Art of the Rural is the Art of the Story: 15 Years of Place-Based Storytelling
Experience our Programs Associate Hannah Almon Matangos' American Folklore Society presentation, reflecting on the role of storytelling in our work.
Our Programs Associate Hannah Almon Matangos loved attending her first American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in October - and getting to hang out with so many folklorist friends in person! She also loved formally presenting on Art of the Rural for the first time since joining the organization in 2023.
The theme for this year’s AFS was “restorying” - or “the respeaking, rewriting, or refashioning of stories that have been erased, forgotten, or subsumed under the auspices of a larger story” in “a process that gives agency to those who have been disenfranchised or neglected through systematic erasure.” Hannah’s presentation has been rewritten in article format for you below, with photos, video, and audio. Thank you for supporting our work!
From its beginnings as a Web 2.0 blog in 2010 to its cross-regional, hybrid programming in the 2020s, Art of the Rural has been restorying the rural by bringing together artists, culture bearers, and audiences from across the United States through storytelling and material practice.
Founded in 2010, Art of the Rural is a collaborative arts nonprofit organization dedicated to resourcing artists & culture bearers to build the field, change narratives, and bridge divides. Headquartered in Winona, Minnesota, a town on the Mississippi River within Dakota homelands, Art of the Rural’s cross-regional work brings together rural communities through a myriad of storytelling methods.
Why storytelling?
While rooted in the verbal, Art of the Rural’s storytelling methods center the material conditions and creations of our collaborators, enfolding past, present, and future in sharing the rural communities, histories, and cultures they embody.
In our contemporary moment, this restorying of the rural counters the biased, politicized representations of the regions & people we serve - representations that have been perpetuated for decades by elite coastal mainstream media. This dominant narrative would have us think that rural America is homogenous in terms of identity, ideology, and lived experience. However, as Art of the Rural’s work shows, the story of rural America is as multifaceted and complex as its geography and the people who live there.
Let’s explore the role of storytelling throughout Art of the Rural’s 15-year history, and particularly in how my organization’s storytelling practice stewards connections with and within rural America and the Native Nations sharing this geography. I’ll touch briefly on the original Art of the Rural blog (2010-2013) before discussing our ongoing initiatives, including the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX; 2014-present), High Visibility (2020-present), and Spillway in the Upper Mississippi River Region (2022-present). I’ll also share some of the challenges of this work.
Since the start, Art of the Rural has been centered on storytelling, which itself bridges methods & modalities, from oral to written, in-person to online, formal to informal. This storytelling practice centers the voices, lived experiences, and material creative practices of the storytellers - a diversity of individuals whose stories & artmaking are deeply intertwined with their local communities and regions. Throughout our work and impact, Art of the Rural is the art of the story, bringing people together despite distance & dominant narratives to envision a shared history and a shared future.
The Art of the Rural Blog
As mentioned above, Art of the Rural actually began as a blog. “The Art Of The Rural” blog was started in January 2010 by now-Executive Director Matthew Fluharty on the Blogger platform. The blog published posts including narrative pieces, critiques, roundups, and interviews about rurally-rooted art, writing, festivals, music, films, and ephemera from across the United States and beyond with an intercultural lens.
This blog was the main home for Art of the Rural until 2013 when the organization’s work was re-established at our current website. With momentum building online and across the country through this storytelling work about rural arts & culture, Art of the Rural began collaborating towards field-expanding digital projects and in-person gatherings and initiatives, including the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange.
Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX)
The Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (or RUX) was founded in 2014 by Savannah Barrett and Josh May as a partnership of Art of the Rural and Appalshop, an Appalachia-focused arts & media nonprofit based in Whitesburg, KY. RUX is a statewide network that unites Kentuckians in common purpose through programs that strengthen intercultural leadership, narrative change, and civic health. It is led through distributed leadership, including Art of the Rural staff, a statewide Steering Committee, and dozens of local, regional, and statewide partners.
From the start, Savannah & Josh believed that, to quote them, “the shortest distance between two people is a story,” and they designed RUX around them. Storytelling helps you get to know a person, their place, and your own in turn, while fostering connection, trust, and an interest in a shared future.
Since 2014, RUX has grown to support intercultural, cross-sector leaders across Kentucky while uplifting diverse narratives of what it means to be a Kentuckian. Both through the flagship leadership cohort and the annual forum The Golden Thread, RUX takes people from across the state, from all kinds of lives, backgrounds and places, and helps folks find common ground through shared experiences of rural and urban communities in every region of the state, often through arts & culture.
Storycircles
Storytelling is at the heart of RUX, not only in one on one personal time, but also specifically through the program’s Currency of Connection curriculum which includes the methodologies of Story Circles and Narrative Stages. An example prompt from a recent storycircle was: “Tell a story about a memory in your favorite place when you were a child.” And participants – who may not be acquainted at this point in the program – each had time to share, uninterrupted and without preparation, a story. This deep listening and deep vulnerability create new connections and shared experiences for participants, and they build trust.
Narrative Stages
Also during RUX’s leadership program, in lieu of highly structured panels or presentations, RUX hosts Narrative Stages to encourage deep listening and rich exchanges between the leadership cohort and featured guests. Learned from public folklore practice, these conversations are moderated by a trained folklorist (often one of our long-time collaborators at the Kentucky Arts Council). Whether a folk artist, a local farmer, or a local official, Narrative Stage presenters often feel there is some aspect of their home or livelihood that is poorly understood and under-appreciated. In this process, stories are shared, often intertwining past, present, and future tenses, and lending to a more nuanced, complex, personal reflection on people & place, in both rural & urban communities that RUX is hosted in.
Below, tune into a Narrative Stage from RUX’s 2023 Community Intensive in Owensboro about African American leadership in the area.
High Visibility
The second initiative I’ll share is High Visibility, a long-term series of collaborations with between Art of the Rural and artists, organizations, and institutions across the continent. High Visibility launched with an exhibition of the same name at the Plains Art Museum.
Welcoming a diverse range of artworks, practices, and histories, High Visibility aims to spark a national reappraisal of the critical and cultural dynamics within contemporary visual art and socially-engaged practice in rural and Indigenous communities – and provide much-needed cultural context in a moment when the rural-urban divide feels especially acute in the art world & societally.
This exhibition also coincided with the launch of the High Visibility podcast and the distribution of the first issue of the free High Visibility newspaper. This was Art of the Rural’s first foray into podcasting, which, in addition to interviews, put artists into conversation with each other through the Long Conversation, an unmoderated interview format consisting of unstructured relays between interviewees, centered on story sharing and reflection - which we also use throughout our programs like RUX and internal relationship building. Overall, High Visibility and the media projects surrounding it restories the non-urban while centering interdisciplinary, cross-regional creative practice.
Spillway
The third initiative I’d like to share is Spillway. Through support for artists, culture bearers, artisans, and storytellers – alongside the local organizations that support them – Spillway works to create the conditions for engaged projects that honor diverse lived experience, deepen regional relationships, and build rural-urban networks of knowledge-sharing and exchange that will create opportunities for artists, culture bearers, and artisans to thrive, connect with new colleagues and audiences.
Spillway Stories
Since 2022, Spillway Stories brings together artists, culture-bearers, and storytellers to share history, experiences, and visions for the future that animate community in the Winona, MN, region. This project weaves a diverse range of artworks, photographs, written features, and oral histories in a community where past and future are closely intertwined, illuminating the deep differences in the way locals experience place depending on their identity, culminating in a local archive of creative practice, intercultural leadership, & lived experience in the area. The stories shared through the project were produced through a collaboration between Art of the Rural and Engage Winona.
In June 2024, the first issue of the Spillway Stories magazine launched, featuring the original stories from 2022 and new stories from 2024. The magazine launch coincided with the opening of a gallery exhibition at the Engage Winona space, featuring the portraits of the creative changemakers from the magazine. You can check them out on the Spillway website at spillway.xyz.
The story continues
So what’s next? This year, in many ways, Art of the Rural’s digital storytelling work has come full circle - my colleagues and I see the way that the storytelling ethos of the original blog - a deeply relational, local celebration of people & place - has been a direct throughline to our initiatives and to our current digital media projects, including the new Art of the Rural podcast and our Broadsheet Substack publication.
This work hasn’t been without its challenges, and I admire my colleagues’ longstanding commitment to restorying the rural, as I’ve only been part of Art of the Rural’s story for the past 2 years. Throughout the last 15 years, increasing polarization and politicization have affected not just artists but all our neighbors in all geographies and sectors. There are always complications of distance in engaging rural creatives, who may live in areas with limited or low-speed Internet access. And there is always a need to ensure digital content is accessible to intergenerational and nonvisual audiences.
Increasingly, there is (warranted) skepticism around the incorporation of digital platforms into storytelling, including the risks of relying on data- and profit-centered platforms to gather our community at a time when marginalized communities are especially vigilant about surveillance and artists are wary of the AI co-optation of their creativity by large platforms like Meta and beyond.
Yet the desire to connect and share stories across rural & Native communities and creative practice continues. Next year, we are continuing the trajectory of High Visibility with a year-long, rural-focused, intercultural series of media projects & gatherings to connect artists (broadly defined) and vision an interdependent, collaborative, creative future across the country.
Our goal is to touch every state & region to share the nuanced narratives of people & places and invigorate networks of institutional support in a time of precarity - so stay tuned on how to get involved!
Beautiful article, Hannah!! Cheers to 15 years of Art of the Rural's stellar storytelling in all of its varied, nuanced and potent forms...and here's to many many more! So honored to witness and intersect with many of these story circles, and for the support to share my own as well.
Great article! I loved reading about the importance of storytelling as a tool to build bridges. It was fun to hear the folks from Owensboro tell their stories.