Re-Thinking The Rural Arts
Day 2 / Apr, 13 @ 10:30 am
Lower Level : Room C
Rural America is undergoing a period of dramatic cultural and demographic change. Its people are poised to take agency over their own narrative, as new media is allowing for the open and decentralized sharing of stories – from next door to across the continent. In concert with this, interest in sustainable and local food systems has leant a visibility, and a cultural and economic force, to a rural landscape often relegated to distorting pastoral clichés.
These dynamic possibilities offer a moving and multi-layered metaphor for the kinds of work to be created in rural America, as artists and community members are working across disciplines to re-think and re-imagine rural America – and to make connections to their partners in urban and international locales.
This panel presents the work of four dynamic artists and community leaders who are offering a new vision for the role of the arts in rural America. By connecting across disciplines and across geographic regions, these practitioners are examples of how serious aesthetic work can also function as an engine for social change and community development.
Polly Atwell: writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013); Matthew Fluharty (moderator): poet, editor, and founder of The Art of the Rural; Brian Frink: artist, professor, and founder of Rural America Contemporary Artists; Rachel Reynolds Luster: musician, folklorist, and founder of HomeCorps; Richard Saxton: artist, professor, and founder of the M12 art collective
Speaker(s):
Brian Frink
Minnesota
Brian Frink is an artist that lives in rural, southern Minnesota. He is also the founder of the Rural America Contemporary Art Institute, or RACAi. Brian is also a professor of painting and drawing at Minnesota State University, Mankato.
Originally from Illinois, Brian and his wife Wilbur grew up near Chicago. From 1979 through 1984 they lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, early pioneers of that vibrant art community. In 1985 Brian started his graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, then in 1989 he began his academic career at MSU, M.
In 1998 Wilbur and Brian purchased the Blue Earth County poor farm. Located south of Mankato, the now named Poor Farm Studios is a nine thousand square foot building in the middle of cornfields and woods. Brian and Wilbur have their respective studios and creative spaces here. It is also where the RACAi headquarters are located.
Their art and their lives coexist with the rhythms of nature and the surrounding agricultural community.
Mary Stewart Atwell
Springfield, Missouri
Mary Stewart (Polly) Atwell is a writer, critic, and author of the novel Wild Girls (Scribner, 2013). Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories and Best New American Voices. Atwell was born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1978 and went to Interlochen, a boarding school in Michigan. She received her MA in Literature at University of Virginia and an MFA in fiction from Washington University in St. Louis. She teaches at Missouri State University.
Rachel Reynolds Luster
Ozarks, Missouri
Rachel Reynolds Luster is a folklorist working in the Missouri Ozarks. She’s a frequent speaker and writer on the topic of cultural sustainability and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Heritage Studies at Arkansas State University where her dissertation explores a holistic approach to rural community revitalization. She is the contributing editor for The Art of The Rural.
Rachel is the founder of HomeCorps, a program that helps rural students, after graduation, lead community recovery projects, stemming youth loss and strengthening rural areas in decline. The non-profit program offers youth a stipend to remain in their home communities for the year following graduation to work on a community restoration project of their own design with guidance from program administrators and a community mentor, strengthening youth bonds to place and community, reducing youth out-migration, and helping to revitalize communities.
Richard Saxton
Denver, Colorado
Richard Saxton is a visual artist and educator currently living in Denver, Colorado. Saxton’s work is conceived through an interdisciplinary cultural framework, and can be contextualized through social and site-based art practice. Saxton’s work has been described as contemporary vernacular, non-heroic, and an art infused with rural experience without subscribing to any one genre or culture. Saxton is the founder of M12, an interdisciplinary art collective that focuses their artistic investigations primarily in rural areas, developing ideas through dialogical and collaborative approaches. M12 creates and supports new modes of art-making in often remote, under-represented communities, and focuses on experiential practices that explore community identity and the value of often under-represented rural communities and their surrounding landscapes. Saxton is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Matthew Fluharty
St. Louis, Missouri
Matthew Fluharty is the Founder of The Art of the Rural, the leading resource for information and commentary on the state of contemporary rural arts and culture, from the traditional to the avant-garde. Matthew is currently working to organize The Rural Arts Working Group, an effort supported by The Center for Rural Strategies and other national and regional foundations.
His poetry has been published widely in the US and Europe. He is currently a Visiting Writer and a PhD Candidate at Washington University in Saint Louis, where he is writing on “rural modernism” in British, Irish, and American literature. He is the son of a fifth-generation farming family from Southeastern Ohio.
