While revisiting some of the resource links on the blog, the title of a piece on the Community Arts Network site caught my eye- Putting Culture Back in Agriculture. The piece is a grant report for the University of Wisconsin Extension, but don’t let that dissuade you from reading it. It is not dry in the least and is very inspirational.
As a small town boy who goes nostalgic at the smell of cow manure, there were a lot of tidbits that caught my eye. The first was the vision of one of the earliest university presidents, Charles Van Hise.
“I would have no mute, inglorious Milton in this state-I would have everybody who has a talent have an opportunity to find his way so far as his talent will carry him, and that is only possible through university extension supplementing the schools and colleges.”
My imagination was also set afire by the story of John Steuart Curry
“…hired as the nation’s first visual artist-in-residence, with a job description of helping anyone on the farm – farmer, farm wife, farm youth – to paint. …he believed that everyone has the ability to paint what was most alive to him – that it was just a matter of enabling people to do so. He emphasized personal vision over technique. As a result, paintings by farmers who worked with Curry are dramatic, breathtakingly alive.”
I am sure the reality isn’t as ideal as my imagination makes it given that Curry was going around Wisconsin during the middle of the Great Depression. It is hard to imagine him being welcomed with open arms at least initially. In fact, according to the piece farmers are a little suspicious of artists in these days of prosperity (relative to the 1930s).
One of the observations the grant writers make as they report about the project is that “Rural arts groups have tended to emulate urban arts groups, and management books have suggested that nothing but scale distinguishes urban and rural arts groups. More and more, we are realizing that this is not the case.”
The writers openly admit that their initial plan of having a statewide conference where they were setting the agenda was probably wrongheaded. It was only due to having to cut back their planned activities because they weren’t fully funded that they feel they ended up stumbling on a much more constructive approach.
In the interests of brevity, I will leave it to you to read how they ended up supporting projects at four locations around the state and what the projects entailed. Some of the project conclusions that jumped right out at me came from the program at a place called The Wormfarm Institute.
Conclusions included: 1) putting ‘agri’ back into ‘culture’ is perhaps more important than putting ‘culture’ back into ‘agriculture’; 2) culture and agriculture are interdependent and this does not mean that ‘artists interpret farmers’ lives; nor does it mean artists are marketers or political mouthpieces for farmers;…
There were a plethora of valuable observations throughout the report at the other sites, including why it was better for them to have taken this route than implementing their initial conference plan. The next thing that really jumped out at me was in the “What We Learned” section.
That ‘art’ is indistinguishable from ‘culture,’ and that this is a good thing and it resonates with people. ‘Art’ may conjure up the stage, galleries, appropriate audience behavior. Even the word can leave people out; where blending creativity with food, traditions, history, meals and conversation communicates and invites people in.
This is a loaded observation for two reasons. First, because solutions to problems like the ones they had getting artists and farmers to talk to each other productively go deeper than just saying culture rather than art. The reporter writers certainly know this. Honestly, I am making this point because I have come across a number of egregious examples of late where people seem convinced they can solve their problems by shuffling terms and buzzwords.
The second reason is that the observation touches upon the whole “What is Art?” and “Art vs. Craft” debate. Yes, they seem to be celebrating rural culture more than art. But they are also saying art and culture are the same and are specifically getting artists, whom they label separately as a group from the farmers, involved in the program so they presumably have something to offer.
So then, is a loaf of homemade bread equivalent to a painting?
The debate has never been clearly resolved in my view but it can be fun to engage in from time to time. Certainly for me a loaf of homemade bread has a greater emotional and sensory appeal than most paintings. I am actually tearing up as I write this remembering baking (and eating!) bread.