Matthew Fluharty

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The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Matthew Fluharty is the founder and executive director of Art of the Rural, an organization that works to support and promote the work of artists and culture bearers across the country and that also aims to bridge cultural divides across urban and rural areas.

Initially created as a blog in 2010, Art of the Rural has since then developed several long-term projects in collaboration with artists and community leaders, particularly in the upper Midwest (Art of the Rural is based in Winona, MN) and in Kentucky Appalachia. Projects have included “High Visibility: On Location in Rural American and Indian Country,” a collaboration with the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND, the first major museum exhibition highlighting contemporary art practice across these geographies; and two cultural-exchange programs – the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange and the Minnesota Rural-Urban Exchange – that have afforded scores of artists a chance to immerse themselves meaningfully in settings once unfamiliar to them.

In this interview, Matthew offers an eye-opening look at the connections between rural and urban communities, challenging the idea of a “divide” and showing how collaboration and cultural exchange are reshaping how we think about art, place, and belonging. He also details the kind of shift in perspective institutions and funders must embrace to ensure that the many artists in rural America and Indian Country continue serving their communities.

Pier Carlo Talenti: I noticed in your bio that you have several advanced degrees in the literary arts, and so I’m curious at what point in your coming up as an artist you realized that your focus was going to be rooted in place and history of place.

Matthew Fluharty: I’m from a multi-generational farm in Appalachian Ohio, and that’s always been the context or the lens through which I’ve thought about my own life and what I’m doing and how it relates to the things around me, so it was always there. In my own journey, I think the question was simply what practice would that take? I think I knew early on that I probably wasn’t going to be a good farmer. [He laughs.] So what are these other ways of being responsible and creative in place? The literary arts and poetry were the first building block on that journey for me.

Pier Carlo: What was it specifically about studying and practicing in rural settings as you have for a while now that attracted you?

Matthew: Well, I think the more specific creative journey began when I was studying in County Donegal, Ireland. I had the privilege of working on a master’s in creative writing through Lancaster University in the U.K. but through this very intimate poetry program in County Donegal. Grant Wood says a version of this in his own way, but I don’t think I really fully understood my little area of rural America or Appalachia until I went to rural Ireland and I saw a landscape that in some respects was similar. Also similar in terms of some of the social contours of that landscape.

County Donegal itself is a pretty remote county. It’s in the Republic. It’s further north than most of Northern Ireland, and it’s part of one of the regions in the Republic known as a Gaeltacht. The Irish language is spoken there; it has a really primary place in the culture. Though I never learned to speak Irish — I tried when I was at Boston College — I think that interrelationship between place and culture and community and initially language put together some kind of alchemy for myself so that I began to question how my own life’s journey intercepted with that.

Pier Carlo: It’s so interesting to me that you had to leave home in order to be able to write about or understand it better.

Matthew: Yeah, it’s real. In Appalachia in particular ... . There’s so many different Appalachias. Appalachian Ohio is definitely different than, say, Eastern Kentucky Appalachia, but Appalachia is a culture and a landscape, and it’s a literary and artistic tradition.

Pier Carlo: That is heavily connected to Ireland, of course.

Matthew: Yes! Yeah, definitely super long-term, multi-generationally connected to that, and at the same time, it’s such a huge tradition that it can feel overwhelming. I think, being in Ireland, being in County Donegal and the Gaeltacht, it gave me an external viewpoint through which to feel some space in my own personal tradition.

Pier Carlo: You talked about realizing that you wanted to intersect your personal life with this understanding of place and of the rural, which makes me want to ask about your founding Art of the Rural. Could you talk about how you decided to create this organization?

Matthew: It was a challenging process, I have to say. I was starting Art of the Rural while finishing a dissertation, and I defended that in 2013 and really had the good fortune of being a research fellow in American studies and then in the art school at WashU. I had a period where I could think through these questions and do work, but it was clear that there was a fork in the road and I had to take a leap.

Pier Carlo: And what was the fork? Was it between entering the academy and doing something else? 

Matthew: Yeah, it was between entering the academy or just pursuing this vision with Art of the Rural. Increasingly, I don’t see them as mutually exclusive, though at the time I also had a young family. I knew there was only so much that I could achieve in either mission. And so we incorporated in 2014.

Pier Carlo: That’s important to note, that having a family, you were also concerned about income.

Matthew: Yeah. Honestly, I think this is left out of the arts conversation sometimes.

Pier Carlo: I know, which is why I’m happy to talk about it.

Matthew: What I should say as well is I don’t see being in the academy and being involved in an arts nonprofit doing creative work as binaries at all, because in many respects, my advisors at WashU were very, very enthusiastic about the blog. Now all academics have blogs, but at that point, I was a real anomaly for having a blog, and that’s a whole other story. 

What I would say maybe more concisely is that my advisors were very supportive of Art of the Rural as a concept, as a vehicle for writing and thinking and connection. They connected me to the school of entrepreneurship at WashU, which ended up being — this is such an overused term — really a game-changer for the future of Art of the Rural in terms of just thinking about how to craft a mission statement, how to share it in front of an audience, how to think about a lot of organizational and leadership elements that are certainly not taught in a humanities degree program. I credit the school of entrepreneurship at WashU really deeply for the journey that began to unfold. 

Art of the Rural at that stage did portend certain academic work, and there were really kind offers from a couple schools for Art of the Rural, essentially for me to travel with Art of the Rural to those environments. But within that same time, we had built a number of networks around the country and really received some positive encouragement and mentorship from a number of foundations showing that there was a runway here for this program to exist and to make useful impacts in the arts field. It was really those encouragements that led to going in that direction and founding the nonprofit. We received our first grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2015, and then that coincided with a move out of St. Louis and further upriver to Winona, MN.

Pier Carlo: You’ve stayed firmly attached to and continued to explore the Mississippi. That’s a fundamental theme in your research and work, right? 

Matthew: It is. Short of being in Ireland, I can’t imagine myself not near the river. It’s just become a companion, a four-dimensional companion almost.

Pier Carlo: I explained what Art of the Rural is, but it’s hard to encompass all that you do in a simple introduction. I wonder if you can talk about one project and describe what its research is, what it attempts to do and who’s involved. 

Matthew: So many examples come to mind, but just thinking about just the gorgeous artistic and cultural continuum of the Upper Mississippi, I really think about the Spillway initiative that, in various shapes and forms, Art of the Rural has been collaborating with folks on really for 10 years at this point. All of our initiatives are very long-term, very patient, but the Spillway work really was one of the bridges towards our journey further north to Winona, MN and to Dakota homelands.

It began in St. Louis and East St. Louis in this region called the American Bottom that was called such until the Louisiana purchase because it was the floodplains at the end of, at that point, what was the contiguous United States of America. It’s a 60-mile-long floodplain.

I just had the tremendous luck of collaborating with Jesse Vogler, who is an amazing landscape architect, and Jim Colton, who is an extraordinary photographer. This was in this period where I was really trying to think out what the next step was for my career with Art of the Rural. Running downstream next to that was this deeply, deeply immersive work looking at a region that for the most part is unacknowledged as a region, this floodplain that extends from Alton, IL down to about 40 miles south of St. Louis. East St. Louis is in the middle of it, which is its own racial challenge for the mindset of the Midwest. 

Though there were a lot of really heavy things and heavy choices in that period, that work led to a regional newspaper called The American Bottom Gazette. It led to thinking through how to exhibit artwork and cultural- and landscape-based research in insights that might seem really unconventional to the arts world, like exhibitions that are in job-site trailers in small towns of the American Bottom and the industrial towns of the American Bottom. 

We knew from the start it was long-term, just the process of building deep relationship with folks, everyone from county historical societies to community organizers to folks running restaurant and to artists. That ethic and that commitment to the story being long and it needing years and years and years led to our overall strategy with the Spillway effort, which looks at the Upper Mississippi and really seeks to support artists and culture bearers and the local organizations that support them and to do so primarily through fellowships, which are themselves long-term. They’re 18-month fellowships that don’t begin with a “deliverable” named. It’s support for these individuals to work with organizations to have the time to assess what work matters, what cultural stories have not been heard, what hasn’t been seen, what relationships could be built with some material support as a foundation. I think the American Bottom work was our own self-funded fellowship in that way.

At this point, these Spillway Fellowships have supported really incredible individuals, folks like Faye Dant in Hannibal, MO, who is a Black culture bearer. Out of the fellowship and out of her founding and direction and leadership of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center there in Hannibal, she has created a book called “Hannibal’s Invisibles.” It’s amazing to think it is the first book about Black history and lived experience in Hannibal, MO, which is the birthplace of Mark Twain, for whom there’s a whole tourism industry and a publishing industry and so many things. From that kind of work to a little closer to home up here, there’s work supporting really deep intercultural exchange between Dakota artists and their communities but also between the white settler communities up here as well. 

I think the common prismatic light between this is, it’s about land and culture and history and about honoring one’s own inheritance and life but also honoring cultural difference and really leaning into, how do we share these stories with various audiences such that we can build relationship?

Pier Carlo: What stories that have come out of Spillway would you never have learned were it not for Spillway?

Matthew: I think what comes to mind when I think about this question and Spillway is that what we’re seeking first and foremost is to support artists and culture bearers and those local organizations that they work with. But what I think has been just so profound and beautiful, to use one example, is how that seed germinates deeper regional and community relationship and connection. 

The example that I would use would be Spillway’s fellowship support of Honoring Dakota, which is an absolutely extraordinary intercultural organization that works in collaboration with Red Wing Arts. Red Wing is a city maybe about an hour south of the Twin Cities. Red Wing is also really close to Prairie Island Indian Community, a Dakota community. Honoring Dakota is an organization that seeks through intercultural exchange to elevate visibility, storytelling, right relationship and healing for that region and for the broader region that I find myself in here in Winona. It’s really been one of the most profound experiences of my time with Art of the Rural to experience how Honoring Dakota and members of Prairie Island Indian Community have not only created work and furthered their own practice and their own relationships but how that work has really expanded connection and knowledge and right relationship with the community here in Winona.

I can safely say that I think without the Spillway fellowship those effects would’ve happened, but they would not have happened in such a concentrated way across the course of 18 months. This is the power of artistic and cultural work, that in and of itself it has such depths, but it also has the ability to move social understanding and I think even to move civic policy-based outcomes. That’s always also one of our hopes with our work at Art of the Rural, that over the long term, some of those elements can also occur.

 

Pier Carlo: Speaking of social understanding, I’d love to learn more about the Rural-Urban Exchange that Art of the Rural has been running for a while now. What kinds of misunderstandings do you think such exchanges are correcting?

Matthew: What I would say we have found through that work in Kentucky … . So in 10 years, about 300 folks have gone through the program; it’s reached 65 counties; we’ve had really intensive, deep intercultural community cohorts in 16 different places across Kentucky. Out of that really long work, I think what we have found is that the questions that we need to ask might be different than the ones that are being asked.

I think one of the unhelpful things that has occurred in these last seven or eight years has been taking as a given that there’s rural-urban divide or saying the words rural-urban divide without asking a little bit more deeply, what’s the water that is beneath that bedrock? Because so many times we say that, and I think, especially in the press, it’s a shorthand for saying Republican and Democrat or something like that.

Pier Carlo: And also, in a way, white versus people of color, whereas we all know there’s plenty of people of color in rural settings. But, yes, there’s a lot of coded language, and politicians in the media are amplifying these misunderstandings because it gets a lot of people talking, I think.

Matthew: Yeah. And when folks come together across Kentucky or more recently in the last four years here in Minnesota across rural, urban and Native nations up here, what you find is those binaries really only serve the people in power. Those aren’t the animating forces of everyday community life or life in a county or a region of a state. What I think has emerged really powerfully in Kentucky and in Minnesota is that the heart of this work is intercultural. It’s not necessarily about politics — and politics is a part of people’s lives — but it’s about everyday experience. It’s about people’s personal history, their family history, where they grew up, where they came from.

I’ve been really grateful the degree to which this program has been covered in the press, but sometimes it’s too easy to cast this as a, “Oh, they’re bringing people together across political difference.” That would be such shallow work if that was the mission of the Rural-Urban Exchange. It’s about folks who maybe grew up in Louisville having a chance to go to the Eastern Kentucky coal fields, and say you’re a community organizer in Louisville, you meet someone who’s doing that work in Eastern Kentucky, or you’re a folklorist in Eastern Kentucky and you meet somebody doing folklore work in Western Kentucky. What it has done really powerfully in Kentucky for the individuals involved, I think, has been truly a living organism all to itself, which is built … .

I think we say words like relationship and connection sometimes as if they’re words that we can just color in whenever we want, almost like they’re disposable words. But what has happened in Kentucky has been real connection, and organizations and programs and collaborations have come out of this work alongside just folks meeting each other’s families, camping together, having meals together.

I think, in the arts field, sometimes it’s a necessity to measure things and make metrics, but how do you measure the vitality and the beautiful cultural difference of a network? It just has to say it itself. And that’s really what Kentucky RUX has done at this point. It’s hundreds of folks who really are an ecosystem all to themselves. You’d be hard-pressed to encapsulate what all of that work has done or meant or is doing. It’s a community. It’s a legit community.

Pier Carlo: And what about that work makes it art?

Matthew: I would say there certainly are a lot of artists and culture bearers involved with it.

Pier Carlo: But that’s not an expectation. In other words, a work of art does not have to come out of the exchange, right?

Matthew: No, it definitely doesn’t. It’s about being with folks. That’s really what it’s about, really deeply experiencing community. 

In the case of Kentucky or in Minnesota, there’s a cohort of roughly 30 to 50 folks, and they agree to a two-year process where certainly there’s some gathering online. But the heart of the arc of one’s time in RUX is two to three cohort gatherings each year — so double that for two years — and they’re held in various communities across the state: urban, rural. Up here in Minnesota, two of the cohort gatherings were held at White Earth up in Northwestern Minnesota as well. 

What that’s an opportunity to do is for folks to gather. There’s a really extraordinary relational curriculum attached to RUX that was co-authored by dozens of folks, and it gives folks an opportunity to really, deeply experience place through the eyes and lived experience of those who live there. It gives folks a chance to hear about the challenges and the opportunities in those places through the voices of those most directly affected by it. Now we get really far from just a media narrative about a place. It’s super-intimate, it’s challenging, it’s complex, but it also offers really porous ways for folks from across the state to feel involved and connected and as collaborators in that work. 

I love this question because one of the things that I thought about immediately after the presidential election in 2016 as really unprecedented media attention was being directed towards rural areas was that a lot of Art of the Rural’s work, the folks we work with and the work we share, broadly defined could be called social-practice work. But in those immediate weeks after 2016, it really illuminated how ill-equipped even the conventional social-practice field was for speaking to this dynamic in rural places. There are absolutely rural social-practice artists, and there were in 2016, but it was not even where that field was in terms of raising up work and building connection.

In many respects, I think it is not important to Kentucky or Minnesota RUX to talk about it as a social-practice project because it really isn’t, but I would say the long-term impacts that many social-practice projects propose really are returned a hundredfold through something like RUX, which is long-term and is deeply self-determined by the individuals involved with it.

Pier Carlo: I’d love to talk about the relationship of your work to your spiritual journey. How did that evolve, and how does one practice feed the other?

Matthew: Going back to that point where I was a writer and a literary critic and Art of the Rural came into the picture, during that same period, I really fell in love with the poetry from the Tang dynasty period in China. There are some just absolutely gorgeous translations by American poets, Red Pine in particular. Copper Canyon Press publishes a lot of Red Pine’s works. I just love that poetry; it spoke to me. What I discovered through the deeper process of reading it and reading the notes and just opening up the drawers in these questions on the desk was that this work was coming out of a Buddhist or a Daoist perspective. I think it just was a low-level curiosity for a while. I would say that that curiosity really intensified.

To be honest, I think it probably was around 2016. I had never really thought about the connection between those two things, but I know that was an intense period for all of us. I think for folks in the rural space it was very fraught. At that point, I’m in my 30s, I’m thinking about my own life, how to be a good father, thinking about time — t­he conceptual artist On Kawara is one of my most favorite artists —  and just discovering more and more jazz artists who were appealing to Buddhism and Zen. And I have just the absolute, amazing great fortune of there being a Zen center, Dharma River, here in Winona, MN. It’s connected to the Zen Garland Order, which has sanghas across North America but also overseas as well. I just started going there and meditating and checking out what that was for a while.

One of the real statements, I think, of truth about Zen in particular is that you can read about it, you can listen to podcasts about it, you can meditate by yourself. If that’s all that one does, that is beautiful, but one of the later steps with that is being with people in relationship. This is where this absolutely connects to so much of the Art of the Rural work: what can be found, what can be discussed, what can be made complex and made simple through relationships and through teaching and understanding.

It’s a real human tendency to think about what we would call dualism, that I am an individual and I’m acting in the world in certain ways, and I am separate from the world. This goes to that. That’s where we end up with subject and object. That’s how we noun things. That’s how in our most crucial moments, in our most consequential moments in the art field, we can noun a word like native sovereignty or equity. We can noun it, and in nouning it, we isolate ourselves from others. And of course, in our personal life — I’ve noun-ed a lot of things, and I still do —to know that there is this possibility to verb it.

What’s beautiful about that is that the arts provide so many opportunities to reinvestigate that as a way of being. I think a lot of folks have read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.” That book is just a really gorgeous articulation of bringing verbing into the world. She writes in there about the grammar of animacy, about just the living presence of plants and animals and water. I think when we’re verbing, these things that we think we just act on, I think we offer space for us to be in communion and in relationship with them, and I think that really changes how one walks in the world, how one thinks about the consequences of their actions and their responsibilities to others.

Pier Carlo: Let’s consider structural change. You must have some ideas, now that you’ve done the work as long as you have, of ways in which rural artists could be supported better than they are currently.

Matthew: So many. Yeah. [He sighs.] So let me try to articulate this through a couple different vistas of scale. 

If one of the goals is to think about this work as a field, we need institutions to come along with us. We need institutions to take chances. We need institutions to do the things that institutions do to bring people together to catalyze conversations, to welcome in researchers and scholars and folks thinking across disciplines, to welcome those folks around the questions that artists and culture bearers are raising through their work. I think that just would be such an electric moment for all of us if that begins to occur in any kind of way. So I think there’s that.

I would say as well if we move beyond that element of scale towards, “Let’s just think regionally,” I think what’s really exciting that is happening is acknowledging that the way that folks regionally receive information has really shifted in the last 10 years. So I think one of the really important structural things that could occur, which is occurring, is for institutions and funders to really support different forms of commentary, different forms of reporting, different forms of news that are really responsible regionally. 

I would raise up a magazine like The New Territory, which is working in the Lower Midwest, and a news institution like Flatwater Free Presss in Nebraska. These are things which exist in regional news deserts for really deep cultural writing, but these are also the avenues through which the artists doing some of the most profound and provocative work can be seen and can be written about by writers who may more innately understand what’s at stake in that work. I think there is a media element to this. 

One of my bizarre side curatorial projects has been this archive deeply influenced by On Kawara of archiving print photojournalism about rural places each day in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal alongside a bunch of other rural newspapers that I intersect with. What I think we see really broadly with The New York Times, which is an extraordinary newspaper, is that oftentimes rural and Indian country in this regard are represented as a political commodity and there’s often far less coverage of the artistic and cultural emanations from those places. Without places like The Journal or The Times or a couple other large-scale, excellent news organizations changing that approach, how will we not see these places as hollow political cutouts? I think that’s part of it. 

But the structural change that absolutely must occur is American foundations equitably supporting artists and communities in a non-urban space.

Pier Carlo: Do you see that starting to change?

Matthew: Yeah, I do. I would point to Minnesota. And it works really in both ways. Minnesota, as you probably know, has really strong public support for arts and culture through a state amendment that is maybe at this point about 10 years old that was a partnership between arts and cultural organizations, history organizations, outdoor recreation and hunting-and-conservation groups, these groups that we would not necessarily think would be collaborators. They all have benefited to the tune of at this point close to a billion dollars in support for their various programs. What that looks like in the arts part of that conversation is every region of Minnesota, if you’re an artist, you can get a grant. And there are networks and support structures for folks to come together. And we have extraordinarily supportive and equitable foundations here, like McKnight, like Jerome, like many others. 

I’m backing into your question to some degree, because in Minnesota, we have a philanthropic structure that is supportive. We have a state program which has really raised the prospects for artists but also for artists in relation to history and heritage and conservation. If you live in a rural area, those aren’t contradictions, you know what I mean? Those are definitely not contradictions. 

But you cross the river into Wisconsin; it’s just a mile from where I’m standing right now. Here in Minnesota, it’s $7-per-person funding for the arts; in Wisconsin, it’s 70 cents. So how does an entire ecosystem change just by that, let alone the philanthropic changes that would be in Wisconsin or in Iowa or in North Dakota or South Dakota? How does that philanthropic change also impact Native nations and communities in these regions that we’re talking about? How does it impact the prospects for intercultural collaboration and exchange? I feel like Minnesota is a really useful example for what this could look like nationally.