National Arts & Humanities Month in Rural America

Last week I had the honor of sharing the mission of The Art of the Rural with a number of local and national arts leaders on a conference call organized by Americans For The Arts and chaired by Theresa Cameron and Mitch Menchaca. On this call I also learned President Obama was set to declare October National Arts & Humanities Month. 

Americans For The Arts is offering up a number of online features to help citizens from across the country engage in this conversation and even facilitate dialogues in their own communities. The organization has designed an attractive and user-friendly map program to illustrate where and when NAHM events are taking place across the country. Here is the embedded map, though following the link above will open a full page of resources:

Add Events| View Larger Map

Americans For The Arts also offers a suite of resources for folks to create and publicize their own events -- and this information can be accessed here. The Creative Conversation stands at the heart of this community dialogue; these gathering seeks to "elevate the profile of the arts in America," but on a local, place-specific context by "connecting the cultural sector with the business community and political leadership." 

This month comes at an important juncture: we have read the feedback report from the White House Rural Council, considered the NEA's report on value of Creative Placemaking in rural America, and encountered a increasingly vocal cultural discussion on the distribution of wealth and media access sparked by the Occupy Wall Street protests. Regardless of our readers' political or philosophical views of any of the above, it's hard to deny that we are in a living in a moment that needs Creative Conversations more than ever.

Much more information on National Arts & Humanities Month is available on the organization's extraordinary ARTSblog. Below I will reprint a significant excerpt from President Obama's declaration:

Norman Rockwell’s magazine covers are classic and recognizable portrayals of American life. A longtime advocate of tolerance, Rockwell was criticized by some for a painting now hanging steps from the Oval Office — The Problem We All Live With. Inspired by the story of Ruby Bridges, this painting depicts a young girl being escorted to her newly-integrated school by United States Marshals. Today, the portrait remains a symbol of our Nation’s struggle for racial equality.

Like Rockwell’s painting, art in all its forms often challenges us to consider new perspectives and to rethink how we see the world. This image still moves us with its simple poignancy, capturing a moment in American history that changed us forever. This is the power of the arts and humanities — they speak to our condition and affirm our desire for something more and something better. Great works of literature, theater, dance, fine art, and music reach us through a universal language that unites us regardless of background, gender, race, or creed.

Millions of Americans earn a living in the arts and humanities, and the non-profit and for-profit arts industries are important parts of both our cultural heritage and our economy. The First Lady and I have been proud to honor this work by displaying American art at the White House and by hosting music, dance, poetry, and film performances and screenings. The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, along with the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services continues to recognize the skill and creativity of American artists, historians, and philosophers while helping educate and inspire our children through the power of the arts and humanities.

We must recognize the contributions of the arts and humanities not only by supporting the artists of today, but also by giving opportunities to the creative thinkers of tomorrow. Educators across our country are opening young minds, fostering innovation, and developing imaginations through arts education. Through their work, they are empowering our Nation’s students with the ability to meet the challenges of a global marketplace. It is a well-rounded education for our children that will fuel our efforts to lead in a new economy where critical and creative thinking will be the keys to success.

Today, the arts and humanities continue to break social and political barriers. Throughout our history, American hopes and aspirations have been captured in the arts, from the songs of enslaved Americans yearning for freedom to the films that grace our screens today. This month, we celebrate the enlightenment and insight we have gained from the arts and humanities, and we recommit to supporting expression that challenges our assumptions, sparks our curiosity, and continues to drive us toward a more perfect union.

In Brief: Odysseys, Brown Revolutions, Rural Druggists, Towns Running Their Age, and Some Resurrection Blues

Jim Howell, Brandon Dalton, and Zachary Jones, Horse Creek, SD; Lisa M. Hamilton

• Double Edge Theatre has just released a gorgeous slideshow of images taken from the preparation for, and performances of, this summer's Odyssey spectacle. We've previously written about their visionary work here: 

• Here's Lisa M. Hamilton, setting the scene for her recent Atlantic article "The Brown Revolution: Increasing Agricultural Productivity Naturally:"

On this particular 8,000-acre section of the Plains there is a single light in view, coming from inside a trailer. Bustling about camp are three men -- cowboys, you'd probably call them. They certainly look the part, dressed in boots and wide-brimmed hats, one of them splitting old fence posts with an axe to build a campfire, another working on some beef for dinner. They call this pasture Horse Creek for the water running down its center, and on it they have 1,100 yearling cattle.

And yet, for these men the bovines are only a means to a greater end. According to the unofficial ringleader, Jim Howell, their goal is nothing less than helping the world to avert a looming global catastrophe. What they're doing here is not just herding cattle; they are starting what they call "The Brown Revolution."

• In another national publication, Peter Hessler offers a vignette of rural healthcare we don't often see. Many thanks to Chuck Shuford for the tip:  "Dr. Don: The Life of a Small-Town Druggist" appears in last week's New Yorker:

Don Colcord has owned Nucla’s Apothecary Shoppe for more than thirty years. In the past, such stores played a key role in American rural health care, and this region had three more pharmacies, but all of them have closed. Some people drive eighty miles just to visit the Apothecary Shoppe. It consists of a few rows of grocery shelves, a gift-card rack, a Pepsi fountain, and a diabetes section, which is decorated with the mounted heads of two mule deer and an antelope. Next to the game heads is the pharmacist’s counter. Customers don’t line up at a discreet distance, the way city folk do; in Nucla they crowd the counter and talk loudly about health problems. 

“What have you heard about sticking your head in a beehive?” This on a Tuesday afternoon, from a heavyset man suffering from arthritis and an acute desire to find low-cost treatment.

• Long time readers will no doubt be familiar with Folkstreams, a phenomenal resource with a mission to "build a national preserve of hard-to-find documentary films about American folk or roots cultures" and "give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet." Here's a recent addition, Mr. Jimmy's Birthday Challenge; the trailer follows below, with the full available for viewing on the Folkstreams site. 

When Mr. Jimmy Moore challenged himself to run 80 kilometers in 1 day for his 80th birthday, his small Mississippi town got behind him to see if they too could "run their age," from age 8 to 80. Mr. Jimmy's quest reveals how a retired railroad man-turned extreme athlete could face the death of his wife and the limitations of his aging body to "enjoy life right up to the end."

• Folks may also be familiar with the North Carolina-based Paradise of Bachelors label from our writing here and here on their excellent 2010 release Said I Had A Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee. A new record is in the works, now available for pre-order: Poor Moon by Hiss Golden Messenger, also known as folklorist and musician M.C. Taylor. This LP greets the world on November 1st, though anyone who preorders will receive access to further new and unreleased EPs by the artist. Live in Bovina documents a festival performance in Bovina, New York (pop. 664) that also included appearances by Endless Boogie, P.G. Six, Meg Baird, and Michael Talbott. As we are told, "considering the condition of most participants that summer—and what has come since—it's amazing that this even exists." Here's a stand-out track from this live EP, "Resurrection Blues:"

Laura McPhee: River Of No Return

1920's Settlers' Cabin At The Edge of a Subdivision; Laura McPhee, courtesy Alturas Foundation

Laura McPhee made these remarkable photographs over several years on successive visits to the Sawtooth Valley [in central Idaho]. River of No Return is organized like a long poem or a piece of music...a stunning look at an actual place, a meditation on rivers, nature, history, the history of landscape photography, of the American West and the idea of the American West. And—while I'm piling theme on theme—the nature of fact and the nature of myth, and how we hold the world in our hands. 

That's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Haas writing on the work of Laura McPhee, an artist raised in rural New Jersey and whose recent work has chosen cultural environments as various as New York City and Kolkata, India. Many thanks to Texas-based artist Chris Sauter who recently shared news of her River Of No Return series.

Yale University Press published a selection of these photographs in 2008, with a forward by Mr. Haas, an essay by Joanne Lukitsh, and an interview between the artist and Dabney Hailey. As the Press elaborates below, these photographs consider the long history of the West's place as symbol and aspirational landscape within the American consciousness, while also cultivating an honest and engaged connection with the real people and real places of this region:

Photographer Laura McPhee follows in the tradition of 19th-century artistic approaches toward the sublime, relying on a large-format view camera to capture images of exquisite color, clarity, and definition. In images spanning all seasons, McPhee depicts the magnificence and history of the Sawtooth Valley in central Idaho. Her subject matter includes the region’s spectacular mountain ranges, rivers, and ranchlands; its immense spaces and natural resources; the effects of mining and devastating wildfires; and the human stories of those who live and work there. Featured texts set McPhee’s photographs in the context of the work of American predecessors including Frederick Sommer and J.B. Jackson, and discuss her working methods and experiences photographing the evolving landscape.

One Car Passing, Valley Road, Sawtooth Valley, 2003; Alturas Foundation

Ms. McPhee first came to Sawtooth Valley as an artist-in-residence through the Alturas Foundation. As she tells Jennifer Tuohy of The Sun Valley Guide, she was expecting to encounter new questions about the relationship of nature to culture, yet also found herself, in the process of getting to know the place and its people, rethinking her relationship to everything from family history to hunting:

Although she was initially overwhelmed by the magnitude of her subject, those first impressions set the tone for what McPhee describes as work she has been preparing all of her life to make.

When she arrived at the top of Galena Pass her thoughts traveled to her grandmother. Raised by a divorced Ohio schoolteacher, she grew up in the early part of the twentieth century, traveling across the West with her mother and sister, living a subsistence life in rudimentary log cabins. “I stood on Galena and I thought about her passing from one mining town to another as a child. And for me that was the hook, an emotional, autobiographical hook. Of course,” McPhee continued with a laugh, “she didn’t arrive there in a white Suburban.”

With thoughts of her late grandmother floating around in her head, McPhee traveled down to the valley floor (in a white Suburban). “The first thing I saw was the sign that says, ‘Headwaters: River of No Return.’ And it struck me, that’s it. Somebody’s experience passes away and passes forward and you never really know exactly what it was like to stand in that person’s shoes or to have that experience, so it’s always an approximation of that. That’s how you understand someone else’s subjective experience or history. So for me, that name really stuck.

 Illegally Kept Snake River Chinook Salmon With Freezer Burn, Custer County, Idaho, 2005 

Skinned Elk, White Cloud Mountains, Idaho, 2004; Alturas Foundation

Ms. McPhee's site presents many more of these photographs, in a larger, high-resolution format, as does the Alturas Foundation page. This collection of 40 large 6' x 8' prints were also exhibited as Laura McPhee: River of No Return at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. 

Related Articles:
Chris Sauter's Rural Intallations
The Rural Avant Garde

Bill Frisell And The Great Flood

From the world premiere of The Great Flood at ELLNORA

Last month Bill Frisell premiered The Great Flood at ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival  at the Kranert Center, University of Illinois. Below we will feature a 5 minute excerpt from the piece, as well as a short documentary clip with Mr. Frisell and the director of The Great Flood film, Bill Morrison.

Aside from the artistry of these musicians, the project also highlights one of the key moments in the ever-changing rural-urban conversation, a period of time which gave birth to so many of the art forms and ideas we have covered in these pages.

This is a preview of an evening long suite - 75 minutes of original music to be composed and performed by Bill Frisell, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen and  Ron Miles with accompanying film and staging by Bill Morrison, based on the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the ensuing transformation of American society and music. Frisell’s wide-ranging musical palette will use elements of the vocabulary in American roots music, but as always, it will be refracted through his own inimitable lens and filters to yield a highly personal and illuminating musical vision, with the overall objective of contributing to a journey of discovery for the audience.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet.  Part of it’s enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. [reprinted from the project's United States Artists page]

On The Road Again, On The Internet Again

Willie Nelson and his biodiesel tour bus; Denis Poroy, Associated Press

Folks, your humble editor will be traveling in the upper midwest for the next few days, so posted material to this site may be sporadic. However, there are many recent news items and arts stories that I have come across my desk this week--and I will be posting links to this material throughout the coming days on our Facebook page. 

Those readers who don't use Facebook, never fear: the Art of the Rural Facebook page is 100% public, with no Facebook account required to view our news feed. 

Rural Arts Links: Indiana?

photograph by Carlos A Varela

In our continuing efforts to work together to create an open canon of the rural arts, we would like to post a new round of entries on our Rural Arts Links site. What artists, musicians, writers, what organizations, radio shows, movies (the list goes on from here...) have caught your attention recently? Please drop us a line on our Facebook page or at artoftherural at gmail.com. 

Also, over the next few months we will appeal to our readers for help in generating the local arts listings on the links page -- so, folks with some Indiana-centric experience, what organizations and artists should we include?

Thanks again for your support of The Art of the Rural, and for your help in guiding the direction of our resources and our articles!

Jetsonorama And The Moving Planet

We are back today, after a few days away from the site to take care of arts and site-related tasks, with some exciting new work by Jetsonorama, an artist based in the Navajo Nation in Arizona (see our related articles below). Jetsonorama, working in collaboration with 350.org's global Moving Planet gathering last week, has just released a new series of wheat paste murals that express the cultural and environmental costs of the coal industry in the Navajo Nation. Here's the artist writing about the project, from his site:

i started getting ready for this project about 6 weeks ago. thanks goes to friend and co-worker rena yazzie and her brother who provided a big, beautiful lump of coal from the kayenta mine. thanks to josey and jameson for letting me photograph their adorable 5 month old daughter, j. c.

it's been an insightful period for me. if the navajo people and coal were to declare their relationship status on facebook, they'd have to chose the "it's complicated" option. i informally interviewed 16 co-workers and asked them to share with me the first thing that comes to mind when i say "coal." everyone i talked with was raised on the reservation. they all identified coal as a cheap source of fuel, especially for the elders. it's readily available to all tribal members. by way of comparison, a pick up truck full of wood costs $200.00. that same pick up truck loaded with coal would cost only $60.00 and the coal would burn longer.

Jetsonorama continues, reporting that his community recognizes the clear effects of their use of coal in her homes (he cites many instances of respiratory illness) and also remains cognizant of the brute economic facts of the coal extraction industry--that the majority of the power (literal, figurative) and the profits are sent out from Navajo lands towards the metropolises of the West. This movement stands in the face of a series of undeniable statistics about the region, its size and its potential wealth, that suggests that the orb of coal floating over J.C.'s head is a remnant of many older structures of oppression:

the reservation is home to 170,000 people who live in an area that is 27,500 square miles. it's larger than 10 individual states within the u.s. over half of the population lives below the usa defined poverty line despite having land that is rich in coal, natural gas, uranium and water. the unemployment rate is 40%. mining operations on the reservation provide work for a small segment of the population who are able to realize a middle class lifestyle for their families. however, the cost to the families who burn coal in their homes and to the environment is great.

Jetsonorama's site features many more images from this project-- in a larger, high-resolution format. Folks can read more about his work on Brooklyn Street Art as well as The Huffington Post, both of which have reported on Jetsonorama's project with 350.org. Folks may also want to pay a visit to this organization, which was founded by writer Bill McKibben five years ago; 350.org has orchestrated a number of global actions and discussions that have engaged a range of people on the issues of climate change.

Related Articles:

Jetsonorama and Wheat Paste Art on the Reservation
New Art From Jetsonorama's Rez
To New Year
Saturday Portfolio: New Work From Jetsonorama