Ms. Donna Neuwirth

It's About Time; It's About Place

Posted by Ms. Donna Neuwirth, Feb 21, 2014 0 comments


Ms. Donna Neuwirth

Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas. Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas.

Some are born rural, some achieve rural, and some have rural thrust upon them. I am somewhere between the second two and have been immersed in rural life in Wisconsin for 20 years now. Though I was formed by urban and suburban places, none would claim me.

I used to call it portable roots and came by them honestly. Ours was a military family who moved every 3-4 years. There was once a time when my peripatetic life was unusual, but now even people like myself, who are most passionate about the places we live, once lived somewhere else and may likely relocate again. I live as I believe we all do—with varying degrees of awareness, along a rural/urban continuum.

This continuum is especially vivid to me today as I write from Mexico City, which has a population of 25 million.  Here among ancient and contemporary ruins, throngs of people, and centuries of visible history on nearly every corner, is live music or bizarre performances; every wall is either a reminder of Spanish conquest or crowded with murals and graffiti. The stream of romantic couples, the well behaved children, the ornate churches, the incense, the roaming vendors, and the incredible street food all goes through my senses into my brain and winds up comingled with Fermentation Fest or Roadside Culture Stands. Experiences here in Mexico for a couple weeks (during a polar vortex back home) can’t help but shape ideas to enliven and transform our very small, very different agricultural community.

Of course, this is nothing new. All culture is alive and changing, and now for rural 01 wormfarm_cribs.jpgareas maybe even more so. There is a sense of possibility in many rural places and what Matthew Fluharty of Art of the Rural calls “a new rural narrative.” Wormfarm’s growing annual event takes advantage of our place—based assets, core contemporary arts programming, and this sense of possibility. Fermentation is about abundance and transformation—from grain to beer,  milk to cheese, cabbage to kimchi—and how seeing the familiar transformed allows us to imagine and ultimately realize new possibilities for ourselves, our communities, and our economies.

Placelessness (or is it residential promiscuity?) is part of my personal history and ironically perhaps, the concept that has brought me to what is currently understood as creative placemaking.

Jay and I arrived in rural Wisconsin from Chicago two decades ago and like our undocumented ancestors (invasive species from Austria, Poland, Mexico and Ireland) we brought with us ways of being and doing formed by those places filtered through the American diaspora. We moved to a small farm on the outskirts of Reedsburg, which had a population at the time of 5,000. Our backgrounds in art and theater were irrepressible, but would need some time to find their place.

03 wormfarm_tractor.jpgIn the meantime, we steeped ourselves in the area’s history with the First Peoples, the settlement by German and Norwegian farmers, the fur trade, the hops boom, the Blackhawk War, and the time when the citizens of Reedsburg prevented the army from removing Ho Chunk families from their ancestral lands to the Oklahoma reservations.

We learned to farm.

At the same time artists came. First to arrive were friends who valued the time out of the city and were eager to help in the garden. This led to formation of our Artist Residency program. We were struck by the similarities between farming and art making (both often requiring a day job, for one) and came to understand the depth of interdependency between urban and rural places.  As we shaped the land to feed ourselves each year, the land shaped us.

We have come to know and care deeply about this place and bring the best of ourselves to the ongoing process of making it home. For us, that meant growing beyond our 40 acres. With expansion into downtown Reedsburg we became invested in the health and well-being of this town, and raised the stakes for our small organization. Theaster Gates, very much an urban placemaker, calls it “the politics of staying.” He goes on to say “What happens if artists, politicians, and designers stay a little longer and do just a little more? What would happen if we invest all that energy in the places we live?”

With a growing list of collaborators we continue to invest, we weave our talents and passions (not always welcome) into its evolving history –it’s now our story too, our place.  We bring a range of assets together with arts at the core; an act of creative placemaking. We were doing it before we had a name for it. Privately, I called it my inability to leave “well enough” alone.

Rural places like ours are at a moment when the possibilities are as abundant as the land itself. New technology has all but abolished isolation, the local food movement has reconnected urban and rural people, we are at the center of the sustainability conversation, and urban places need us more than they know.  We celebrate the fresh, the home-grown, and the local, but leave out the parochial. The best home grown is even better with spices from other lands.

The arts in rural places may never look like the teeming streets of Mexico’s Centro Historico. Our ancient ruins are barns built just over a century ago and remnants of Native American earth mounds. Aldo Leopold who made this place home not long ago describes being a part of the biotic community consisting of people, plants, animals, and the land itself. If you think of it that way and look closely, rural America is teeming with life.

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