Exploring the rural & putting the urban in its place

Stacey Ray is an arts admin professional, and the Programs and Communications Manager at Lane Arts Council in Eugene, OR, with serious experience in both the arts and rural life. She has previously interned with TBA Festival/PICA (Portland Institute for Contemporary Art) and studied Arts Management at the University of Oregon, but grew up in central Montana, in an unincorporated community of about 20 people, where her family has been for five generations, working as farmers, butchers, and loggers.

We talked to Stacey about her special interest in art in rural places, which was also the topic for her graduate thesis. She researched contemporary art in the rural context by looking at artist residencies around the country. Is there contemporary art outside urban spaces? Perceiving a lack of scholarship on the subject, Stacey took matters into her own hands and decided to dig into six different art residencies in rural places in the U.S.

Residencies and collectives are the ways that contemporary practice can happen in isolated and remote places. There are many challenges to being a rural community, not only isolation from centers of cultural activity, but also separation from the infrastructure that support it and barriers such as population density and lack of a shared vocabulary.

We examine the term “contemporary” and the language we use to speak about art, talk in depth about the good work being done by the Wassaic Project in NY and M12 in CO, dipping into informal versus formal participation in the arts. We also get into preconceived notions city folk have of the rural idyll as “a place to get away from but not to go, and certainly not to stay,” and avoiding being a tourist by being attentive to your surroundings. The artists and the arts organizations in rural places both act as mediators and facilitators, gaining the trust of local communities and earning their goodwill. We can’t expect people to come to us, we have to go to them. We have to meet people where they are.

Links:
Lane Art Council: http://lanearts.org/
TBA Festival/PICA: http://pica.org/tba/
Wassaic Project, NY: https://www.wassaicproject.org/
M12 Collective, CO: http://m12studio.org/index.html
Wormfarm Institute, WI: https://wormfarminstitute.org/
Grin City Collective, IA (closed operations in 2019): http://www.grincitycollective.org/
Epicenter, UT: http://ruralandproud.org/
Coleman Center for the Arts, AL: https://colemanarts.org/