Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Open Call For Rural Arts Correspondents

First Rural Delivery Automobile, Colorado Springs; Horace Swartley; Library of Congress

As we approach the final months of 2010 (and the end of the first year of this site) we're planning to offer some new projects that aim to better present the wide bandwidth of the contemporary rural arts. To expand this mission, and also to open up a space for further interaction and feedback with our readers, we'd like to invite folks to consider becoming Rural Arts Correspondents.

These positions will not be time-intensive, but will instead ask our readers to draw from their own pre-existing areas of expertise and to share this knowledge with our community.

Rural Arts Correspondents will share, approximately every six weeks, a short listing of artists, arts organizations, museums, events, or other links that fall under their specific category of expertise. The length and form of these can follow the "For The Weekend" posts we sometimes provide: a listing with links, an occasional video or audio clip, and a few sentences to provide context. As opposed to composing a regular article for this site, which can sometimes take a few hours to research and revise, this work promises to be relatively low-impact--yet will make a tremendous contribution. 

We would like to find folks who could cover their region of the world (southeast, northwest, etc) and perhaps even writers who would be interested in updating readers on the rural arts activity in their own particular state. We would also be very interested in writers who have a particular interest in a specific art form. As with our mission, we are interested in all forms  and all issues in the rural arts--from the traditional to the avant-garde.

Aside from sharing this information with our readers, the Correspondents' work will also be integrated into the updated Rural Arts Map and (in the new year) an expanded and comprehensive list of Rural Arts Links.

Please feel very welcome to join in our work here at The Art of the Rural, and please feel free to pass this invitation along to your family, friends and colleagues.  We can be contacted at artoftherural [at] gmail.com . Thanks to all our readers for visiting this site and sharing it with others during the last ten months; your suggestions and encouragements have been the inspiration behind our push to expand the discussion in the coming months.