foreign languages I’ve grown close with North Carolina ballad singers and have gained a new musical family through singing from the Sacred Harp. I began traveling ten hours on most weekends to sing in Georgia and Alabama, and made weekend visits to Madison County, North Carolina, not only to sing with others, but to pray with them, eat, drink, recall, love and laugh.

I am now a young person at a crossroads – one with no certain route, one that can always be found again or adjusted, one that implies many homes, families, pasts, futures. Vermont is where my song started, but these things have a way of meandering. Singing has given me some semblance of a philosophy but if life was my father, it’s got me sitting on the sofa right now, asking, “So, what’s the song taught you so far, and where will you take it now?” I’m trying to take in the songs and histories I’ve stumbled across, chew the melodies over until I’ve refined my own version.

I first came upon The Art of the Rural during one of those late-night strings of Google searches, the kind college students can spend hours on as they dream of Real Life After College. I scrolled through pieces addressing new approaches to rural issues, the bolstering of small communities, and respectful portraits of people still holding onto knowledge given to them by those before. While each piece was beautifully concise and attentive, equally complete was the overall collection of vivid, honest accounts of rural life.

Untitled Sketch; Cy Twombly

My father has taken his time with fixing up our old house, and hasn’t painted for two decades. Instead, he does thumbnail sketches with any old ballpoint pen, miniature outbursts that play with light and shade, shape and angle. I’ll find them on napkins, in newspaper margins, on the backs of unopened bank statements. He calls them his sketches, saying that in an ideal world, they’re full-sized paintings. He likes to imagine, he says, what happens to the rhythm of an image when you alter the perimeter; certain contexts have smoother or slower rhythms than others. His thumbnail sketches are thoughts and themes translated into measurement, stretched or pushed into a new frame: studies in reconsideration.

Study is from the Latin studium, meaning “application,” and, originally, “eagerness.” This is of studere, “to be diligent” and “to be pressing forward,” of Proto-Indo-European, *(s)teu-, “to push, stick, knock, beat.” The noun form for “application of the mind to the acquisition of knowledge” is from 1300.

My father’s splashing of concept onto paper, and his pushing and pulling of parameters, is what passion is, what a life is for. As I sit on the sofa and try to take in my singing experiences, I know that while their meanings are ambiguous – whether they’re good, or bad, and why – I have to put them into whatever roughly coherent form I can. My installments with The Art of Rural will be my attempt to push these themes around, stick them into different contexts, knock and beat them until they’re good and worn in, proven that they’re the stuff I can put my trust in.

In Brief: Prairie Churches and Sunken Steamboats

Hope Church, Grant County, North Dakota; Preservation North Dakota

Today we debut In Brief, a series offering a selection of links and videos for folks to explore. While in the early months of The Art of the Rural I faced challenges locating material, thanks to our readers and the wonders of the internet (including the increasing rural presence on Facebook, Vimeo and YouTube) there's now more great stories to share than I have time to responsibly cover in a given week. I feel it is important to get the word out about these pieces, and I hope that In Brief will help keep the conversation going. 

Prairie Churches: "All these steeples, the vertical spikes in our prairie horizons, they look like exclamation points, but I think they may be question marks. Where did all of these churches come from? Who built them, and where did those people go to? What does it mean when every other material expression of who those people were is gone?"

Courtesy of Prairie Public Broadcasting, Prairie Churches is an hour-long documentary that considers those questions of migration, preservation, and community:

Prairie Churches showcases the diverse history and architectural traditions represented by 117 churches throughout Manitoba, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Minnesota. Prairie Public's video crew filmed prairie spires, onion domes, and steeples through four seasons. "Prairie Churches" explores the role churches have in sustaining the history and culture of the vanishing rural landscape of the prairie. Often the first community structure to be built and the last to close its doors, these landmarks represent the hopes and dreams of early settlers and the congregations that currently occupy them.

Please also visit the gorgeous Preservation North Dakota, "a statewide, grassroots, nonprofit organization that provides resources for local preservationists." Their Prairie Places exhibit is a phenomenal resource. Folks can follow here on Facebook.

Sunken Steamboats: Rural Missouri Magazine edits an excellent Facebook page that I would recommend to folks who use that internet service. In particular, RM posts additional material to complement their print stories, and this often takes the form of high-quality short documentaries. This piece caught our attention: it's a work of archeological rural art. 

On August 30, 1856 the steamboat Arabia set out from St. Louis on the mighty Missouri River with 130 passengers and more than 200 tons of new cargo. On September 5, less than a week later, she arrived in Kansas City. And before the sun set, the steamboat and her cargo would sink from sight. 

This short documentary tells the story of the excavation of the Arabia from a Kansas cornfield. Effects from the ship are now housed at the Steamboat Arabia Museum.

How The Rural Could Save Modern Art

Last Chance installation; Erik Van Lieshout, Art Basel

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 to 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 modern 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 modern-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 modern art in much the same way that modern art can come to the service of the rural: by working across those rural-urban lines and recognizing our shared responsibility to each other.

Related Articles:
Modern (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here
Contexts: Flooding, Farms, and Modern Art 
Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes
The Rural Avant-Garde
100,000 Polaroids
Chris Sauter's Rural Installations
The M12: A New Vision For The High Plains
James Magee And The Hill
Jetsonorama And Wheat Paste Art On The Rez
New Art From Jetsonorama's Rez
In Memory of Mark Linkous
Rural Poetry Series: Lorine Niedecker

The Vernacular: Thirty-Five Dozen Eggs

click on the image for a larger view; The Art of the Rural

Saturday 23.

Dear Mary & Family:

Will send you a card of my old home see slip if you don't know them. All well. Oats in the garden my shanty cleaned thought would see you at border but couldn't go was sorry will try & write more next time. Cold easter here. Mrs. Hunter fell & hurt her left arm so has both lame is about the same girl is there yet. We are going to town today if we ever get started have 35 dozen eggs to get ready also some butter was glad to get your letter but Elma was awful sick & helped her and am doing her sewing so neglected to write. Hope to hear from you soon. Your friend Carrie.

On The 4th: Where Soldiers Come From

Dominic Fredianelli at work on a mural; Where Soldiers Come From

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack often quotes this statistic: rural America comprises 20% of the nation's population and 40% of the country's armed forces. As we celebrate the Fourth of July today, that figure stands as a concise statement for what many folks already know--that rural soldiers serve their country at a disproportionate level in comparison to their suburban and urban colleagues, yet they often receive less than adequate care when they return home.

This issue was reinforced last week at The National Rural Assembly, in a special afternoon session. Folks who have been reading this site for a while will remember our previous coverage of Where Soldiers Come From, a documentary film by Heather Courtney that follows a group of friends from Michigan's Upper Peninsula as they enlist in the National Guard and later travel to the frontlines in Afghanistan.  Both Ms. Courtney and Dominic Fredianelli, one of the subjects of the film (and an excellent graffitti artist), were present at the Assembly to present a few clips and to answer questions.

Here's Bill Bishop covering the event in The Daily Yonder:

But this is not a war film. It is a narrative about rural America, Courtney said. “I’ve always felt that rural America is not portrayed very authentically in television or film. That was my main motivation. It started as a coming of age film and [one about] the place they’re from. At its heart it is a film about rural America.”

Much of the film focuses on the difficulties Dom and his friends faced when they returned home to their small town of Hancock, not the least of which is access to Veterans Affairs (VA) services. “Our big hospital is about two hours away,” said Fredianelli, who was present at this afternoon’s partial film screening. “Some people are still waiting for their compensation. If you don’t have a car, there’s only like one shuttle per week down to the big hospital.”

I had the pleasure of speaking with Dominic Fredianelli and Heather Courtney after the screening. I'm looking forward to sharing more about Mr. Fredianelli's graffitti art (and also the presence of this art form across rural America) and also to returning to the documentary when, this fall, it travels across rural Michigan. Ms. Courtney is very interested in engaging rural communities with this documentary; as the Q&A following the screening demonstrated, this film opens up a number of avenues through which to discuss the challenges facing rural veterans. What's most promising: the story of these men, combined with Ms. Courtney's gifts as a filmmaker, can move an audience to work through solutions to these challenges.

Below I'll include the trailer for Where Soldiers Come From, followed by an interview with Ms. Courtney from PBS NewsHour. The film will be broadcast on the PBS POV series this November.

On The Road Home From the Rural Assembly

photography by 42N

We are currently on the way home from The National Rural Assembly, stopping off in one of our adopted-hometowns of Riverside, Iowa--the future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk of the USS Enterprise. 

While Captain Kirk will emerge from southeastern Iowa in 2228, rural America's next generation is ready and waiting for a place at the decision-making table. It was tremendously heartening to encounter the emphasis on rural youth at the Assembly, and to have the chance to talk to so many of these young leaders in their communities. From our perspective in the rural arts, we are excited to carry forward those discussions and connections in the coming weeks.

To those ends, folks can look forward next week to the first dispatch from our intern, Rachel Beth Rudi, a student at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina who hails from rural Vermont. Ms. Rudi is a creative writer and an experienced Sacred Harp singer who also writes about issues of culture and place. It's going to be an honor to share her perspective on this site and to also bring to these virtual pages the voices of those young leaders we met at the National Rural Assembly.

Contexts: Benton Flippen and Gillian Welch

 photograph courtesy the Music Maker Relief Foundation

Today the Southern Folklife Collection is reporting that the legendary Mount Airy fiddler Benton Flippen has passed away. We had a chance to write about Mr. Flippen last year, and we have great respect for this man and his music; our thoughts go out to Mr. Flippen's family and friends. 

Yesterday also saw the release of the long-awaited The Harrow and The Harvest by Gillian Welch, an artist who has done a great deal to further the cause of traditional and roots music in this country. We feel that the new ways in which Ms. Welch carries forward this music illuminates how we can rethink the place of the rural arts within the rural-urban continuum and within the ever-shifting dialogue between traditional and modern forms of expression. Below, Ms. Welch and David Rawlings perform  "The Way It Goes" last night on The Conan O'Brien Show: