Kenyon Gradert To Discuss Midwest Culture On NPR This Morning -- Join The Conversation!

Photograph by Robert Josiah Bingaman; via fly over art tumblr

This morning from 11 to noon Central Time, Kenyon Gradert will appear on the NPR program Saint Louis on the Air to discuss Midwest culture. Also joining host Don Marsh: Mike Draper of the extraordinary art/clothing store RAYGUN. He recently published The Midwest: God's Gift To Planet Earth. It's going to be lively and wide-ranging discussion.

If folks have questions for these guests, they can call (314) 382-TALK (8255) or send an email to talk@stlpublicradio.org.

Kenny would love to hear the questions and comments of Art of the Rural readers -- those within the Midwest and beyond. As his Course on Midwest Culture pieces suggest, this region has a particular rural ethos, and a unique rural-urban connection, that will make for an illuminating conversation this morning.

Making Connections: Community Radio In Appalachia

Making Connections reporter Sylvia Ryerson

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

This week from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we bring a story that's floated to us on the airwaves from atop Mayking Peak in Letcher County, Kentucky: a service of Appalshop, WMMT is a radio station broadcasting a wide range of music and news throughout communities in Central Appalachia. The writing of this piece, for instance, is being fueled by volunteer DJ Old Red's early bluegrass and country show, "First Generation Bluegrass." 

One WMMT program, Making Connections: Diversifying our Future shares with its listeners stories and commentary promoting a self-sufficient, multifaceted Appalachia. Making Connections has been posting PlacesStories updates since 2010, giving voice to regional agriculturalists, artists and policy workers and exemplifying just what a group can do with the digital mapping tool. From the "About Us" website:

While coal mining will play a role in the central Appalachian economy for many years to come, the industry continues to mechanize creating a dramatic drop in jobs – it currently represents less than 2% of employment. Analysts also project that recoverable coal reserves in the region could run out in 20 years.

Now is the time to develop a more diversified and sustainable regional economy that supports the current generation of coal miners while creating new jobs in new fields. We have no shortage of strengths to build upon, including our rich cultural traditions, unparalleled natural landscape and strong sense of family and community. To move forward we must honor our past while focusing on a future that provides healthy and productive lives for our children and grandchildren.

 

Making Connections' coverage frequently highlights Appalachia's especially high rates of residents without high-speed Internet; a recent audio story entitled "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks – Broadband in Appalachia" was created by Sylvia Ryerson and Mimi Pickering to further examine the problem. Reads the description:

The Federal Communications Commission's Eighth Broadband Progress Report finds approx. 19 million Americans, mostly rural, lack access to high-speed Internet. In Central Appalachia the digital divide is stark: in West Virginia's McDowell and Mingo Counties, upwards of three-quarters of the population do not have access; in East Kentucky over 50% in Leslie and Breathitt Counties are without it. So why is it so hard to get a good connection in the mountains? What will this mean for the future of our communities? And what can we do to change this situation?

 
An essential part of the answer is that, as with many disputes over political policy, there is significant disagreement between the haves and have-nots in a thing's true worth or function. In this case, access to high-speed Internet is still largely regarded by those who have it as an earned luxury, our heavy reliance on it an addiction by which we're jokingly embarrassed. But as Ms. Ryerson points out, quality Internet service is a vital utility of everyday information dispersal, not a superfluous iPhone app, whether combed for a student's homework assignment or used to relay local safety concerns.

As artists who try to push against traditional, institutionalized limitations on accessibility, education, and diversity of art, and who place our critiques, our manifestoes, and our subversive work onto the Web, "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks" hits home and keeps this important issue on the table. We highly encourage readers to listen to Ms. Ryerson's reporting (if you are able), and to then expand on this conversation in your own communities. Please also explore Making Connections' other PlaceStories installments, as many fine productions come from these folks.

The Rural-Urban Reality of the Local Foods Movement

The Dumbo, Brooklyn neighborhood farmers' market; Dumbo NYC

This week begins with a another must-read piece on the Daily Yonder: "How Rural is our Local Food Policy?"

One of the elements of the rural-urban exchange which gives many of us great hope is the emergence of farmers' markets, CSAs, and the overall awakening to the importance of agriculture many urban and suburban folks have demonstrated. These cultural tendencies suggest, with the right kinds of dialogue, that this cultural moment could reveal the connectedness of urban and rural communities -- and even suggest a way through which folks in the cities and suburbs might find themselves invested in a sense of rural identity. 

While those aspirations are in themselves lofty long-term goals, they are undercut in the short-term by the realities of participation in the local foods movement. Trey Malone and Brian Whitacre's piece today in The Daily Yonder clarifies the reality of these rural-urban partnerships -- and suggests there is much work to be done on the federal and local level. 

This is a must-read, with some extraordinary maps that express data along the rural-urban continuum codes. Here is a very brief excerpt:

Notably, in counties with high levels of direct sales for human consumption (Figure 1) or community supported agriculture (CSA) (Figure 2), we find that these areas:
•    Are predominantly located in the most metropolitan counties (55% of high direct sales counties and 51% of high CSA counties are in codes 1-3 [the most urban counties]).
•    Have an average population density of between 469 and 994 people per square mile (compared with an average of 16 people per square mile in counties with codes 8-9 [the most rural counties]). 
•    Have median household income averages of over $50,000 (compared with an average of $38,600 in counties with codes 8-9).
•    Are usually located in coastal regions – far away from where average government payments are highest.  

We all know that we have many different "rural" Americas. While Malone and Whitacre's piece suggests points of opportunity of farmers, it also suggests that we have two different local foods movements -- one located within driving distance of a coastal city, and another placed in the regions of the country where the philosophies and immediate benefits of healthy, local food are desperately needed.

Walking the Fields, From Liberia to California

Sacramento Bee

High Country News has long been one of our favorite publications; they consistently think in new terms about the West, but also about urban-rural and rural-international connections. Such a perspective continues with "In Rural California, a Liberian Family Finds an Agricultural Refuge," by Laura Markham.  

Markham's article offers not only an inspiring story of how immigrant families are contributing to local agriculture, but also a much-needed look into how African-Americans helped to transform such practices in the state last century. We'll include an excerpt below:

On a historic 50-acre ranch in Northern California, Cynnomih Tarlesson and her nine children drop watermelon seeds into the ground. Behind them, her father, Roosevelt, uses a tractor to churn up the dirt for tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant -- along with some lesser-known crops, like the Tarlesson-named 'Billy Goat Pepper,' from the family's native West Africa.

When war erupted in her Liberian hometown in 1990, Cynnomih and her family fled their farm and lived for over two years in the bush, foraging for berries, shoots and small fish. After several years in a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast, Cynnomih, now 43, finally received permission to come to the U.S. as a refugee, along with 25 younger siblings and children (biological and adopted). They joined her father, Rev. Roosevelt Tarlesson, in Vacaville, Calif., where he had lived since the 1970s.

Vacaville was a peaceful escape from the harsh refugee-camp life in Ivory Coast -- plenty of food, friendly neighbors and teachers assisting their transition to U.S. life. Yet in this suburban environment, the family's job prospects were low and financial pressures high. They missed farming; they missed the land. So in 2007, the Tarlessons secured a loan to buy property in nearby Guinda, population 254. 'When refugees are brought to this country, they are put in cities, making minimum wage at factories. Why? They know how to farm. Let them farm!' says Rev. Tarlesson, who's pushing this idea with resettlement agencies at the national level.

Continue reading here:

Related Articles:
40 Years in the West: High Country News 

Bringing It To The Table

Arkansas State Folklorist Mike Luster at the Roundtable; Jennifer Joy Jameson

By Rachel Reynolds Luster, Contributing Editor

Last month Art of The Rural joined a host of artists and cultural workers from around the country in Fox, Arkansas for the 2nd Annual Meadowcreek Roundtable. The gathering brought together people working in the fields of folklore, literature, film, ethnomusicology, ethnobiology as well as others with an interest in community action, bioregionalism, social justice, and local food systems.

The original concept for this retreat was born from conversations following a panel presentation at the American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in 2010 where I, my husband Mike Luster, and our friend and colleague Meredith Martin-Moats of The Boiled Down Juice presented a panel entitled, Community Based Folklife Practice.

We called for an interdisciplinary holistic approach to community renewal and sufficiency, and a lively conversation followed for nearly an hour after the panel. That discussion bore an online component, the Community-Based Folklore Practice Facebook group, which broadened the conversation to include additional artists as well various voices from around the nation and across multiple disciplines ranging from community-engaged design to peace and justice activists alongside the many folklorists working in the public sector, and the Meadowcreek Roundtable was created to serve as the physical manifestation of that open conversation.

We call it the Roundtable because we firmly believe that some of the best conversations come at the table, or in preparing and enjoying meals. For three days we gather, we talk, we cook, we eat, we play music, we walk and swim. This year we enjoyed several wonderful films including Witch Hazel Advent by Fayetteville, Arkansas, filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel. There are babies and dogs there too.

Angel Band by The Meadowcreek Singers by joyamerica

More than anything, we try to identify what we see that we’d like to change in terms of cultural practice and/or its impediments, the funding structures that dictate what work is fundable, how culture (whether it be rural/urban, fine/traditional) is represented in media, where we might draw inspiration from one another and those “doing it right” across the country and how we can contribute to, in Gandhi’s phrase, being the change that we want to see. And then we go home and set out to do it, renewed and inspired. This year was no exception.

The American Folklore Society has generously supported the retreat for the past two years. This year, The Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University and that school’s Heritage Studies Department sponsored the event as well. Thus far, we’ve been able to keep the gathering free for attendees including registration, lodging, food, and childcare. We prepare the meals together from scratch and everyone chips in to do whatever else needs doing. It’s a truly beautiful thing in a lovely place. The Boiled Down Juice has also posted a story about the Meadowcreek Roundtable that offers a more in-depth discussion of the Meadowcreek property and its history and links to many of this year’s gathering’s attendees, their organizations and their work.

Here's two of this year's participants reflecting on the experience:

For me, the Meadowcreek Roundtable has been an incredibly important resource. The meetings have fostered invaluable and directive conversation with peers and senior colleagues that have stayed with me long after the weekend of the roundtable. For two years, I've come in with ideas and questions about how to carry out meaningful cultural work. Each time, I have come away with substantial mentorship, leading me to ask deeper questions about the intersections of folklife and cultural sustainability, and encouraging me to proceed boldly. - Writer and Folklorist Jennifer Joy Jameson

I came away from the Meadowcreek Roundtable retreat inspired and full of new ideas. In fact, on the drive home, a fellow attendee carpooling with me and I conceptualized a creative collaboration for our own community which we are in the initial stages of implementing. Without a designated time and place for such creative incubation to occur, I doubt we would have seen this project materialize, let alone make it to fruition. - Filmmaker Sarah Moore Chyrchel

If you and your organization would like to support or participate in next year’s gathering please contact us. We’d love to have you at the ‘Table.

Eamon Mac Mahon: The Landlocked North, On The Edge Of Great Change

Photograph by Eamon Mac Mahon

Many thanks to artist Richard Saxton for leading us to the work of Eamon Mac Mahon, a photographer raised in a mining community in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, at the precipice of the massive expanse of boreal forest. 

Mac Mahon's photographs of this place have received much attention in recent years, and for good reason. They balance a strong compositional eye with a sensitivity for cultural nuance and an awareness of the threats posed by expanded natural resource operations. An argument for environment and indigenous culture coexists with these stunning visual elements; in the hands of a lesser artist, this material would seem overly political, a strident kind of photojournalism. Instead, they alternate between wondrous and stark evocations of the landscape we would otherwise never encounter.

We will reprint below Mac Mahon explanation of the Landlocked series, alongside a few further images and an excellent multimedia piece on the work produced by Daylight, a photography magazine. The artist also places his work alongside the environmental threats to the region in a moving photo-commentary in The Walrus. Please find larger, high-resolution examples of this work on Eamon Mac Mahon's site.

This series of photographs is part of a larger project that began in the autumn of 2004 with a series of extended journeys by bush plane into the Canadian wilderness. Since that first journey, I typically spend three months each year in the north with a bush pilot in a two-seat airplane built in 1946. We set off in the autumn, at the end of the pilot's season, when we have the skies to ourselves.

In the beginning I was drawn to the boom and bust resource towns scattered throughout northern Canada. I wanted to know what happened in these places: what the people were like and what it felt like to be in a place that is surrounded by so much uninhabited, wild land. It would sometimes take weeks to make our way to these remote villages. Along the way we camped in wilderness, took shelter in fire towers, and were often taken in by strangers. When we finally arrived in an isolated community we would often get stuck waiting for the weather to change, or a shipment of fuel to arrive, or parts for the plane. Most of these communities had no access roads and had generally experienced reckless growth or stagnation, and then decline.

The surrounding wilderness has a deep effect on the inhabitants of these towns and, in turn, the towns have a great impact on the wilderness. And in these small isolated communities, it is possible to see clearly how individuals have made each community vastly different. I have become increasingly captivated by the wilderness between lonely settlements. Vast areas of land not yet exploited, or briefly plundered and left uninhabited. Growing up in western Canada on the edge of the boreal forest, I had vague impressions of mysterious and wild, yet monotonous places. I thought of the north as an endless expanse of homogeneous forests, lakes and tundra. I was wrong. I have been astonished by the variety and complexity of these landscapes. These photographs show a wilderness of increasing importance to the world, on the cusp of great change.

Farmer of the Future and Harvest Public Media

Photograph by Alison Rose; Forgotonia

This morning the excellent team of reporters and editors at Harvest Public Media began a series, entitled Farmer of the Future, that considers how "technological, cultural and political forces are bringing immense change to those people who commit to building their lives around the land." 

Kathleen Masterson offers the first dispatch, a report considering how the northwest region of Iowa, with its recent population growth and cultural diversity, presents both a model for the future and set of complex questions. Here is the transcript introduction to "Blending of Culture May be Blueprint for Growth:"

Sioux County, in northwest Iowa, is known for its Dutch pastries. The landscape is dotted with Lutheran and reform churches.  But today, Catholic churches and tortillerias are creeping into the landscape — signs of the new residents joining this vibrant community.

In Sioux County, as in a scattering of communities across the Midwest, Hispanic immigrants are working in meat processing plants, dairies, egg-laying facilities and hog barns. In fact, the majority of U.S. farm laborers today were born outside the U.S.

And while some parts of the rural Midwest are hollowing out, areas like Sioux County and its biggest city Sioux Center, are actually growing as immigrant populations move in to take jobs that otherwise employers cannot fill.

Sioux Center’s population has grown 17 percent and the county is up 7 percent over the last decade. Meanwhile, government figures indicate 91 of Iowa’s 99 counties have declined by about 9 percent over the last three decades.

No surprise, Sioux Center looks very different than many other rural communities in Iowa. But although this area may well offer a glimpse of the farming community of the future, the melding of cultures is not always easy.

Masterson continues in her piece to talk with folks from all sides of the Sioux Center community. We find that, for many farmers in the region, the rhetoric of immigrants "stealing American jobs" masks the pressing need for agricultural workers. Furthermore, these new residents are contributing to an expanding local economy, in contrast with other rural regions of the state.

Harvest Public Media also provides, embedded within Masterson's report, an interactive map illustrating the influx of hispanic immigrants within Iowa.

If we consider this news from Sioux Center alongside last week's "Readings" piece on Thomas Hardy's view from rural England -- as workers fled from the fields for industrial centers, in some cases to complete against English agriculture as newly-American farmers -- then we might see this news not as a political "hot-button" issue, but as part of a larger continuum, another element of a broader arc of international rural diaspora across the last two centuries.

Related Articles:

Readings: Rural Traditions Sunk Into Eternal Oblivion

The Farmville Files: Take Our Jobs

Mexican Migrant Workers, Vermont Dairy Farmers, and Local Artists

The Tree That Bursts Through The Silo

Tree In Silo; Ken Wolf

Many thanks to María Arambula for sharing on our Arts and Culture Feed A.G. Sulzberger's latest rural dispatch for The New York Times, "Amid Rural Decay, Trees Take Root in Silos." The image of these trees bursting from disused farm structures unifies an arc of how the last century has dealt with rural place as an aesthetic ideal.

To begin, here's Mr. Sulzberger discussing this phenomenon across Kansas and Missouri:

The empty structures catch seeds, then protect fragile saplings from the prairie winds and reserve a window of sunlight overhead like a target. In time, without tending by human hands, the trees have grown so high that lush canopies of branches now rise from the structures and top them like leafy umbrellas. 

Across a region laden with leaning, crumbling reminders of more vibrant days, some residents have found comfort in their unlikely profiles. 

“It just struck me as, I don’t know, a symbol of something,” said Ken Wolf, who has spent many days of his retirement searching the area for what he calls, simply, silo trees, photographing dozens along the way. “I see it as a kind of passing.” 

Mr. Wolf's photographs present these tree-silos are a kind of vernacular architecture, not consciously assembled structures -- though they suggest this aesthetic through neglect and abandonment. As the photographer surmises, we're in the presence of a symbol heavy with historical and cultural weight.

It's jarring, then, to consider the image of this tree just one hundred year's ago, in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. In "Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation," Yeats laments the passing of the Anglo-Irish Ascendency who even, before the Easter Rising, were seeing their large estates broken up into smaller holdings and dispersed to local farmers. Yeats's position on the matter would be akin to many modernists, who envisioned their art free from the demands of (or condescensions to) popular audiences; the Nobel laureate saw in the destruction of an estate's "big house" a metaphor for the loss of what he would call (in another poem featuring a tree-symbol): "custom and ceremony." After decades connecting rural folklore to national literature, Yeats displays the anxieties of his class and his cultural standing -- worrying if these same people, so often portrayed by him as the spirit of the nation, would really be careful stewards of the land and its culture. He laments what is lost by allowing a tree to flourish in the place of a symbol of high cultural wealth. 

In Mr. Wolf's phtography we find a drastically different situation but, nonetheless, a structure in ruin and a landscape in transition. What is contested is what narrative we ascribe to the branches breaking free from the silo's concrete hold; is this a reclamation or a commentary on industrial agriculture, a scene of "rural decay" or something that transcends economics and cultural cliches? Is this a preface or a postscript?

Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation

How should the world be luckier if this house, 
Where passion and precision have been one 
Time out of mind, became too ruinous 
To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun? 
And the sweet laughing eagle thoughts that grow        
Where wings have memory of wings, and all 
That comes of the best knit to the best?
Although  Mean roof-trees were the sturdier for its fall,
How should their luck run high enough to reach
The gifts that govern men, and after these 
To gradual Time’s last gift, a written speech 
Wrought of high laughter, loveliness and ease?

Silo With Tree; Ken Wolf

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Rural

Cast-iron stove reclaimed by David Lundahl from a local farm;  the foundation for a new sculpture

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines, 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. Starting March 19th, we will offer new articles and share some new projects related to our mission.

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Rural was originally published on August 15, 2011.]

**********

While working on an Art of the Rural project at New Light Studios in southern Wisconsin, the self-created arts environment of David Lundahl (who, despite physical and economic hardship, rebuilt a dilapidated dairy farm into a vibrant arts space) I had a moment to learn that some of my comments after the recent Talk of the Nation piece on rural America were printed in The Daily Yonder, and that TOTN's Blog of the Nation gave The Art of the Rural an enthusiastic mention. It's an honor on both fronts, and timely, as I spent a good part of the drive up to New Light Studios thinking about the TOTN piece and its reception. 

If folks haven't had a chance yet, I'd encourage a listen--and also a perusal of the TOTN comments section both there and on the Blog of the Nation follow-up.  Very quickly, the real concerns over the loss of rural posts offices were either swept off the table by some commenters ("These towns have no other buildings they can't meet in front of?") or subsumed into predictably digested political rhetoric ("If you want rural America to have stuff like P.Os., health clinics, and communications access, you'd better vote for a "big-government" Democrat."). 

Of course, this is the level of discourse on a number of internet forums and comments pages--a gruesome spectator sport all to itself. What's different here is that, in my opinion, the Talk of the Nation piece was not entirely successful in its communication of the diverse set of complexities enmeshed in contemporary rural life--and it almost entirely ignored the question of rural arts and culture, the very fabric that unites these communities. 

While NPR consistently provides some of best broadcast news and commentary to be found anywhere, and while (contrary to aforementioned political rhetoric) both my conservative and liberal friends seem to value its in-depth coverage (see the reports from the GOP straw poll in Iowa), I left the rural segment of Talk of the Nation discouraged on a basic level. Here's a portion of my reaction published in The Daily Yonder:

More than anything, I wish the NPR producers had the foresight to keep Dee Davis [President of the Center for Rural Strategies] on the line with Neal Conan for the whole segment, so that he could have helped contextualize the excellent perspectives of the guests.

This is telling: culturally speaking, as Americans, do we all assume we "know" the rural equally well? Do we admit that the "face" of rural America is changing, that there are many people in cities who identify as "rural," and that rural youth have a stake in these discussions?

Neal's language during the transitions spoke (alternately) to all the old assumptions about rural America: it's either a pastoral or a broke-down ghetto. The guests offered perspectives that challenged this, but I worry that the format of the segment and Neal's questions may, in the end, not have done the work of challenging his listeners--something NPR is generally adept at doing.

Writer and producer Mary Phillips-Sandy has added a much-needed critique of that use of language on her excellent A Lot of Consonants blog:

One of the things that stood out to me was the host’s use of the word ‘heartland’ as a synonym for ‘rural America.’ It’s a common idiom and a disingenuous one. Where is this heartland, exactly? Does the expression mean a geographic center or an emotional center? If the former, it fails to include all the parts of rural America that exist at the nation’s edges and farthest-flung points. If the latter it is patronizing, because it locates rural America in the realm of abstract sentiment, instead of on a map, right there, or right here.

An emotional center, in the realm of abstract sentiment: this eloquently gets at how Americans with little direct rural-experience can sometimes describe and qualify non-metropolitan life. If we think about this from a literary perspective, the use of "heartland" is simply an updated term for "Arcadia," that place of the literary pastoral invented by Theocritus--writing from the library in Alexandria, ca. 300 B.C. For this poet, it was a place of shaded groves of song and love, a landscape of man's communal experience with nature. 

In actuality, Arcadia was a rocky and barren region where very little grew. Two millennia later, we find that readers (and nations) need to have a pastoral myth, a place to invest the unalienable values of their people. And, updated in the modern age, they also need to view their Arcadia simultaneously as back-woods region where acts and sensibilities that would not be tolerated in urban centers can somehow be found permissible (consolidated schools, drastically insufficient health services, mountaintop removal, and so on).

Whether the author is Theocritus or a speech-writer for any of the forthcoming 2012 campaigns, this language ignores one basic and inseparable fact: the rural and the urban are intimately connected.

New Work From Places: Rural Studio, Cotton Farmers, The Sound of Music, And Our Natural Space

Bloom, 2010; Michael Lundgren 

One of the most valuable resources for considering how the arts intersect with and enliven the rural-urban exchange can be found in Places, "an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal."

Today we would like to offer links to some recent work from Places that expands conversations and ideas we've shared with our readers and collaborators. Below we will feature a brief selection from each piece followed by links to the larger, visually-rich articles:

Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studio

Lessons From The Front Lines Of Social Design is an essay by Will Holman that charts this designer's time spent at the Arcosanti urban laboratory, YouthBuild, and Rural Studio - while also touching on projects we've also discussed: Epicenter and Studio H. 

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Holman's time at Rural Studio:

The Rural Studio was founded in 1993 by architects Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth, around the same time I was dreaming away afternoons in my elementary school library. Both professors at Auburn University, Mockbee and Ruth set up shop in Newbern, Alabama, three hours away from the main campus. Greensboro, ten miles north, along with nearby Moundville and Tuscaloosa, were at the center of James Agee and Walker Evan’s Depression-era study of sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [10]. Mockbee and Ruth hoped to expose students to three things usually missing from modern architectural education: construction, clients and social engagement. “Rural Studio is what architecture should be about, not what it should theoretically be about,” said Danny Wicke, a former instructor and student. “Engaging in practice makes school real and gives it context.” [11] Mockbee died in 2001, and Ruth in 2009, but not before the Rural Studio earned Mockbee a MacArthur “genius” grant and a wave of positive press from around the world. Now directed by British transplant Andrew Freear, the studio has concentrated on raising standards of professionalism and building larger civic projects. “I want to get students to dream about our society,” says Freear. “Architects are not just playthings of the rich.”

The Hills Are Alive is an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging essay by Michael P. Branch, a Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno and a columnist for The High Country News. 

In this piece Dr. Branch takes a moment of family history - his daughter's performing a version of Julie Andrews' revelry on their Nevada hillside far -and transforms the memory into the groundwork for a meditation on romantic and ecological landscapes. Here's his introduction:

My grandmother’s highest compliment for a natural landscape was to say that it was “pretty as a picture.” Even as a kid I remember thinking that this aesthetic was somehow upside-down, that the beauty of art should be judged according to the inimitable standard of natural beauty rather than the other way around. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, well-heeled European travelers toured the countryside looking for views that would be as pretty as a picture — or, to be more precise, as pretty as a painting. And because they had a certain kind of painting in mind as embodying their standard of natural beauty, these early ecotourists often carried with them a small, convex, tinted mirror known as a “Claude glass,” after the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. When a picturesque landscape was encountered — say, the snow-capped Alps — the tourists would turn their backs to the mountains and whip out their Claude glass, holding it up to frame the mountains, which were not only reflected but also color-shifted to a tonal range that made them appear more painterly. And voila! The rugged Alps become not only pretty as a picture, but become a picture, as the pleased ecotourists admired not the mountains but rather the image they had created. But must we turn our backs on the land to see it as aesthetically pleasing? Why do we so often love our representations of the world more dearly than we love the world itself? 

a selection from a photograph from Kathleen Robbin's project

We also highly recommend visiting Places to view Cotton Farmers: Photographs from the American South, a collaboration between Kathleen Robbins and writer Mary Carol Miller. Ms. Robbins, whose grandfather was a third-generation cotton farmer, recently returned to her family farm for an intensive five weeks of photography and interviews, alongside Ms. Miller. (NPR also provides more of the context here.)

The Places slideshow captures the breathtaking sweep of the land, yet also communicates the physical and mental hardship of continuing these practices. Below, Mary Carol Miller's prose speaks to this situation:

We found a handful of men and women who remain where their fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers planted their flags. Each spring, they weigh the odds and walk the land, recognizing every turnrow and low point and subtle rise over a thousand or two thousand or even eleven thousand acres. And, once again, as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, they will buy the seed and the fertilizer and service the tractors and the combines and hire the cropdusters and begin the daily prayers for more rain or no rain and sunshine and cool nights and no tropical storms in September and no frost in early October. And their children, muttering about the social challenges of being way out there and never having a next-door neighbor, will slowly, slowly find their own souls tied to that dirt.

Untitled, 2010; Michael Lundgren

Last week Places published a collaboration that speaks to the concerns delineated across these pieces. If There Be Such a Place is a slideshow of work by two photographers with divergent visions of the American West: Aaron Rothman and Michael Lundgren. Poet and Places Assistant Editor Josh Wallaert offers an introduction not only to their work, but to the problems of aesthetic representation in natural space. As a whole, this is an intellectually complex and visually stunning presentation, and we highly recommend it - the techniques and ideas here can find application across the American landscape. Here is a selection from Mr. Wallaert's introduction; please follow the links to larger, high-resolution examples of the photographs:

By sundown in this Western town, you’ve met an artist, likely an environmental artist, a role synonymous these days with a kind of citizen interpreter of landscape. This is a golden age for geography in art, and its artifacts range from embarrassing to inspired. We embroider birds on pillows and use historical maps for découpage; we also write gorgeous poems whose lines re-enact processes of geological transformation, engineer mobile apps that enable hikers to identify the Latin names of plants, and exhibit photographs of altered landscapes that challenge old notions about the dichotomy of built and natural environment. The artist invites the audience to participate in an active reading and interpretation of landscape. We all want to read the world these days, or, more often, have the world read to us.

These exchanges are thrilling, yes, but also dazzling — as in, they can make you go blind. An afternoon hike with a naturalist friend can feel like immersion in a hypertextual, augmented reality, where the names of wildflowers hang, shimmering, in the desert air. It’s exhausting. I have often longed for the mute world I knew as a child: where a rock was a rock and a tree was a tree, and none of it spoke to me, except through direct perception and experience. Nature offers this still, if we are willing to accept it: the blank, unreadable, unbeautiful, apolitical moment. There have been times, when I found myself staring at exposed rock on the side of a hill, that I have known something about its formation; and times when I was accompanied by a scientist or artist who was obliged to translate. But there have been many more unreadable moments, when I could comprehend nothing in that open face of the world but its presence, when I had only the desire to climb the wall or poke at it with a sharp stick.

 Untitled, 2007; Aaron Rothman

Related Articles:

The Border of Nowhere and Nowhere

Rural Poetry Series: Josh Wallaert

In Brief: Water In The West

Fiction That Crosses the Rural - Urban Line
Rural Studio and the 20K House
Studio H: Designing and Building Skills for Rural Youth

Update: The Black Hills Are Not For Sale

Mural Installation on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles; Honor The Treaties Facebook Page

Last year we discussed Honor The Treaties, a promising collaboration between photographer Aaron Huey, the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and a host of urban and indigenous street artists. 

Today we have more information on the latest developments in this project which crosses all kinds of generational, regional, and rural-urban lines. Here's video the recent Shepard Fairey installation on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, followed by Mr. Huey's brief summary of the project:

The Black Hills Are Not For Sale from sinuhe xavier on Vimeo.

“The Black Hills are not for sale!”  is a common rallying cry for Treaty rights on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

In 1980 The longest running court case in U.S. history, the Sioux Nation v. the United States, was ruled upon by the U.S. Supreme Court.The court determined that, when the Sioux were resettled onto reservations and seven million acres of their land were opened up to prospectors and homesteaders, the terms of the second Fort Laramie treaty had been violated. The court stated that the Black Hills were illegally taken and that the initial offering price plus interest should be paid to the Sioux Nation. As payment for the Black Hills, the court awarded only 106 million dollars to the Sioux Nation. The Sioux refused the money with the rallying cry, “The Black Hills are not for sale.”

The United States continues on a daily basis to violate the terms of the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie treaties with the Lakota. The call to action I offer today is this: Honor the treaties.  Give back the Black Hills.  It’s not our business what they do with them.

My goal is to amplify the voices of my many Lakota friends and family on Pine Ridge, all of whom have advised me on this campaign.

Thanks!
Aaron Huey

Ernesto Yerena signing copies of his contributions to the project

More information, as well as downloadable images for wheat pasting, can be found at Honor The Treaties. The organization also hosts a Facebook page (where many more images and videos can be found), as well as a tumblr page.

Related Articles:

Honoring The Treaty: Aaron Huey And The Pine Ridge Reservation

The People Speak: New Work From Jetsonorama

A Jetsonorama Panorama

Many thanks to Gary O'Brien for contacting us and sharing this interactive panorama from Jetsonorama's wheat paste installation in Cameron, Arizona.

What's striking about this technology is that it not only gives depth and dimension to Jetsonorama's work, but it reveals how these installations stand as monuments in a sparsely developed landscape - as these representations of folks from the artist's community float luminously beneath a crystal-clear night sky.

Mr. O'Brien is an award-winning photo-journalist currently working Tuscon, Arizona. His site also features some multimedia reporting on a wide range of subjects, as well as a portfolio of work that meditates on natural space and then applies that same compositional sense to domestic scenes. He also spent a portion of 2005 school year with a class of fifth-graders, and the photo-essays and audio work to emerge from that time is particularly moving - and suggests a collaborative model for other artists and community members. 

Related Articles:

Jetsonorama and Wheat Paste Art on the Reservation

New Art from Jetsonorama's Rez

Jetsonorama and the Moving Planet

In Defense of Rural Post Offices: Stories And Media

Selection from a mural inside the Ukiah, CA post office, which closed January 6th

Today we have some updates on the valuable artistic and cultural work addressing the proposed closings of post offices, a move which will disproportionately affect rural communities.

Sylvia Ryerson of WMMT, with Mimi Pickering of the Appalshop Community Media Initiative, produced an excellent 20 minute radio piece that takes the time to sit down with postal workers and their communities - and to hear about the palpable human relatioships which orbit around, and are cultivated by, their town's post office. In many of these communities, these are the last meeting places left - and the last operating public space with a rooted connection to the history and culture:

As the U.S. Postal Service faces financial crisis, Central Appalachia and much of rural America may be hard hit by pending closures of post offices and mail processing centers.  To avoid bankruptcy, the Postal Service had announced plans to make reductions amounting to approximately $3 billion.  Such drastic cuts would result in slower first class delivery and close hundreds of mail facilities nationwide.  After public and Congressional outcry, USPS announced a moratorium on closures until May 15, 2012. In this expanded WMMT report customers at the Burdine and Premium post offices, two of the nine in Letcher County, KY on the closure list, describe what the service means to their communities while officials from the USPS and the American Postal Workers Union offer differing solutions to the Postal Service financial crisis.

More Than Mail: Rural Postal Service Threatened by Mimi Pickering
 

This radio piece is also an effort of Making Connections, a multi-media production of the Appalshop Community Media Institute with a mission to serve as a platform "for sharing news, stories, and information highlighting opportunities and challenges for building a healthy future for Appalachia's people and land." Their deep archives offer a diverse range of stories - from local tax reform to horticulture, agriculture to photography.

These media-makers are also utilizing PlaceStories, an interactive multimedia mapping site, to reach folks from across rural America and hear their thoughts on the importance of their local post offices. This project is linked to the extraordinary Save the Post Office, which offers a range of reports and cultural perspectives far too diverse to accurately summarize in this space - though folks should give a read to the photo-essay on the Alplaus (NY) post office available via the extraordinary Going Postal site. 

For much more information on the challenges facing rural post offices, we recommend (as always) visits to the archives of The Daily Yonder and The Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issue's Rural Blog.

The Weekly Feed: January Twelfth

Wendell and Tanya Berry in The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater; Ralph Eugene Meatyard

• Lisa Pruitt of Legal Ruralism - an Ozark native and a law professor at UC-Davis - visited Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art on its opening day, and she contributes this reading of what the space offers, and what it might lack:

[Ada Smith of The New York Times] mentions an interesting gap in the Crystal Bridges collection--indeed an ironic one: "the almost complete lack of paintings by largely self-taught or folk artists."

This omission is especially noteworthy because rural America is so often associated with the common man, as well as with other connotations of folksy.

And, indeed, the museum is reaching out to the "common man" or--more precisely--the common child. Smith notes the museum's "ambitious education program, which will reach out to more than 80,000 elementary students in the area."

• Producers Hal Cannon and Taki Telonidis of the Western Folklife Center and the What's In A Song project recently shared this moving story about a singing group formed by friends of folklorist Barre Toelken to help him re-learn the nearly 800 songs he lost after his stroke. The piece originally aired last weekend on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, and can be heard here. 

"I used to know 800 songs," Toelken says. "I had this stroke, and I had none of these songs left in my head. None of them were left."

But, Toelken says, he soon discovered that, with a little positive reinforcement, he could remember some of the forgotten music after all.

"A little bit at a time, I realized I still had the songs in my head," he says. "So now I meet with this group of friends once a week a week, and we sing.

• Kyle Munson of The Des Moines Register is one of our favorite journalists - he covers the wide panorama of Iowa with great insight and creativity. This week he traversed the state on a "full Grassley" tour of all 99 counties, taking stock of the state of Iowa after the Republican primaries and the fallout from Stephen Bloom's article in The Atlantic. Folks can read his latest report from the road here; his Facebook page also contains extra photographs from this Midwestern Odyssey.

I’m following the shortest possible path through all 99 counties, roughly counterclockwise around the state with the start and finish line both in Des Moines. As I type this Tuesday afternoon, I’ve hit 15 counties — or about 406 out of 2,738 miles on the official GPS itinerary.

Unlike a presidential candidate, I don’t have the benefit of a hired driver, plush bus or quick-fire stump speech. It also takes time to pry introspective views from Iowans in each county with persistent questions.

But also unlike a candidate, I’m not using these 99 counties as a steppingstone. My simple goal is to glean a more precise, updated sense of the state at the start of a new year.

• In the land where the pastoral genre began over two millennia ago, young Greeks are leaving Athens and returning to the rural. Here's Rachel Donadio writing in The New York Times:

Nikos Gavalas and Alexandra Tricha, both 31 and trained as agriculturalists, were frustrated working on poorly paying, short-term contracts in Athens, where jobs are scarce and the cost of living is high. So last year, they decided to start a new project: growing edible snails for export. 

As Greece’s blighted economy plunges further into the abyss, the couple are joining with an exodus of Greeks who are fleeing to the countryside and looking to the nation’s rich rural past as a guide to the future. They acknowledge that it is a peculiar undertaking, with more manual labor than they, as college graduates, ever imagined doing. But in a country starved by austerity even as it teeters on the brink of default, it seemed as good a gamble as any. 

• We learned from The Rural Blog of Honest Appalachia, a wikileaks-inspired site working to increase transparency in Appalachia and "to assist and protect whistleblowers who wish to reveal proof of corporate and government wrongdoing to citizens throughout the region."

• The National Council For The Traditional Arts posted video to their Facebook page of Los Texmaniacs, who "combine a hefty helping of Tex Mex conjunto, simmer with several parts Texas rock, add a daring dash of well-cured blues, and R&B riffs," as these musicians describe their unique groove:

• The Big Read Blog offers some links to consider the presence of immigrants in Willa Cather's My Ántonia:

When Cather published My Ántonia in 1918, the book was a major departure from the literary trends of the day. She not only strayed from the urban settings and themes that were fashionable at the time, but her characters were also new to contemporary American fiction—they were common folks and, even rarer for the time, many of them were immigrants, all presented with genuine dignity.

The links above include an audio guide and documentary that also features the perspective of the real-life Ántonia's granddaughter.

• If you are currently digging out from the first winter snow of the year, then Sara Jenkins's article in The Atlantic on the art of picking olives in an Etruscan hill town will be a welcome respite. On the subject of rural-international terroir, folks may be interested in Extra Virginity, a new non-fiction book on the history, culture, and industrialization of olive oil by Tom Mueller. NPR's Fresh Air sat down for a fascinating conversation with him in November; a trailer for the book project is included below:

• The header image for this Weekly Feed comes from Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), a prolific photographer born who was born in Normal, Illinois but spent the majority of his life in Lexington Kentucky. He worked as an optician during the week, but, when the weekend came, Mr. Meatyard produced some of the most singular photography of the last century: intimate, irreverent, and at times terrifying. 

The artist collaborated with many members of that era's extraordinary arts scene in Kentucky - folks such as Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton, and Guy Davenport. Much of his photography used the abandoned homes and farms as settings, and Mr. Meatyard also collaborated with Mr. Berry on The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge. 

After news of a cancer diagnosis, the photographer devoted the remainder of his days to The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater, which featured his children and his friends wearing plastic masks and posing in normal situations. Though the idea of such a series might sound bizarre, the totality of this project offers a moving meditation on friendship, family, and mortality.

Unfortunately, though Mr. Meatyard's photography is becoming more widely known, no central site yet exists in which to discover the breadth of his work. The International Center for Photography housed and exhibition in 2004 that offers the best resources yet - and a little research here, as well as a Google image search, will reveal startling results.