In this section of Broadsheet, our staff gathers resources to read, watch, and listen to from across the field of rural arts & culture.
Exhibitions
Mary Sully: Native Modern
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Mary Sully—born Susan Mabel Deloria on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota—was a little-known, reclusive Yankton Dakota artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive work informed by her Native American and settler ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully’s groundbreaking production highlights recent Met acquisitions and loans from the Mary Sully Foundation, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art. This exhibition was on view July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025.
Out of Site: Survey Science and the Hidden West
The Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, CA
The Western landscape is a place where the transformation of physical space involves both visualization and manipulation, where the connections between what can be physically seen and how it is visually represented are not always clear; technologies originally designed to render places visible often became instruments of invisibility and surveillance, severing western lands from the populations that depend on them. This exhibition was on view May 18, 2024-January 5, 2025
Field Language: The Painting & Poetry of Warren & Jane Rohrer
Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA
This exhibition examines the art of Warren Rohrer (b. 1927, Smoketown, PA, d. 1995) as it evolved in conversation with poet Jane Turner Rohrer (b. 1928), his partner of nearly fifty years. Field Language traces dialogues between husband and wife, painting and poetry, and between tradition and modernism, particularly in the context of rural southcentral Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Dutch & Mennonite heritage. This website serves as a digital companion to the exhibition at the Palmer Museum of Art, which was on view from February 10-May 30, 2021.
Articles
Crystal Wilkinson, "Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts" (Emergence Magazine)
Remembering her grandmother’s jam cake, biscuits, and sweet black tea, Crystal Wilkinson evokes a legacy of joy, love, and plenty in the culinary traditions of Black Appalachia.
Mina Kim, "Reframing the Impossible into Opportunities: Rural Creative Placemaking with John Davis" (Creative Placemaking Technical Assistance)
In this interview, John discusses how valuing local people’s experiences and listening to multiple perspectives have guided him in co-creating processes relevant and meaningful to community members. He also highlights lessons learned from earlier projects in New York Mills (Pop. 1,301) and Lanesboro (Pop. 717), both in Minnesota, as well as his current work with Warroad RiverPlace, the first arts and cultural center in the nation to be accessible by boat, kayak, canoe, ice skate path, snowmobile, and cross country skiers, in Warroad (Pop. 1,824), Minnesota.
Gina Favano, "Below Deck at Back Channel Radio" (Mn Artists)
What it takes to document a subculture from the inside: a community archivist tells the story of the only year-round habitable boathouse community left on the Mississippi River.
Literary Landscapes in Kansas (The New Territory Magazine)
High Plains Public Radio and The New Territory Magazine present “Literary Landscapes in Kansas: from the Ground to the Airwaves.” This project invites Kansans to explore the present and ponder future possibilities for the region. Funding for this program is provided by Humanities Kansas, a nonprofit cultural organization that connects communities with history, traditions, and ideas to strengthen civic life. Visit the Literary Landscapes page to read more than 60 essays across the Midwest landscape.
Chase McCleary, "Bought-out, priced out, burned out: the individuals fighting to keep local journalism alive in Colorado" (Rocky Mountain PBS)
Read about the struggles facing local newsrooms across Colorado and recent efforts to document local news sources and keep print media circulating.
Andrea Everett, "A Sacred River’s Sovereignty" (BorderLore)
A Tigua Pueblo woman honors traditional knowledge for the restoration of the Rio Grande.
BorderLore is a free online journal documenting, sharing, and elevating folklife in the US-Mexico borderlands region. They publish six times a year to uplift folklife practices often “hidden in plain view” and to connect people across culture, tradition, and geography.
Isa Luzarraga, "Immigrant farmers rarely get federal aid to farm in Nebraska. These nonprofits are helping." (Flatwater Free Press)
Documentation status, language barriers and lack of information can all create barriers for immigrants to access federal grants. Now a number of organizations are stepping in to provide direct support.
Books & Publications
Madeline ffitch, Stay and Fight (AK Press, 2019)
Set in Appalachia, a region known for its independent spirit, Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature and make deals with the system.
Springboard for the Arts, Heartland, Heartwork: A Field Guide for Place and Possibility for Rural Leaders (2024)
Developed in partnership between Springboard for the Arts & the Blandin Foundation, this comprehensive field guide is designed to empower rural leaders in planning and executing effective place-based projects centered in arts, culture and creativity.
Steven Conn, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—And Isn't (Chicago UP, 2023)
In The Lies of the Land, Conn shows that rural America—so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind—has actually been at the center of modern American history. Conn invites us to dispense with the lies and half-truths we’ve believed about rural America and to pursue better solutions to the very real challenges shared all across our nation.
Film & Video
Lakota Nation vs. United States (dir. Jesse Short Bull & Laura Tomaselli, 2023)
The Lakota fight to protect their sacred land. A provocative, visually stunning testament to a land and a people who have survived removal, exploitation and genocide – and whose best days are yet to come.
Stranger With A Camera (dir. Elizabeth Barret, 2000)
In 1967, rising tension between media and community in Appalachia led to an extreme and tragic response, when Eastern Kentuckian Hobart Ison shot and killed Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor, who was in the region to document conditions of poverty. Stranger with a Camera revisits this tragedy as a way to examine the relationship between media-makers and the communities they portray in their work.
Podcasts & Radio
5 Plain Questions (Plains Art Museum & Eleven Warrior Arts LLC, 2020-present)
The new season launches with an interview with Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore, an independent filmmaker and Kanyen'kehà:ka (Mohawk) citizen.
“When a Dream Dies - Pamela Riney-Kehrberg,” Heartland History (Midwestern History Association)
Dr. Pamela Riney-Kehrberg (Iowa State University) discusses her new book, When a Dream Dies: Agriculture, Iowa, and the Farm Crisis of the 1980s.