A Rye Whiskey Rural Arts Metaphor

Templeton's home-grown rye crop; Brewvana

[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.

[A Rye Whiskey Rural Arts Metaphor was originally published on February 9, 2011. A review of Kristian Day's excellent documentary Capone's Whiskey: The Story of Templeton Rye is forthcoming. The trailer for this film is included at the conclusion of this piece.]

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We occasionally like to dwell on issues of food culture and the culinary arts that have a particular rural connection (see the search function on the sidebar for Ian Halbert's excellent series of articles), and today we've found a controversy that has developed across the state of Iowa that may be of interest to our readers.

The story involves Templeton Rye, a small-batch rye whiskey distilled in Templeton, Iowa. With the exception of liquor connoisseurs, most folks outside of Iowa--even most folks in the midwest--probably have never heard of Templeton, despite the fact that it is one of the most sought-after whiskeys in the United States. It's also a whiskey with a compelling local and historical legacy. Here's a brief introduction from the distillery's site:

When Prohibition outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in 1920, many enterprising residents of a small town in Iowa chose to become outlaws – producing a high caliber and much sought-after whiskey known as Templeton Rye.

Based on its extremely smooth finish, the American rye whiskey earned the nickname of “The Good Stuff” and quickly brought a certain degree of fame to the doorsteps of Templeton (pop. 350). As the premium brand of the era, Templeton Rye fetched an impressive $5.50 per gallon – or approximately $70 by today’s standards.

Over the course of its storied history, Templeton Rye became Al Capone’s whiskey of choice, quickly finding its way to the center of his bootlegging empire. Hundreds of kegs per month were supplied to Capone’s gang who in turn filled the demand of speakeasies throughout Chicago, New York and as far west as San Francisco.

Capone was eventually convicted on charges of tax evasion and sent to prison. Later legends suggest that a few bottles even found their way inside the walls of Alcatraz to the cell of prisoner AZ-85.

Although most American whiskeys ceased production after prohibition ended, Templeton Rye continued to be produced illegally in small quantities for loyal patrons. More than eighty-five years later, the infamous small batch rye whiskey finally returned – made available legally for the first time ever in 2006.

While the Capone connection may be enough to tempt a taste, the product's history is far from a gimmick; this is one of the finest, and most unique, rye whiskeys that money can buy. Beyond the connection to Prohibition and Alacatraz, this is no doubt also related to the local elements of this product's creation, to the care that the distillers--and the town itself--has put into each bottle. As their blog indicates, this distillery is intricately linked to its home region.

The Templeton controversy, however, has emerged at the convergence of all the wonderful attributes contained in the previous paragraph. Iowans want to purchase a quality drink with an Iowa connection,  stores in the state wish to stock this local gem, and--to confound this seemingly simple example of supply and demand--a huge number of urban, coastal connoisseurs are desperate to also enjoy a sip. Extraordinarily limited quantities of Templeton Rye can be found in upscale liquor stores in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago, often at considerably higher prices. Even within Iowa, it is very hard to find the product; often local stores will only receive 2-4 bottles a month. People turn to Facebook and Twitter (#TRspottings) to report when and where they have found "the good stuff."

Ironically, then, a product which began as a contraband item has, through different circumstances, become again a subject of hush-hush conjecture. This has led, within the state of Iowa and no doubt through internet chatter, to the perception that the scarcity of Templeton Rye was linked to a single likely cause: Templeton was shipping a larger proportion of its product to distant cities. As the video below and the site's allotment data indicate, this was only a perception. The vast majority of Templeton Rye stays within the Iowa border.

Herein lies a multifaceted metaphor. We see in this story those ever-present tensions between the local and the cosmopolitan, between the rural and the urban; we also see here the point at which a fantastically successful rural, regional business reaches a challenge that has less to do with profit-margins than with the community on which the entire enterprise is rooted. As a culinary art form, this is a kind of instructive tale for artists working within other mediums.

Also, looking more broadly at the well-earned success story in Templeton, we have an aspirational model for the rural arts. It's a sort of material and aesthetic challenge for contemporary rural artists in all mediums, how to balance the desires of rural and urban audiences--and how to reach one's local audience in such a way that they take the kind of ownership over their region's work that Templeton's Iowa base has exerted. While this controversy has been a challenge to the distillery, it's an envious one for most rural artists. Imagine if the words "Templeton Rye" and "Batch 4" were interchanged in the video below with any number of other words: "our recent series of paintings", "our recent book of poems", "our current recording:"

Reconsidering Grant Wood's Revolt

[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.

Reconsidering Grant Wood's Revolt was originally published on January 4, 2011.] 

This morning The Daily Yonder published an excellent review of Grant Wood: A Life, a new study of the legendary regionalist painter by R. Tripp Evans. Within her review "The Edgy Idylls of Grant Wood," Cyndy Clark notes many of Evans's new ideas on the use of gender and sexuality in Grant Wood's work--and Ms. Clark finds a way to artfully integrate this shifting interpretive terrain into the lines of the artist's most iconic canvas, American Gothic:

One of Wood’s eccentricities seems to have been a fascination with death and funerary subjects.  According to Evans, the gothic arch was a common 19th c. American folk art form that referred to mortality. Wood and his mother lived for ten years in a small apartment above a Cedar Rapids funeral parlor with a coffin lid as its front door, so the connection seems reasonable.  The American Gothic house may also represent the place where Wood spent the first eleven years of his life, in Anamosa, Iowa, the house where his father, Maryville, died.  The artist spent those early years hiding his artistic talents from Maryville, a man’s man who considered art feminine and only for sissies, an attitude consistent with his Midwestern contemporaries. Wood said, regarding his father’s disapproval of his art, “For a farmer’s son in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to say he wanted to paint pictures for his life work was as startling as a girl to announce she wanted to live a life of shame.”

Wood’s troubled relationship with his father contributes an obvious and psychologically predictable influence on many of his paintings.  Although the model for the male figure in American Gothic was his dentist, his resemblance to Maryville, a stern Quaker, is striking and confirmed by Wood’s sister, Nan. The prongs of the pitchfork, echo the seams of the farmer’s overalls and form the letter “W,” to evoke Maryville Wood.

Ms. Clark's review continues on to make a number of important connections between the varying responses to American Gothic, suggesting that we still have much to learn from Mr. Wood's situation, his place in that time-honored American-Arts-Bermuda-Triangle between rural, urban and academic spaces, and from the ideas he so gracefully articulated on canvas. 

Her writing led me back to an essay of Wood's I hadn't read in long while: "Revolt Against the City." As modern readers, we can scan the lines below in full cognizance that rural and urban spaces are inescapably interconnected, that a "revolt" from one merely means hardship for those involved in the rebellion. With this book review in mind, we come to understand that Grant Wood may not have argued such a basic dichotomy. Instead of revolting against the city, perhaps Mr. Wood would point the contemporary rural arts towards considering how they anchor regional artistic (and economic) centers:

Because of this new emphasis upon native materials, the artist no longer finds it necessary to migrate even to New York [or to emulate French painting, which Wood discusses before this quote], or to seek any great metropolis. No longer is it necessary for him to suffer the confusing cosmopolitanism, the noise, the too intimate gregariousness of the large city. True, he may travel, the may observe, he may study in various environments, in order to develop his personality and achieve backgrounds and a perspective; but this need be little more than incidental to an educative process that centers on his own home region.

.....

Let me try to state the basic idea of the regional movement. Each section has a personality of its own, in physiography, industry, psychology. Thinking painters and writers who have passed their formative years in these regions, will, by care-taking analysis, work out and interpret in their productions these varying personalities. When the different regions develop characteristics of their own, they will come into competition with each other; and out of this competition a rich American culture will grow. It was in some such manner that Gothic architecture grew out of competition between different French towns as to which could build the largest and finest cathedrals. 

.....

I am willing to go so far as to say that I believe the hope of a native American art lies in the development of regional art centers and the competition between them. It seems the one way to the building up of an honestly art-conscious America.

The Art Of The Flyover

False-color composite aerial map outside Garden City, Kansas; Wired

Who says there's no contemporary art in the heartland? Wired magazine offers these images taken by NASA and USGS satellites, which capture crop and irrigation patterns across the rural international. 

Betsy Mason explains, with larger, high-resolution images available by following the link:

The image above, taken by the USGS' Landsat 7 satellite on Sept. 25, 2000, is a false-color composite made using data from near infrared, red and green wavelengths and sharpened with a panchromatic sensor. The red areas actually represent the greenest vegetation. Bare soil or dead vegetation ranges from white to green or brown.

The image below is a simulated true-color shot from the same county in Kansas taken June 24, 2001 by NASA's Terra satellite. Bright greens are healthy, leafy crops such as corn; sorghum would be less mature at this time of year and probably a bit paler; wheat is ready for harvest and appears a bright gold; brown fields have been recently harvested. The circles are perfectly round and measure a mile or a half mile in diameter.

True-color imagery of Garden City, Kansas

As Wendell Berry asserts in Standing By Words, much of the arts now mirror commercial rhetoric, in that each forthcoming series of paintings, each new collection of songs or poems by a given artist must feature "new and improved" style - a misreading, Mr. Berry argues, of Ezra Pound's dictum "make it new."

It is interesting, then, to compare these images to the work of Damien Hirst, whose spot-paintings are currently on view worldwide, across all 11 Gagosian galleries. 

Damien Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 – 2011 (New York gallery); Mary Altaffer

Much is made of these works (Hirst's assistants actually "paint" these paintings) and their multi-million dollar auction prices, yet there's an irony in comparing these images - each geometric patterns that represent collaborative efforts aided by the latest precision technologies. The deeper irony, depending on which regions are captured in such satellite photography, is that the land illustrated within the frame is worth far more than Mr. Hirtst's spot paintings. Perhaps Gagosian should open up a gallery in Cedar Rapids.

Below we will offer a few more of these stunning aerial images. To further consider these connections, please visit the Rural American Contemporary Artists group and check out their current exhibit. Many thanks to Kelly Green for leading us to the article in Wired.

Pasture and logged acreage in Bolivia

The Al Khufrah Oasis irrigation project in Libya

Related Articles:

How The Rural Could Save Modern Art

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

100,000 Polaroids

The Rural Avant-Garde

The M12 Collective: A New Vision For The High Plains

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.

What's The Matter With Iowa: The Oxford Project

Ben Stoker photographed in The Oxford Project; Peter Feldstein 

I love you all. I love Oxford. And I’ll never leave — except in a box.

     - Peter Feldstein, speaking at the book launch for The Oxford Project

While Stephen Bloom's article in The Atlantic, "Observations from 20 years of Iowa Life" has since brought the state into an uproar, sent the professor into hiding, and placed, at the very least, his good standing at the University of Iowa in question, there's a less-reported cause for sadness beneath all of this - and it concerns the small town of Oxford, Iowa.

In 2008 Mr. Bloom contributed interviews to The Oxford Project, a stunning series of photographic portraits by Peter Feldstein that capture the lives of nearly every resident in town on two separate occasions in 1984 and 2004. Mr. Feldstein moved to Oxford in the late 1970's and has since become part of the fabric of the community.

Both the book and exhibition received rave reviews, for what The Washington Post called the glimpse of a people "paired with themselves in an eerie and beautiful reckoning with the past." To complement the intimacy of Mr. Feldstein's work, Stephen Bloom interviewed each subject at length, letting these citizens tell their own stories of their lives and their community. 

Here's the two artists in conversation with Josh Landis of CBS Sunday Morning: 

Considering the way citizens of Oxford must have let Stephen Bloom into their lives only makes the controversy surrounding his article more tragic. Placed alongside The Oxford Project, "Observations from 20 Years of Iowa Life" comes across as a cavalier and self-serving monologue, a hollow caricature of a far more complex picture.

Certainly no one would understand this better than Peter Feldstein, who has written one of the most powerful rebuttals, published recently in The Des Moines Register. I'll include a few short excerpts alongside a few of his photographs; please visit The Oxford Project and Peter Feldstein's site for larger high-resolution images :

Calvin Colony

I don't know what happened to Bloom between the making of “The Oxford Project” and his online article. What happened to the grit and strength of people attempting to survive the hardships that life presents them?

Hunter Tandy

What happened to the intelligence of people like Oxford’s Kathy Tandy, the wonderful sense of humor of people like Jim Jiras, the generosity of so many of my neighbors like Tonya Stratton Wehrle, the experiences of people who’ve suffered unspeakable horrors like Jim Hoyt and his son, Jim Jr., and the difficult life transitions met with great perseverance by people like Ben and Robin Stoker and grandparents Kathy and Darrell Lindley? What about the incredible and real family values of the Cox, Hennes, Stratton and Stockman families?

Brianne Leckness

Jim Hoyt, Jr.