The Art Of The Rural

Friday, March 2, 2012

Bob Dylan's Direction Home

[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.

Bob Dylan's Direction Home was originally published on January 25, 2011. His summer tour did not travel through Minnesota.]

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City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away.
I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.

--from "Mississippi"

Last week Aaron, a reader from Ohio, passed along some very interesting news. It appears that Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan's birthplace, is actively working to bring back their estranged native son for a concert on his 70th birthday. The news of these plans has been documented in forums on the encyclopedic Dylan resource Expecting Rain, and was confirmed last month in the Duluth News Tribune, where John Ziegler reported that city officials are currently in talks with Dylan and his management to bring him back to Minnesota on or around his May 24th birthday.

As with all things Bob Dylan, this story contains a good deal of rumor and apocrypha. For instance, I heard that the small mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan's hometown, had originally sought to welcome the musician back on his 70th birthday (Aaron tells me that Dylan last visited for his ten-year high school reunion, where he was roundly ignored by his former classmates), yet Mr. Ziegler reports that Duluth had extended their invitation a full year ahead of schedule, contacting him on his 69th birthday. Regardless, if Dylan accepts this invitation we will see a great deal of media attention focused on his rural Minnesota roots. While there may be a nostalgic whiff to such reflections, it is significant to think of Dylan-the-70-year-old back in Minnesota, over four decades after he recorded his generation-defining howl of "no direction home".

If we put that song--and the long-view of Dylan's legacy--in perspective, then what could also come out of such a birthday in Minnesota could be a reappraisal of a whole generation's relationship to rural place. While Dylan did his best to shirk his "voice of a generation" status, it's clear that his life narrative, captured so eloquently in "Mississippi," is representative of many of his fellow baby boomers: that first wave of the "rural-brain drain," many of whom would later take part in the flight out of America's urban centers and into a suburban life where rolling stones meet their cul-de-sac.

However, Dylan's last handful of records have embraced the traditional forms of blues and country music just as baby boomers are returning to facets of their own rural upbringing. While the local and organic food phenomenon is part and parcel of this generational trend, many are realizing (as Wendell Berry did so many years ago, in his essay "A Native Hill") that you can go home again. In my own home region this has been occurring for a few years, as baby-boomers begin to form organizations to preserve our small Ohio Valley town--and to hopefully bring it back to some semblance of its former self.

Beyond this, the issue becomes one of what "homecoming" means, and how the rural diaspora negotiates this return. As this teenager's video from Hibbing suggests, life never stopped in these communities, and those who stayed both welcome and resent the influence of those who left.

We'll be following the events surrounding this birthday concert; until then, here's a short video produced by the University of Minnesota in conjunction with the UM Press's release of Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World, edited by Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss:

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Rural International: Luk Thung & Thai Country Music

The album cover for Luk Thung; Dust-to-Digital

Rural International: Luk Thung & Thai Country Music was originally published on September 10, 2011.]

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A few weeks back, I began an unofficial series of pieces that look to expand what we talk about when we talk about the rural, and today I'd like to discuss a recording that can challenge us to rethink our own categories and boundaries when it comes to rural arts and culture.

Luk Thung: Classic & Obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside is one of the latest releases from Dust-to-Digital, a record label that has, for over a decade, consistently produced some of the most thorough and thought-provoking reissues of vernacular music and visual art--everything from the southern gospel of their landmark Goodbye, Babylon set to the forthcoming Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM, a multi-disc package featuring diverse pan-African music that has never been released on CD. Luk Thung is one of the productions of the "phonographic arm" of Dust-to-Digital, Parlortone, though this music is also available for download. Luk Thung was compiled by record collector David Murray (see his Haji Maji music blog) and the notes were written by Peter Doolan of the Monrakplengthai Thai vernacular music site.

Many of our readers are no doubt familiar with the work of Dust-to-Digital; as both a record label and a kind of cultural sensibility, Lance Ledbetter's project has not only served as a catalyst for the thriving reissue movement, but has pushed an audience to reconsider the deeper dynamics of a place and its people.

Luk Thung continues in this direction, and provides an opportunity for many of us to expand our own deeper narrative of the rural arts. While many discussions of rural culture fail to consider the role of the rural diaspora, I cannot think of many instances where we've thought of this geographical movement--from the Great Migration to the farm crisis of the 1980s--in an international context. Luk Thung provides such an opportunity.

Here's Peter Doolan, editor of the Monrakplengthai music site, writing in the introduction to his liner notes:

Luk Thung is known to many as Thailand's "Country Music"; it's a vibrant and syncretic genre of pop song which aims to give voice to a disenfranchised rural population. Its history is intextricably linked to that of the nation at large, and it continues to provide a soundtrack to the political turmoil that abounds in today's Thailand. Despite its commercial nature and its roots in imported music, Luk Thung's use of local Thai melody, instrumentation, rhythm and vocal styling leads many casual listeners to mistake it for a sort of folk music. In any case, Luk Thung may indeed be filling the social gap left by a slowly vanishing traditional culture.

The term Luk Thung itself, meaning "Children of the Fields," refers to people of rural background, as opposed to Luk Krung, those born and bred in the city. Bangkok, the capitol of the Kingdom of Thailand, is a massive metropolis disproportionate to the rest of the country, and is, without rival, its political, economic and cultural center. The majority of Thailand's population, however, lives in the provinces outside of Bangkok, as has been the case for millenia. But in the 20th century, spurred by the nation's increasing status as a global commercial power, the capitol began to attract significant movement in from the provinces. By mid-century, a steady stream of migrants were making their way into Bangkok, with most joining an urban underclass of menial laborers, pedicab drivers, market vendors or slum dwellers. Some settled permanently in the city, some came and went with the seasons, but all had to cope with enormous changes in their lives. Music became a vital means of maintaining a feeling of connectedness to the world they were leaving.

As Mr. Doolan tells us in his extensive notes, this rural diaspora first met a state-controlled mass media that privileged western culture (everything from dress to dining utensils) and denigrated traditional Thai practices. After World War II, these forms of expression were re-integrated, as pop music blossomed into a complex and kinetic exchange of idioms, instruments, and experiences; in balancing these various sources and influences, these artists created what I've called before a kind of "rural modernism." Consider the breadth of expression Luk Thung incorporated: "Liké street theatre, antiphonal Lamtat field songs, and Klong Yao long-drum troupes," Mr. Doolan writes. "A particular interest was kindled in songs from Isan, the impoverished and drought-stricken Northeast...singers integrated both Isan's Thet Lae preaching style and Lam Klon poetic form into their performances, and many even began including words from Isan's distinct dialect in their lyrics."

From Peter Doolan's extraordinarily helpful notes we see that these musicians were working in a vein not at all that stylistically different than James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, or any of the modernist painters who incorporated a wildly divergent range of materials and images. Further, the span of Luk Thung runs the American timeline from the Great Migration to today, and from the explosion of folk, blues, country and rock music--all fueled in large part by what a rural diaspora brought with them to the city and its airwaves and recording studios.

Here's Phloen Phromdaen singing "Ruedu Haeng Khwam Rak (Season of Love)." Mr. Phromdaen, who grew up on his family's farm along the border with Cambodia, first encountered Luk Thung on the radio and saved his money to make his own recordings. A rise to stardom followed and was punctuated, Mr. Doolan tells, by his 1966 hit "Chom Thung (In Praise of the Fields)." Phloen Phromdaen is still singing today.

Mr. Phromdaen went on in his career to create a variant of Luk Thung called Pleng Phut, or "talking music," a development which seems to suggest, if we are thinking in terms of a rural diaspora, a comparison with Johnny Cash, or Elvis, or Muddy Waters or any number of other musicians. As Mr. Doolan writes, these musicians attained a level of stardom in their home country commiserate with the likes of their American counterparts. Given the cultural and political backdrop to Luk Thung, we find many similarities to the social commentary within the language of American folk, blues and country--even to the rebellious use of identity and dialect in "hard country," as discussed by Barbara Ching in her essential book-length study Wrong's What I Do Best.

Lastly, what such a vibrant release as Luk Thung can stir in us is the thought that, even within our own home borders, we may live near folks who most likely identify on one level or another as members of a more distant "rural diaspora," be it from Thailand, Mexico, Somalia or elsewhere. We do a disservice to these members of our community--and to ourselves--when we leave them out of a discussion on rural America.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Bessie Harvey And Her Tennessee Roots

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

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."

Monday, February 27, 2012

Bringing The Yarn Bomb To The Country

Bringing The Yarn Bomb To The Country was originally published on June 9, 2011. International Yarn Bombing Day is set for June 9th this year.]

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

International Yarn Bombing Day will occur for the first time this Saturday, June 11th. The event was the brainchild of Joann Matvichuk, a “domestic goddess” who lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta. Her motivation is to encourage knitters and crocheters to perform crafted graffiti on the same day, around the world as a collective group.

For those not familiar with the concept of yarn bombing, it’s a form of graffiti and cultural activism that involves repurposing aspects of the urban landscape by covering them with knitted and crocheted adornments. The movement was started in 2005 by Texas artist Magda Sayeg. At the time, Sayeg was the owner of a yarn shop in Houston and was overcome with “a selfish desire to add color to my world.” In reaction to the urban landscape and the lack of warmth she found there, she knitted a cozy to cover the metal door handle of her shop. She then knitted a sheath for the stop sign across the street. Passersby stopped and noticed. They took pictures. She was encouraged by the reaction and began covering items across the city.

Sayeg and a group of fellow knitters have since yarn bombed items across the world including parking meters in Brooklyn, a bus in Mexico, and a twenty-six foot statue of a soldier in Bali, neutering its violence, according to a 2010 article in The Guardian. In that same article, Sayeg says, “In this world of technology, over-development, fewer trees and more concrete, it is empowering to be able to beautify your environment." This is a powerful statement in action. Sayeg, now in Austin, has spawned an international movement with yarn bombing groups popping up not only across America but also in Japan, Britain, Scandinavia, South Africa, and Australia.

Generally done in cover of darkness, some of the participants wear masks and relish the role of artistic vagrants. Like all unsanctioned street art, yarn bombing is illegal, and Sayeg’s original group of knitters in Houston crafted a terminology for their work based on the world of hip-hop, creating names for themselves such as Notorious N.I.T. and P-Knitty. The group as a whole was called Knitta Please or just Knitta. Further information on the history of the movement, Magda, and International Yarn Bombing can be found here.

I’m not really good at knitting, but I love to do it. I’ve crocheted for as long as I remember. My great-grandmother taught me when I was 4 or 5 to do a chain and basic single stitch. I remember getting a crocheted potholder every Christmas from Nanny with a five dollar bill folded up inside. While they were truly horrible potholders (acrylic yarn easily melts), I still have an entire collection along with the many scarves and pillows she made for me over the years. I keep them because they are touchstones of my time with her and all that she shared with me. They represent personal remembrances, a set of skills, and bright objects that are both functional and decorative.

I am also enamored with the idea of knitting or crocheting to affect cultural change. Yarn bombing definitely falls into the category of “craftivism,” a concept developed by Betsy Greer, whose website is a resource for many in the DIY and feminist craft movements. I love that those participating in yarn bombing, at least on one level, are taking action to reclaim their urban landscape, one that they see as cold and distant, by beautifying and changing it with a craft seen mostly as domestic, predominately functional, and in many circles--I would imagine especially in an urban context--irrelevant to modern society. Participants are reclaiming public spaces as home. Still, I have been contemplating what form such a movement would take in rural America and what the motivations and implications might be.

Photograph by DPA

First, I believe that many of the rural yarn bombing projects would stay around. Rather than temporary remnants of acts of activism, removed promptly by city employees tasked with keeping the city clean, I think rural examples would be adopted by many as decorative aspects of community life and remain part of objects such as mailboxes or garden swings where they were placed. I also believe that it might cause a resurgence in rural textile craft and appreciation of it. If we factor in, for example in my community, that there are many people, especially women, raising fiber animals and creating yarn that could be used, the implications become economic. These are just some of the possibilities that come to mind, but I would like to encourage any of you who knit or crochet to yarn bomb something, anything, in your rural communities on June 11. Of course, I believe we should locally adapt our methodology for such activities. If you’re going to yarn bomb something at someone’s home, you might ask first. I think, probably, public spaces are fair game. It doesn’t have to be large, could be something as simple as the first door handle that Magda did at her shop in Houston. Yarn bomb your local senior center, or better yet, get those folks involved!

In the spirit of engagement, I sent a note to Joann Matvichuk, organizer of International Yarn Bombing Day, asking if she had communicated with any groups or individuals planning on participating in the event from rural America. She was kind enough to pose the question on the IYBD facebook page and received dozens of responses of interest. Two responses in particular struck me as relevant as we think about what the implications might be for rural yarn bombing activities.

Corrine MacKrell: “I grew up rural. If I were going to yarn bomb at home, I would personalize it like a gift. A camo scarf on or around the garden gnome of a hunting family, flowers in her favorite color for the lady down the road, etc.”

Shane Raymond: In the country we have to be more discrete and organic with our tags. Since I know most of the people and their personalities I can tailor my tags better as well. Overall I would say it's much more personal. Example, a colorful spider webs in the trees in deep state land. The only people that will see them are middle-aged hunters.

I encourage you to join the conversation on the International Yarn Bombing Day’s Facebook page. If you do a project, I’d love for you to share it with us. I’m interested in your photographs and in learning how the projects are perceived in your community. I’ll share my story too.

Friday, February 24, 2012

How The Rural Could Save Contemporary Art

Last Chance installation; Erik Van Lieshout, Art Basel

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.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Two For Mardi Gras

Zulu Parade 2010 King Jimmie L Felder; Eliot Kamenitz, Times Picayune

Here's two videos with a bit of Mardi Gras spirit. First, from the Alan Lomax Archive Channel, comes this footage shot by Alan Lomax and his crew in 1982: "Big Chief Jake Millon and the White Eagles Mardi Gras Indians rehearse 'Little Liza Jane' at Darrell's Lounge, 7th Ward, New Orleans."

Though geographically distant, David Lundahl's "Volcan Man" performances are located in a similar region of exuberance, also honoring the passing of a season. Yesterday we published a consideration of this boundary-crossing artist in Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here.

Many thanks to Rachel Reynolds Luster for her assistance. Happy Mardi Gras!

Monday, February 20, 2012

Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here

photograph by David Lundahl

[Contemporary (Rural) Art: You Can't Make That Here was originally published on August 3, 2010. Please see the links below the article for further coverage of Lundahl's work here and here ; we recommend a visit as well to the Rural America Contemporary Artists organization.]

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I recently had an opportunity to re-visit David Lundahl, the photographer, sculptor and musician from southern Wisconsin who (over 15 years) has taken 115,000 Polaroid self-portraits. When we originally discussed his work a few months ago, I spoke of the process itself: how the layers of stencils, gelled prints, and natural media (scarves, bark, shark jaws, among others) combine with a complex series of mirrors to harness natural light to create a startling level of three-dimensionality to his photographs. I also spoke of his life itself in some detail, which I'll reprint below:

The story of David Lundahl's art and life can't really be put into one paragraph, but, as an introduction, here it goes. Mr. Lundahl's art, and his choice to live in rural Wisconsin, all speak to his lived experiences. He contracted polio as a boy in the 1950's and has worn a leg brace ever since; his family were prominent executives in John Deere; he came of age in the heady years of the late 1960's and decided to set out on his own path...

But part of the story here is New Light Studios, the dilapidated farm that Mr. Lundahl rebuilt, largely by himself. Despite his restricted mobility, he reroofed and refloored the barn and completely rehabilitated the house and other buildings. Thus, an abandoned dairy farm became a place for people to come and visit and make art: the silo contains musical instruments, the barn is floored to accomidate dance performances, one room in the house is covered in three layers of white shellac to make it an overwhelming space for music-making, a modified shed is a welding studio and the corn silo is affixed with a level of decks leading all the way to the top--so that one can watch the sunset or just read a book 100 feet in the air.

Here is a slideshow I created that traces the arc of these photographs, from the early representational stencil works to the intensely abstract self-portraits of the later years. They appear larger and in greater detail by following the link to the web album:

David Lundahl's art, and the story of how he overcame physical adversity to create a place equal to his art, ranks among the most inspired and visionary collections of work I've ever encountered. However, the more recent chapters of this story have thrown his accomplishment into a light that may be all-too-familiar to our readers and to those attempting to make art outside of our country's urban centers.

Put simply, the very place that gives Mr. Lundahl the space and freedom to create his art--by virtue of its remove from urban and suburban centers--actively works against his desire to share it with people beyond his handful of local friends. While these audiences may feel more comfortable with someone from rural Wisconsin engaging in the folk arts, or portraying subject matter they deem sufficiently "rural," an artist like David Lundahl (and his social non-conformity) throws all of those assumptions to the side. One visitor from New York City, after sitting around the artist's kitchen table and viewing some of his photographs, perhaps articulated this predicament best; "you can't make that here," he yelled, shaking Mr. Lundahl by the shoulders, imploring him to leave Wisconsin for New York.

Yet David Lundahl is staying put at New Light Studios, albeit uneasily. Though he despises the line of thinking that suggests that modern art can only be made in cities, and only with by entering "the art world," he simultaneously feels a desperate need to connect with anyone, artists or otherwise. When he talks through this bind to me, it's clear that his work has left him at the crossroads, to decide between valuing the place he calls home or leaving it for the sake of an artform that only exists because of its rural genesis.

I'm wondering if other readers have encountered similar issues--either themselves, or in the story of other rural artists. Here's a few questions we're considering here at The Art of the Rural, inspired by Mr. Lundahl's position: are modern rural artists who don't work in a folkloric vein solely considered "outsider artists?" Is there a rural-urban dynamic beneath that term (even though there are many urban outsider and self-taught artists)? Wendell Berry has written of "the prejudice against country people;" is there a similar prejudice against (or misunderstanding of) rural artists, or has the internet eroded those limiting assumptions?

If you have any ideas, or suggestions for artists that address these questions, please feel free to contact us or discuss the matter on our Facebook page--we're hoping to discover more artists such as Mr. Lundahl.