[Editor's Note: today we both welcome a new writer to the Art of the Rural staff and begin a new series of articles. We are excited to feature the work of Savannah Barrett, a writer and community arts advocate who has taken lessons learned in urban and international locales and applied them to rural contexts. She's currently completing work on a Masters in Community Arts Management at the University of Oregon. We are proud to count Savannah as our Community Arts Editor.
Her first piece is also the inaugural entry in a series we are calling "The State of the Rural Arts" -- reflections, interviews, features, and online installations that will seek to articulate the historical context surrounding this question while also expanding our common understanding of who, and what, constitutes "the rural arts" in contemporary America. As Savannah mentions below, this investigation springs from the imperatives that emerged from The Rural Arts and Culture Working Group.]
By Savannah Barrett, Community Arts Editor
As
a native of rural Kentucky, I have been witness to both the blessing of
belonging to a country community alongside the entirety
of my extended family; and to troubling and significant changes in this
community and our distinct cultural traditions. These changes have taken place amidst
a mass exodus of industrious young people who have left in search of quality
education, employment, and social resources; and in response to a lack of
investment in those fundamental needs in their home community. These experiences
have led me to pursue a career in the rural community arts field. As a graduate
student, I have struggled to piece together the history and dimensions of this domain,
and found that history difficult to unravel and my field difficult to locate. There
are few signposts in this work, yet I have been fortunate to find “my tribe”
and my discourse among members of the Rural Arts and Culture
Working Group.
It was while there, while we collectively struggled to name our movement and
identify our narrative, that I was connected with Patrick Overton.
I
had discovered Patrick’s book Rebuilding the Front Porch of America while searching library
databases for information related to Robert Gard and to the history of rural
arts programs in the Cooperative Extension Service. I knew his work to be
concerned with both the dynamic history of rural community arts development and
with contemporary rural cultural policy. Patrick Overton is the Director of the
Front Porch Institute in Astoria, Oregon, and
has pursued community cultural development as practitioner and scholar for 35
years throughout the United States. In 1990, he defended the rural arts when called
to Washington D.C. to testify in front of the House Appropriations
Sub-Committee on the Interior on behalf of continued Federal support for the
National Endowment for the Arts. There he conveyed that Rural Genius was one of
the most important natural resources in our country, that it is one of our
greatest sources of innovation, and that this resource was at risk. Twenty-three
years later, I set out to ask Patrick about the current state of the rural
arts, about rural genius, and about how those of us who are advocates and
practitioners for rural arts and culture should move forward.
For
those interested in building a movement of folks committed to sustaining,
honoring, and growing rural arts and culture, we must be cognizant of the
significant historical efforts by the rural arts pioneers that have laid our
groundwork, or as Patrick refers to it, the Old/New work: the Lyceum and
Chautauqua movements; Alfred Arvold, Baker Brownell, Robert Gard and others who
pioneered the rural arts programs of the Agriculture and Cooperative Extension;
the community cultural development movement; local arts councils; and the
practitioners, both in small and large communities, who have advocated for
recognition in cultural policy. One of the first things Patrick told me related
to the history of the rural community arts movement, and the distinctive
differences between this movement and the more popularly understood community
arts council movement:
“The minute you add rural/small communities
to the history of community arts development, you have to push the history of
the movement back from the 1950’s to 1826 with the beginning of the Lyceum
movement. Now when you look at the community arts movement, you can stop in the
50s, because they really can be understood as two very different movements. A
lot of what we call community arts today began as the symphony movement in the
middle of the last century and evolved into what we know today as the arts
council/local arts agency movement.
But the community it served was usually a large metropolitan areas. When
you start talking about rural arts, rural/small community arts development, I
go back to the Chautauqua and go all the way back to the Lyceum. I think it is
essential because that is a distinction that we have failed to make. They
really are distinctly different movements.”
…
What sets the community
arts development movement apart from the Arts Council Movement is the emphasis
on self-improvement and self-education.
“The community arts development movement has such a rich tradition and
it’s a tradition that is very much about understanding art as a noun (a thing
you have or own) and citizens as patrons, but rather understanding art as a
verb and citizens as participants. And it’s that element of participating in
the arts that really is distinctive difference between the two. Not that you
don’t participate in the arts in the fine arts in large metropolitan areas, but
there’s a level at which participation in a small community setting has a very
different take and feel to it.”
Understanding
the history unique to the field of rural arts helps to illuminate the
challenges of our contemporary work. Rural Community Arts work, historically
and presently, is slow to ripen. While we certainly need more capital and
resources in this field, our work also requires human investment. Similar to
the argument for slow foods, rural art and culture necessitates patience and
planning. Wormfarm Institute farmer and artist Jay
Salinas describes this through the use of his word Cultureshed, which he
defines as 1. A geographic region
irrigated by streams of local talent and fed by deep pools of human and natural
history. 2. An area nourished by what is cultivated locally. 3. The efforts of
writers, performers, visual artists, scholars, farmers and chefs who contribute
to a vital and diverse local culture.”
If
we want our work to sustain, we must listen to our places and to the people
that live there and we must be patient with the process as it reveals itself,
rather than implementing our individual visions. We must commit to our people
and to our places long enough for our project’s ownership to belong to the soil
(place) and fertilizer (people) that grew it. We must cultivate.
Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas of The Wormfarm Institute
The
result is authentic, is “of a place” and not “imposed on a place”, and is worth
waiting for. Overton addressed the importance of investment in place in our
conversation:
“If you don’t do the relationship building,
in particular in the most rural and small communities, if you don’t show them
that you care for them as people, then it doesn’t matter what you do for them
or what you offer them. Or what you get them to do, it will not be valued if
it’s not part of a relationship.”
…
“I believe community
arts development and the arts in general begin with the individual. I believe
that language and communication are the way individuals really do come into
existence, it’s the way we say “I am.” Sometimes very special things happen and
when say I am by expressing our voice, we end up inviting a relationship with
somebody else who is a “you are”, and the “I am” and the “you are” become a
“we”. To me that is really is the nexus of community. That’s the
invitation.”
…
“My work
in rural and small communities was never about the arts, it was about the
invitation. People will do what they are capable of doing if they are invited
and know that they have access to it. Community arts development is about
access and access to education. ”
At
this point in the conversation, we turned our attention to broad based issues
that are inhibiting the rural community arts’ growth as a movement and our
development as a field. I and many of my rural peers are concerned with the
lack of resource investment in rural communities. As Art of the Rural director Matthew Fluharty recently explained, “While
Rural America stands as roughly 20% of the population, and 80% of its land
mass, these artists are often isolated both from each other and from the
possibility of creating a larger narrative. As the moral failure of
American philanthropy’s 1% investment in rural America suggests, too often a seat at the table for “the rural” has
been withheld”
(Fluharty, 2012). Overton echoes this
explanation:
“Public policy has utterly failed to recognize the essential contribution rural and small communities make…I
think a lot of people who talk about rural don’t know what they’re talking
about because they’ve never been there, they’ve never done it. They talk about
rural as though it is a particular place, and though we know it is
geographically central in our life; it’s really not about geography for us,
it’s about everything that’s connected to it.”
While
those of us who identify as rural are certainly dismayed at the underinvestment
in rural America, we are also alarmed by the ever growing trend of our natural
resource (our best and brightest young minds) leaving their home communities. They
are the Rural Diaspora, born into rural areas yet relocated to more populated
areas in search of educational and professional opportunity. In universities
and professions across the world, we represent the rural genius’ disbursement to
the cities. Yet, many of us remain tethered to our homeplaces and our rural
birthright, despite our current address. Many of us do not feel it possible to
live in the rural full-time and know that going home for good is complicated.
Nevertheless, we are deeply committed to rural communities, particularly in
regards to celebrating our cultural distinctions. Acknowledging this duality, how
can we mobilize the Rural Diaspora to support a rural arts and culture
movement, and to entice some of our Rural Genius back into rural communities?
“I’ve seen communities lose their identity
because they’ve lost their major business, and I’ve seen populations leave. And
I’ve seen the out-migration of people like you in rural communities who take it
with them but live with a longing that people like you have because of the
significance of that homeplace to you, I’ve watched that out-migration and the impact it has on those
communities.”
…
“Rural small communities
are the cultural underpinnings of what we are as a nation, those cultural
underpinnings are crumbling. Our nation is at risk because of it.”
…
“The biggest need that
we have is the ability to get together. I believe that ironically those
communities that were founded by pioneering efforts that started this country
are going to be the ones that keep it together.”
Despite
the challenges facing rural America, I feel a genuine excitement for the
people, the work, and the coalitions I’ve engaged with in the past year.
Constructive and critical conversations are taking place. While they are not
yet ubiquitous, there are myriad opportunities for engagement in rural community
arts programs across America. Organizations and individuals are leading the way
in challenging the narrative of rural culture and its intrinsic value to our
national cultural fabric: The field is being written about, researched, and
published on more frequently; academic programs are training students to
address the needs of rural communities; and some policy and funding
organizations are stepping up to the plate to acknowledge rural arts and
cultural work not only for the ways in which it provides access to the arts,
but for the ways in which it enhances community pride and vibrancy and improves
the standard of living for rural residents.
I
asked Patrick to specifically comment on his perception of the state of the
Rural Arts today:
“I am seeing something that I find very
exciting. First, rural arts are a topic of conversation again... Now, I am
hearing about and talking to younger people, like you, who are driven by the
passion of the work and the important contribution it makes. The concern that I
have is much of what I have been reading seems to ignore the vast, rich history
of the work and the writing that has been done so many years before all of us
started this contemporary expression of the rural/community arts development
work. There is so much to learn from the pioneers who have gone before us – I
worry about a cycle that seems to occur every twenty years with exciting,
gifted, impassioned young people discovering rural/small community arts
development and proceeded as if it is a new field.
It is possible we may be
entering the most important phase of our history doing this work. Why? Because
people are beginning to understand that if something doesn’t change, we are in
deep, deep trouble in this country. And I believe rural/small communities are
the most critical cultural underpinnings that keep this culture from imploding
on itself. There is a need, a desire, an interest in finding alternative –
constructive/creative alternatives to the social disintegration that has
diseased our entire country. The arts are (and always have been) the way to
authentic community expression.
This may be our time.
And people like you may well be the messengers who are going to be able to tell
this story and this potential and do so in a way that recognizes that the story
is a long story and the contribution this story identifies is great.”
I
asked Patrick to respond to thirteen additional questions regarding the “State
of the Rural Arts Today.” His responses encouraged my own professional
development, enlivened the tired rhetoric about rural place, and fully
expressed the need to engage with and celebrate rural arts and culture as it is
happening on front porches and back roads across this country. To read more
about my conversation with Patrick Overton, download the PDF of our interview.
[Author’s
Note: All direct quotes attributed to Patrick Overton are taken from a
transcribed interview conversation between Patrick Overton and Savannah Barrett
that took place on October 16, 2012. For questions, please contact the author.
©Savannah Barrett, 2012.]
