 Welcome. We are so pleased that all of you are here today. My name is Katherine, here's Chris, and we're based in Kentucky and Tennessee and Los Angeles. Our job, the Center for Rural Strategy, the Assembly, and out of that last year, Arts and Culture, and what that means in the community and rural communities, and to talk about art in this country and around the world. We're at the Double Edge Theater, and all of you are athletes and fans. I know of Double Edge Theater, and you know it's a wondrous place in this community. Matthew Glassman, Matthew, where are you from? Matthew has been the person from Double Edge, who is our co-convening partner. Whitney Kimble Cove, Whitney, Wade, and Art of the Rural, which is a block of collaborations with rural artists who have attempted to spend these three days looking at the challenges of going forward that is these, and therefore there's sustainability just policy makers in the family. People that decide how you're going to go and support your local communities. Is that a fair assessment? So we have a very interesting and exciting panel here today. And I would like to just say a couple of words, though, about the hosting capacity and capabilities and generosity of Double Edge, and acknowledge Stacey Fly, Stacey, who's the artistic director, and all of her wonderful cast, crew, and group of people. We thank you very much for having us here in this wonderful, beautiful space. This is a space that I can only have imagined when I was a young person wanting to be an actor some long, long, long time ago, long ago in far away at this big galaxy. Being a place that manifests so many of those hundreds of hopes and dreams that many of us have had about a space and a place in which to work in this country. A few words about the live stream. Do you need to say anything about that? Yes, I can just say one thing for our online audience. Is this okay? The audio is okay? If you're watching this online, you can email questions to me at www.bassmanatdoubleedgetheater.org or you can tweet at d-e-t underscore rural arts or you can just put in the hashtag new play, all one word, hashtag new play. If you have any comments or questions or observations, please feel free wherever you are to be a part of the conversation. Thanks, thanks. That's kind of scary in a way to me. I'm not, you know, that much into the social media and the modern technology. But I do remember being here several years ago being part of a panel and we had questions from Norway and Michigan and I think rural Mississippi was. So we do have the capacity to invite people to participate from all around the world. I just spoke to my son who lives in Kenya and I get him the tag and I said you better go online so you can see your mom. Or send me a question and I'll know that you've been tagged, haven't you? So that's a few that are in the audience. How many of you consider yourself rural? And how many of you consider yourself rural even if you live in the city? And I'm intrigued that you were raising your hand on that one. And how many of you come regularly to Double Edge? Is there some other question you'd like to ask if you come? How many of you? How many of you consider yourself artists? Excellent. Thanks. Well, again, welcome. My role is as facilitator and let me explain the format of today's panel. We have five really interesting and intriguing panelists who represent a diverse cultural age experience, geographic gender, racial, ethnic diversity that spans a long time. And if you added up the experience of this panel, you'd probably come up with maybe over a hundred years, right? Maybe? I would say close to two hundred years. Well, you guys, the three of us are probably a hundred of these people has a specific contribution we think to make to this panel and they will have seven to ten minutes to make a presentation about that. We have Matthew Florety who is a PhD candidate in literature from Washington University in St. Louis and who as a co-convener also has created the blog Art of the Rural. That will be followed by Stephen Gong who is the Director of the Center for Asian American Media and who also happens to be the Chairman of the Board of the Center for Rural Strategies. You know, we have been by him. He will be followed by Karen Atlas who is the Head of Art and Democracy. She will be followed by Carla Zuriana who we are asking to speak not only of his experience at Double Edge but of his historic experience coming from South America at a time when things were dicey and then we will be we will conclude with Makiko Masamoto who is from her family farm and who is an agrarian artist and who also happens to be the young generation the next generation of artists working in this country. I do have white hair though. You do? I don't see it. So without further ado and no further introduction then let's start with Matt Florety. How are you guys doing this morning? Thanks. It's a real honor to be on this panel and especially to have a chance to contribute in some way to Double Edge which has already given me so much in the last couple of days. I'm really happy to be here with you guys today. For the next couple of minutes what I would like to talk about is really to kind of walk a line between some of the work I do on Art of the Rural but also some of the work I do in my scholarship at Washington University where I'm writing about the state of literature and the arts in the 20th century and thinking about how that engages with modernism. Modernism is often what I'd like to do is offer a theory of change in the next couple of minutes about shifting modes of rural expression and really to offer a metaphor to tell a story on some level but also to really just offer a metaphor about two conflicting ideas that are still present I feel in the rural arts broadly and in our conversation about rural place and rural culture. Oh, yes. So this is a metaphor for two conflicting and contrasting notions here. I'm calling this theories of change from the pastoral to the contact zone and those are our two polls in this discussion today. We're all familiar with the pastoral whether or not we kind of identify with it as a literary genre. In the most broadest sense is the version of the country that we receive in school and through sort of many many art forms. The pastoral is one of the oldest genres in western art and it presents shepherds and farmers in an idyllic lush landscape. If we could see the second slide here. This is from this slide's from an illuminated manuscript of the first echelon of Virgil. There we go. So the pastoral really sort of as like in ancient form it looks to celebrate the pleasures of song the pleasures of the body and to idealize the quote unquote of rural people. If we could have the second slide here as well to show you another element of this form. Nature mirrors human desire in the pastoral form. We see this sort of scene of love here. This is Daphne and Chloe from a French painter from the 1500s. We see here sort of nature and the erotic we see the two goats sort of bucking up there in the background as if it wasn't unsubtle enough. You know and that's a narrative that has been put upon role-placed and sort of dominant western culture from the third century B.C. What is also important to note in this picture is we have this sort of scene the erotic scene but we also have a landscape behind it. And one of the ways that this genre moves is that it thinks about human conquest over landscape and over culture in ways which I'll talk about in a moment here. The pastoral began in third century B.C. with Theocritus who was a Greek poet who's really the person to popularize it. There were some other writers writing before but he's sort of the leader in that field. The pastoral place originally was Arcadia and Theocritus invented Arcadia in a library in Alexandria. He had never actually been to Arcadia. Arcadia was actually a rocky barren hillside nothing grew there but it became this. If you want to think about a metaphor there's a metaphor. Theocritus wrote these pastorals in a very coded language. Modern translators especially modern American translators have an impossible time translating these. They're so rich with reference that they're just hard to translate. And to boot, if Theocritus had read his pastorals to actual Arcadians they would not have understood them. So there's the pastoral. If we could have the next slide please. There's one other element to the pastoral that I think is worth noting here as rural artists and rural practices project their anxiety with two separate meetings. Notice how the castle is in the background. Whether or not I think oftentimes even if we look at contemporary sort of images of the countryside we imagine that there's some sort of overseeing power looking down on the space. So the pastoral became a mode for empire basically. Arcadia came in to stand for the anxieties, the romanticisms of Rome, of Greece and we can just kind of keep on going on from western empire to western empire. And most importantly whether it's Arcadia or whether it's my farm in Ohio it's popularly envisioned as a timeless, stable place that does not move. So as the nation goes through social upheaval and change in war they look to this place as a place for stability. It stays the same. And we see no better sort of instance of this I think when with the idea of the country itself country comes from the Latin for contra. So we figure the rural is a separate space often even in sort of a linguistic sort of a bedrock there. As a separate space I think as many of us kind of empathize and recognize with it's used in two ways. We have this pastoral a paradise, a rural paradise but also more recently I think in the 20th century it becomes an anti-pastoral wasteland. And these are the two ways oftentimes we see rural culture represented in certainly in the mainstream media. It is a romantic getaway or it's a scene of social all forms of social social conflict from meth and so on. And that's a bind that exists from Theocritus on to us now. So it becomes a shorthand for how to really distort and dehumanize rural culture on some level even if it's well meaning. And I think that's important to note. And it offers rationalizations that legitimize everything if we went back to that second slide. From colonialism and genocide and manifest destiny down to its contemporary forms, mountaintop removal strip mining, fracking some things that are happening in my region. The rural as a separate place because it's a separate place we're allowed to do those things to it. We don't hear from that culture. Maybe we think about it when we're throwing something away but beyond that it's a separate silent stable place. I want to sort of make a transition here if that's a lineage we inherit as artists and as thinkers and as people. I think we still have a little problem hearing you in the back. Okay, should I just move the microphone? No, it's not the microphone. Project, okay. Thank you. The good thing is at the 20th century we began to see some change with that. It's really the first century where rural-born artists begin to actually question the pastoral form. And I think we all probably have examples of that sort of experience in that coming about. I think mostly through technology, through increased access to education through community organizing a shift that took two millennia to break began to break at that point. And I think what we see there is a quality of experience that we're experiencing now and it's on view here at Double Edge of boundary crossing, of aesthetics that are based on a process of exchange, on a transmission of ideas across cultures, across geographies, across disciplines. I think really importantly and this is on display in the Odyssey so beautifully even across historical and cultural moments we're beginning to tell our own narrative about rural space that perhaps wasn't told before. So it's a moment I think we're thinking about crisis change and opportunity. It's a moment for great opportunity. So if we have the pastoral as something that we're coming from, I think we have a new metaphor for all of us to think about and that would be the next slide, I believe. That's the idea of the contact zone. And this was coined by Mary Louise Pratt the anthropologist who works predominantly in South America, I believe. And she said that the contact zone is a social space where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other. And I'm playing a little fast and loose with this idea of the contact zone. But what I like about this is the notion that we're meeting in a space that has changed and we're negotiating new narratives for ourselves, which as we talk a lot about rural America has changed dramatically and it needs a new narrative. And what's important about the contact zone that's very different from the pastoral is that it all happens with the particulars of local place and culture. We begin from that point and we move forward creating our narratives and creating the stories that we tell to ourselves. I'd like us just to focus for a moment for thinking about our opportunity as thinkers and artists here to look at how Dr. Pratt frames the contact zone. She said that they live among us every day in the trans-nationalized metropolis of the United States that are becoming more widely visible, more pressing, more decipherable to those who once would have ignored them in defense of a stable centered sense of knowledge in reality. That stable centered sense is the pastoral. I mean that's what we're working through now. And what I think is beautiful, she wrote this in 1991 the internet is a very different force now and we have a different narrative about rural culture. Rural culture is trans-nationalized. I mean we have an opportunity here to really say some new important things. What I'd just like to conclude with is that note of opportunity and what the contact zone can give us. And if I could just have the final slide there please. Pratt isolates a number of what she calls the arts. These are the positive benefits that we have in terms of community change and in terms of art making that happen in the contact zone in that space where we meet within a community and really think in a new way about what what composes our ourselves. We see auto ethnography, trans-culturation critique all of these parody I think just as an aside I think maybe we need more parody in the rural arts we can work on that and vernacular expression I think is extraordinarily important as well. I don't have an example of the contact zone for you because we're sitting in one right now. You know maybe we came into this room not necessarily thinking of it that way but we're in a space where all of these things are happening. I mean double-edged the living culture of double-edged really fosters something like a contact zone which I think is so beautiful and it's wonderful that we have a physical emanation of it right here. What I would just sort of say as we think about other opportunities is that we have an online contact zone is certainly developing right now as folks are watching us online as well. They're part of this contact zone. This community is beyond sort of physical borders as well. New media and the sort of philosophy of sort of the open source I feel is a next wave in terms of how we talk about the contact zone and how we make real change. What I would just like to say to say as a concluding remark is with all of this and with the important points that we have up here we still need to make art that can transcend social context. I think that's another thing that double-edged us so fantastically well. We saw that in the Odyssey last night that these are all tools for us to transcend ourselves and to transport ourselves and the ways that we do in our mediums and our fields. So we see just in conclusion here the contact zone is not a place where urban attitudes are imposed on rural place or rural culture and it's not about rural people creating a simulated environment based on the whims and the desires of folks from outside their community. Instead it's about people working through a process of engagement. Process is a metaphor there within a particular place and opening up a space for urban and international dialogue and I think importantly putting the past and the present into a new context and bringing all of these traditions together in conversation. Thank you. Very good. Thank you Matt. Hi everyone. Good morning. I'm Stephen Gong. I'm the as you heard the executive director of the Center for Asian American Media. We're located in San Francisco. We're a public media non-profit. We produce documentary film a little bit later. We produce documentary film for public television. We also have a film festival each year. We show works of all types documentary as well as narrative short and long form and where we were founded on the premise of and maybe we'll go to the power point now and I'll just have 14 or 15 slides that just contextualize the work we do at the Center for Asian American Media but it'll be a spring board just so that I won't so you'll know where I'm coming from and my other kind of comments. Good. Why don't we go ahead. We were founded 32 years ago and it was the time of a lot of civil rights movements and certainly it was the birth of what we now kind of know as the creation of the Asian American consciousness and community and it was next slide please. Yeah. We're part of the American landscape and we've got over two centuries on this continent and we helped build the west and we now comprise we're the fastest growing minority group in the United States we're now 5% of the population. Next slide please. This is our home and you can see that our mission is to present stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian American experiences to the broadest audience possible and that part is kind of key is how you take the particular experience and then share it broadly. It isn't just for Asian Americans but our founding is to give the Asian Americans an authentic voice in what our own history has been because there has been an absence of that in mainstream media. Next slide. So we do our work in public television, we have a film festival, we distribute films to schools and libraries and for the past six years we've started to move into digital media and that is also something that I'll want to touch upon and it builds on what Matthew brought up. Okay next slide. Incidentally that the image before was of Mimua who some of you may know you know Mimua she was the first Hmong American to be elected to a statewide office in the state of Minnesota and she's now the director of the Center for Asian American Justice and represents one of our newest Asian American communities and that's something we could also sort of talk about how the nature of the Asian American community has changed and continues to change. We were found on this notion of filling in a void in media and being responsible ourselves for our own representation. This is a young Cambodian American named who assumed the name Don Bonus and right when the first portable video cameras were available we gave it to him and he documented his senior year in high school in San Francisco and it was a remarkable window on the hard experience of Cambodian Americans and indeed it's been replicated by refugee communities of wars and unfortunately wars that have all been started or led by the United States has spawned a lot of refugee communities in America and we'll still see that process happening and increasingly as you know a lot of these communities are finding their way into rural America and so let me just stop and say there's a real split here. You have some Asian Americans who are third to five generations the language of our ethnicities any longer we're very Americanized but you of course have several million people who are very much experiencing contemporary American culture for the very first time and they have a deep sense of isolation oftentimes. Next slide please. We'd make documentaries about and increasingly one of the things about the Asian American communities are presents in more public realms of the United States. The first Asian American congresswoman in the country Patsy Mink and she's very important for those of you who are feminist because she created Title IX and was a very very important person for all of us for our marginalized communities. Next slide please. One of our recent documentaries was about this gentleman he was a principal in an experimental charter school for science and math in the Bronx New York. He he left a lucrative career in retail marketing to become a high school principal and we found in the documentary we did it also speaks to an increased kind of role of Asian Americans to not just look inward to their communities but to help be part of a social change, cultural change and education for the broad mainstream. Next slide please. This was a documentary we did about a Korean American adoptee and I think this touches on many different kinds of identity issues and this is where even though I'm giving you the two-minute spiel about CAM what I really want to think about why I'm involved in rural is that those of us who come from communities that have been marginalized and silenced to some degree I think the past 30 years has been a process whereby we've gained our voice and we've gained a kind of understanding about our place but the real crux of this time of both crisis and opportunity is how do we move beyond that how do you start to shift a kind of self dialogue about being marginalized to a new one where we were actually we redefined what is the mainstream and in fact how we could make overall diversity part of the real success story of the United States. Next slide please. This was a particular I did want to mention one of the documentaries we did was about the experience of the Vietnamese American shrimpers and boat people in their experience in post Katrina New Orleans this was a wonderful documentary about how they reclaimed a community after the city of New Orleans decided to put all of the toxic land wreckage from Katrina into the dump which is located right next to their community and they fought it and that site was relocated and what that's telling is actually a this is a community that could not rely on the US government systems of support after Katrina FEMA they did not access FEMA they didn't trust it and instead they were their forms of immediate relief were developed out of their own community but in this next process it was in the following two years afterwards where they really learned how to become energized American citizens and they learned to participate in the political process. So next slide. We have a film festival where we convene community in person and I think as we think about the opportunities this socially networked age of communication we're in and this is room for enormous opportunity I believe at the same time I think and this underscores what we all feel about theater like double edge there is no substitute even in a Facebook YouTube world for a lived experience of gathering together and sharing one another's presence in person and we recognize that. Next slide. Nurturing new talent I guess I would just say you'll hear from Nikiko so I won't presage too much but to say we have enormous faith I think as a community because the next generation is going to be much better and much smarter at this than we were. Next slide. And if you want something fun you can create apps to respond to this new age of creativity and new opportunities we can have to spread our kind of message so indeed with some grant support from the Wallace Foundation which unfortunately has since dropped its support for arts and has gone into education we created a mobile phone app called Filipino or not it is a media literacy team at its heart you're asked 10 questions 10 figures in entertainment or sports or popular culture and you're asked to decide whether or not they're Filipino and you're scored at the end and there are links if you want to find out more so it's people like Rob Schneider or Leah Solanga and you can determine and we throw in some celebrities whom you have to say guess whether or not but one of the comments we wanted to make about this is a very important Asian American community that absolutely has made enormous contributions to American popular culture but which has largely been you know what do you want to say invisible and part of it is just the more we gain about our knowledge of one another and learn how to speak to and speak about identity and grow comfortable with it it really is the best antidote outworn notion that we have to have a melting pot America where all of our distinctive ethnicity is washed away some hour you can't be American next slide this this is just our model our tag now this image incidentally is from a narrative film that was made about the internment camp experience of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II this was the Manzanar camp where this young man is seated but our as you can see our mission are to tell these untold stories and share them broadly next slide I think that might be it okay so I I'm about two-thirds the way through I wanted to pose some thoughts about the place we're in and I think Matthew touched on some of them Cam we were founded in a in the midst of an old legacy form of media we can now see you know it's network television even though PBS that depended on a system of some 300 public television stations taking a national schedule supplementing it with some local but that and theatrical film exhibition both of those rely on a fairly small number of producers right and the notion is is that broadly everyone else kind of follows that now we sometimes romanticize we don't have those perfect water cooler sort of experiences that the Ed Sullivan show was when the Beatles appeared you know in February 1964 it was like boom half of the nation's youth got that hit and that's profound of course we all live in a completely different universe of hundreds of channels on cable but of course an almost infinite number of channels when you look at something like YouTube and I think in some ways those of an older generation we despair almost of what that means and I do think in the space that we're in it does provide us with some unique opportunities and I would like to posit that our experience for in the Asian American community tells you you can actually link up the numbers of your community dispersed geographically and they can share in an experience and they can feel connected and empowered in a community in ways that were impossible and part of that drive it could be that drive that we've seen in these last generations where all young people and most especially in most die are so many creative young people feel like they need to move to larger urban centers in order to their personal identity as creators or as members of minority communities I think we have opportunities in the future where that does not have to be the only choice they make finally Catherine had asked me and I wanted to mention I have had about 35 years experience in non-profit arts administration starting with the American Film Institute but then the National Endowment for the Arts and then I worked for many years at the University of California Berkeley and I think in some ways I'd like to raise the notion a practical one of how do we sustain a movement to create a more equitable cultural change and part of that danger it's part of that you know seeing newspapers under assault or broadcast television unfortunately something like the philanthropic systems that we thrived under fashion these fields of and disciplines out of is under profound change if not direct threat many large foundations are moving out of the arts perhaps it's because in their own debate it may well be the wisdom to look to more fundamental needs of the social safety net but the arts are hurting there and one of the issues is I think the new found wealth the new billionaires do not seem to be motivated as the previous generations to invest in broad ways for the common good and I think we have in one sense we we don't want to give up I guess personally I'll just say I don't think we should give up any of those networks and systems of support and that includes very importantly public support that comes from agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts or the Department of Education I think we need to look to continue to state arts agencies regional arts agencies local arts but clearly we need to find a new way to sustain and support this kind of change I think we're all going to speak maybe a little bit about the possibilities of crowdsourced funding like Kickstarter and Indiegogo and United States artists there are a number of ones there's been some remarkable success stories there's clearly been tens of millions of dollars that have been raised successfully just in the last year but you know being in the heart of it and a lot of this is going on in the independent film community I think there's this shadow this fear I guess we have since we're not used to already reaching a point of exhaustion and pretty soon those of us who every time we see someone we know they're working on a project and you donate $20 or $50 that you just can't keep doing that we really need to enlarge this we really need to invent a new form of philanthropy I would say that has some of these elements and recognitions of dispersed community but which still invites with one another and with that I guess I'll stop Hi everybody how you doing am I loud enough I'm going to experiment with a little audience participation I'm going to call out some people and when I call you out you can do something to let people know because there is so much wisdom in this room and so many of you know so much about the things I'm going to be talking about so I want people to know that you're all resources and if I don't call you out but you think you know a lot about what I'm talking about you can also do that and I'm the director of the arts and democracy project Javier works with me we work nationally in both urban and rural communities to really cross-fertilize arts culture and work towards social justice and I realize that I'm actually what I'm going to be talking about is a lot of contact zones what you're looking at is a really fuzzy picture of a t-shirt I have that's too small for me so I made it a photograph and that's from the free southern theater funeral and it was called a valediction without mourning so the free southern theater was a theater company that was really like the theater wing of the civil rights movement and in 1985 they threw themselves a funeral but this was a really different kind of New Orleans funeral so there was a coffin and people put things in it and said sad things and then there was a party and a parade and then there was a theater festival from showing all the theaters that had been inspired by free southern theater and I thought this was a good story to start with because it died and was reborn and in a panel about crisis change and opportunity it seemed like a good symbol of that and for me personally free southern theater funeral was like the final blow to get me out of New York City because I was so incredibly impressed with how art and culture could be so tied to social movement building and I wanted to know more and at the same time the Alliance for Cultural Democracy and Catherine and probably other people here was going on which was also doing that it was bringing together rural people and urban people and this discussion about what it means for work to really be connected to community and Patrice I'm going to call you out because expansion arts at that time had a big thing to do with Alliance for Cultural Democracy and Patrice you could probably wave your arms through my whole talk because the NEA was so important in a lot of this work so the Alliance for Cultural Democracy the board we used to meet at the Highlander Center in Rocking Chairs and Alandria and Catherine and I were part of it and we'd sit there and rock and that was like again that rocker got me out of New York City because I just started to feel like really important work that was going on wasn't happening there so I went to Apple Shop and there's a bunch of Apple Shop people in the room, Amy and Mark and Ada where Apple Shop a community based Appalachian Center I went to work there I thought a year figure it out bring it back to New York stayed there 10 years didn't figure it out didn't bring it back to New York but profoundly changed my point of view and what I saw as important work and whose voices needed to be listened to in terms of the national narrative so this is history but it's also in the present I mean I'm looking now at Ada and Alandria and they're both working Highlander and Apple Shop but also the Stay Project which is all about some of these really major issues which haven't gone away which is how do I create meaningful work in my home community so I don't have to leave town to have work with meaning and creativity so I just returned from Alternate Roots and that's another one of these contact zones support systems and Alternate Roots is a network that supports artists in the south and Roots started at the Highlander Center and you see how it's an ecosystem of intersecting forces that start to really add up so Roots started at Highlander 36 years ago and I was so blown away this year by Roots because they're actually going really strong and they figured out a way to be a really grounded support system and peer support. They figured out methodologies that really help you figure out how to better work in community or to strengthen the aesthetics of your work but from a grounded often rural perspective. The other thing about Roots they're also talking yesterday about their new strategic plan which is really about bringing them back to their original purpose at Highlander which is action toward social justice and so they went from the service organization to the activist organization really grounding themselves in those values and then the other thing about Roots I have to say it was one of the most diverse rooms I've been in in terms of really natural diversity both in the membership but also in the leadership and the board. So some of the things I heard at Roots that I just want to pass along because I just came from that meeting to this one I'm going to go over Kelly you're here Cornerstone Theater did a really powerful play about all the veterans that are going to be coming back that are coming back and will increasingly be coming back for more and what it means when they're back in their communities. There was a day laborers theater that was talking about the very powerful human story of crossing the border and how we can bring that story to rural communities of people who have been taught to fear this rather than to see what our common stories are with them and there were of course because this is Roots really deep conversations about race in class. So another gathering that I was at and I'm kind of shifting from my social movement talk now to my policy talk is there's a group called the Art and Social Justice Working Group and Steve I was thinking of them when you were talking this is a group of funders but also people who have created these other kinds of support systems like Roots and animating democracy and art and democracy and art has changed and we've come together and said what should this new funding look like and this is you know both from the conventional funders and not and you know we all know how private funders that there are these fads now and Art and Social Justice is one of them and the dangers of private funders doing initiatives and getting excited about things and then having to move on and what that does to the field and all these danger points but we've come together to say well what really are the underlying values of this work and how do you create some philanthropy that can represent those values and that's not easy because there are so many structures that make that difficult but if we really wanted to look at a values based policy how would you construct that and there's a couple papers out there and I just want to bring them to your attention because they're stirring up some good conversations in the funding world Holly Sidford wrote a paper with the Committee for Responsive of Philanthropy just saying what most of us have known for a long time that there are these amazing inequities in the way funding is done and this was looking at arts funding and one of the shocking things was that she showed a correlation that the arts funders were funding very far away from the social justice and that arts funding was not a good representation of social justice and that of course rural and people of color were getting very small amounts of funding compared to urban and white groups but she put this paper out and it's really stirred up a conversation about equity. Peter Penningkamp is about to put out a really powerful paper based on his work with the Humboldt Community Foundation that's called Philanthropy and the Regeneration of Community Democracy and he really points out in this paper that the Kettering Foundation is putting out in about a week what are the ingredients of community democracy and all those things that really make it fertile and strong are things that Philanthropy has a really hard time dealing with because it's decentralized it's not institutions it's all the sort of things that we know make for strong work but aren't projects that get funding so that paper I'm really hoping is going to stir up some good conversation so I am with a minute left I guess what I want to put out there is this question about how you make values based policy that's really informed by the social movement that you're looking for we had a series of conversations in New York and in rural areas we did one with the Center for Rural Strategies that a lot of these folks here were at that really look at sort of what does place based story based work look like in New York we're calling it naturally occurring cultural districts but places where there's sources of innovation and support systems where civic engagement really happens and they're built on the local cultural assets and local leadership and self-organized these spaces are very powerful spaces so how do we recommend policies that really nurture these spaces and allow them to do the wonderful things that they do and I guess a couple last thoughts on that is one of the things that came up in these various roundtables is the whole question of economy you know we hear about creative economy we hear now about creative place making so whose creativity whose economy and whose place are we talking about and let's interrogate those and let's look at the multi-layered narratives around those and one of those narratives around economy is that this isn't just consumers and producers these economies are about relationships and what are those relationships and how do we support them and how do we get this really work on the ground to really inform policy and so in New York we have a working group that's doing that and exerting our force and joining our voice they have a loud voice that says no this is what the policy should look like and I'm very excited about this working group because I think its purpose is to do that around rural issues in this country thank you me too coming from a subtropical place I want to give you a scoop if I may it's not part of my speech but when you're in New England and in this area you're in the snow belt so it snows a lot when it snows a lot and you have a snowstorm you tend to do very little and wait right? so you wait when it's very hard the worst thing you can do is to push against it because it will defeat you so I'm going to try to be slow and I'm sorry because it's hard but now you will understand the meaning of siesta which begins way before noon at this time actually I really want to express my gratitude to everybody here and before saying anything you know as an actor one invites somebody like Stephen was mentioning to me to see inside of myself or inside of this that we created and you have entrusted that with your attention and which is worth it and valuable so thank you Catherine asked me to talk a little bit or these five minutes that are left about the the story of South America I was born in a city in Buenos Aires but then soon enough I was taken to a farm in the outskirts where you know my family was a mix of urbans and farmers so I had the possibility to have both things I was very lazy as a good boy so I liked to read and what I did was create these kind of clans of gangs of kids that I would read a novel and then tell them the story and then we would during the course of two or three months kind of like play it which reminds me that this is what I'm doing here some things don't change the next thing that I want to share is that yes sir we're doing the timeline and you know I needed to put down there what you know what decided me to be an artist and it was what came to my mind was 1976 was the coup d'etat that led to the dirty war and I was there and by accident I was in the wrong side of the you know not on the winners and the losers so I needed to really with my group of people be creative about how we're going to survive this because we are really in the wrong place one other thing I was doing was I was studying anthropology which was already considered Marxist less wing Leninist and so we were all suspected and to be suspected meant that you would be disappeared in a short time so soon enough thank God a friend of mine who had his father in the army and I was a lawyer you know tell Carlos that he needs to just go away find out so I high I was hiding at that point all that debate that one has with the family well are you going to be an artist I really seriously considering to be an artist it was futile so I couldn't study law like my dad wanted me because I couldn't go back because I already was stained so what are you going to do I rather do what I want because I don't have any other choice and because you know what what doesn't matter if I'm going to die anyway so just be an artist so I started doing this kind of like experiments or artistic experiments and then I dare go back to the city and put myself down in a conservatory and there I met this guy that told me you know my thesis will be about Gaucho theater I'm like what is that this whole movement that you know we could go into one day but this created the major theater activity of Argentina in Buenos Aires was done by rural people like Buffalo Bill but different because they would do Ibsen so it was kind of crazy because the Italians were there and they had the Comedia and so it was fascinating so we went into the Pampas to find this there was nothing left because of course the military had a systematic a systemic plan conceived in the 1960s so now let me give you a little bit of a historic frame this is happening as the Cold War is developing so Bay of Pigs is not the end of it it continued so as West Point and some of the you know the corporate world US being the National Guard of the World and then Europe being very scared you know the Americans are growing and you know look at Cuba and this and that so the Cold War started to develop south because all of our countries had a tendency to move to the left and we were about to get there so this begins this incredible repression and in that repression we started researching Gaucho Theater at the same time an incredible guy that was coming from France and was doing sort of Boal experiences what led me to do Invisible Theater which were like guerrilla operations undercover like we would not say that it was theater but we would do it in a place like this so we would stage something beforehand and go there impact and the thing was really complicated because we couldn't have our names in phone books so we needed to be really reliant and develop a sort of trust and tactics to be really fast in acting and not just with our art but also in life like you know we knew how we were going to get out of the place before we were going into the place and we didn't want to know the names of our friends so if we were caught we wouldn't tell so this is how we develop the first experiences out of all this we created two groups mostly with an anarchist tendency and we were craving to do theater and to do it in a way that it would include all the people that were at the time being either silenced or suppressed and so we did it and it was very successful one of them is the reason why I'm in the US because Philip came to see us and in 89 when after the repression happened and we became a little more visible and popular and brought us to a festival where Catherine was a foreigner to somehow see that role you maintain and then that led me to come to the US and to Europe and you know I could go on in different I don't know if this is kind of like enough of the history I think that there are certain things that I want to point out like there's always a possibility to create even in very difficult circumstances and there's something that Stacy reminded me when I first came here that anything is possible so we're looking at a dilapidated farm and we thought well we can do it and here it is so somehow I don't need a power point and I'm very thankful because I think you're experiencing it with me as we go I think with that in mind I think that the thinking of the thinking about optimism faith the leap of faith they're really crucial to develop anything that that could get us out of situations like war situations or repressive instances or refugee instances it's interesting because I love paradoxes I love to hold them as long as I can in Argentina I am the white guy, the dominant guy I was called a blonde in the native communities they call me the blondie because I have blue eyes and here I come and I'm on the other side I'm the Latino and this is coming as a refugee guy and I think that paradox is really important and it nurtures the art because where I want to go with this is what I think my role is to somehow find a way or create a structure that will support that passage for some people to be able to go and hold the irrational and which is what probably I was trying to show last night with the performance so this is a moment where I'm going crazy and you're witnessing it with me and what the irrational is after I heard all the beautiful stories and I was thinking when you were telling the stories I can relate to all of you guys somehow, emotionally not in the detail but in the deep down what the irrational is is that ability or the different tactics and the different abilities to deal with pain and I think pain is like a signal to us that death exists like you say but then there is also pleasure which relates to the sex part that you were talking about and our connection between that and our elation is that religion is to relink the earth and these terrible stories we need to live like Odysseus and this elation even Penelope there are moments of elation that we can attain for a very ephemeral second the rest of the time we go back down and then we go back up and I think that that's the role of the art and I think that that is the deep contribution to the politics and the deep contribution to the social change because without craziness and without saying anything is possible my country would have been still in that dictatorship but because we created the movement of popular theater we created the movements of medias in the university we created and we developed the system fell apart so this is what I think is possible and this is probably what you want me to share to be speaking next I don't know about everybody else but I need a little moment of witnessing just to acknowledge everything that we are sharing that we are sharing and I also need a moment to remember my body so I'm going to invite everyone to do a little chair wiggle wiggle in your chair take a deep breath can I go for a run? come back absolutely honor the body take a deep breath and as you get settled when you feel ready I wanted to ask my name is Nikiko Masumoto and I wanted to start not with me saying something but when we did the poll in the beginning we saw so many hands of people who are rural who identify as rural who have some connection to rural and who are also artists so what I wanted to do is start with I wanted to let you all think of a piece of rural art it could be your own it could be something you witnessed it could be something you heard about think about one piece of rural art that has moved you that has touched you and I'd like you to think of something that you had that responded to that art or that captures that art just one word to describe your experience of rural art and I'd love to just hear some of those words whenever you're ready organic organic visionary transcendent courageous inspired risky one more time risky fantastic one more time humbled and innovative magic heavy connected one more time me scrappy maybe take two more national small identity one more time love love love thank you so we can go on and on but I just wanted to take a minute to locate ourselves in this passion that I think we all share and as I was preparing for this and I was thinking about what word to choose right now and that word is embodied and I wanted to share kind of the segue of a little bit of what I do and why that word is so important to me I'm a fourth generation Japanese American mixed race farmer organic farmer from the central valley in California and I call myself an agrarian artist for a couple of reasons and one of those reasons is because as a farmer I can't separate my artistic creative life from farming and I know Jay and Donna we talked about you shared this yesterday also I'm sure there's more people in this room who share that and so one of the ways I've been able to articulate how farming is an artistic practice is through this idea of embodiment that we forget that eating and producing food are embodied experiences that are always aesthetic they're always aesthetic experiences they involve the senses they involve meaning beyond the molecules which we are consuming and so for me that's been key to my survival to my thriving as a burgeoning a young agrarian artist so what I wanted to offer today was just a little bit of the histories that inform my life as a 26 year old and then also offer a little bit of a few nuggets of theories of change of what keeps me going and as an activist as an artist, as an agrarian, as a farmer and so I wanted to start off with this idea of a history being rooted in the place that I'm from I think there's so many beautiful stories in this room and one of those stories I kind of touched on this yesterday but I just wanted to expand on it because there's so much importance in this idea for me of resilience and resilience that takes a form that does not always look like protest or idea of protest and it might jumping out of a math idea and then a different model of rural activism that does challenge the pastoral confining of rural to these two dichotomies but that might also not match up with urban ideas of protest and social change and so this idea it's really a story about my family so the land that I work on every day that I live on the land was purchased by my grandfather right after World War II my g-chan was a Japanese-American and was interned during World War II he met my bachan, my grandmother in camp and despite all the odds they fell in love and they decided that they were going to have a family farm and so right after losing everything right after being drafted right after losing a brother my g-chan comes back to the Central Valley and buys land cheap land because he couldn't get good land so he spent years using dynamite to blow out hard pan from the land but he bought land literally planting roots in a place that clearly did not want him did not want him and that history for me in my family and particularly on the landscape of the West Coast of immigrants of color coming and planting roots in a place that explicitly did not want them that for me is the resilience of rural culture that I think has carried us to now and can keep on carrying us to the future and so this history of my g-chan who is a registered Republican his entire life doing the most radical thing I think I could ever think of building a family farm in the United States that legacy is something that I carry with me every single day it relates to just the nuggets that I have learned from working in his gloves in his workshop on farm and that's one of my theories of change that I would argue is a rural change is a sense of long timelines of long timelines when I came back to the farm we planted an orchard of nectarines and my dad looked at me and he said so in 20 years these trees will be fully grown and I was 22 at the time and that really startled me I don't know why I don't know being in the land I know this is the place I want to be but it was this moment of right change, social change, environmental change ecological sustainability doesn't have an end we have to think of ourselves on these long timelines and in contrast to that or in wonderful juxtaposition with that hope is this thinking about ourselves in these long timelines with at the same time the development of digital media and the internet age that allows us to have connections almost instantaneously and that paradox that contradiction is really invigorating to me and it's what gives me a lot of hope a lot of stamina to keep going because our modes of communication allow us to connect with such a multiplicity of people instantaneously and I hope that those connections are part of building blocks of a long tradition of growth and change so those are just the two ideas I really want to get into dialogue and some debate so that's all I want to share right now I want to say thank you again for you all being here and giving us the ultimate as Carlos was saying witnessing and being present so I want to say thank you and I want to pass it off to Katherine for the next part thank you thank you all so much what we've done now or what we're going to do now what we've asked is that we have four respondents that we have asked to witness and to ask a question or make a comment or think about what they've heard I'm excited to open this up to a broader conversation with everyone in the room Richard I'm going to ask you to go first sure would you stand and introduce yourself so I would respond I'm Richard Sachs and I'm the creative director of the M12 art collective also a professor of post studio practice at the University of Colorado in Boulder I actually have two quick things and they're both very quick so we'll roll through them and they're actually for the entire panel here well the first thought that I have is I want to jump on Carlos's bus and just take us all on a mission of craziness campaign for craziness I think that's probably what we should all do to make more progress but the first topic is really about exchange and Steven you spoke of the split between sort of between generations in the language and experience and Matthew you spoke of this implied misrepresentation of the rule as a separate place both cultural and sort of from the urban and real quick I want to go down and I want to ask this question of what examples each of you have from your bodies of knowledge that are transnational on the ground project based initiatives that are fusing cultural global experiences in rural areas what should we take the respondents all I need some time to make up a line sure question one more time can I yeah the question is basically fusing all of that together and saying what examples of transnational on the ground functioning project based initiatives that are actually fusing cultural global experiences together happening in rural areas anywhere in the world I'd like us to know about some examples that you all know about through your bodies of knowledge so if we're going to take the questions can I say a little bit quick and this is really easy I think we sort of have an idea of yours here and I think it's great and it's a question of values and what we're thinking about and what we think about values I think it's very clear at this juncture that rural does not mean living in the country and it doesn't mean Grandpa Jones and Andy Griffith as we talked about yesterday we're cropped for Texas and as we are not moving into but that we are currently in a post-agricultural rural transnational period what are the core values that we associate with this notion thank you okay thinking about that Alondra hi so I'm Aladra Blades I'm with the Highland Resociation Center so it's hard to say I had it so I wanted to say this first part and then ask the question because it goes together at the beginning when we were talking about the pastoral frame I realized I wasn't actually in the space and nor am I halfway on the panel and most of my identities I'm not on the panel and what does that mean for how we actually talk about rural art and it's time to complicate that time because in my people's art from indigenous to black we can go down the list especially southern what does art mean and whose art are we talking about and so I think it's really important to do that otherwise we continue to perpetuate historical memory loss and historical and thinking even if we go back to Europe and it wasn't idealistic for 98% of the people so for me a key question for someone who to me cultural practice and art are always about shifting and pushing paradigms and pushing to a new reality what is the role now in terms of art and cultural practice and actually getting us to a different place globally what does it mean to have come from Argentina to come from movement and what does it mean to be working here now what does it mean in terms of your work and all of your work in terms of where we have to go we are now under the executive director of the World Farm Institute and our mission is to integrate culture and agriculture and I heard at least three of you mention farms or agriculture or food in your talks and because it's a crux of what we do and because we see that that piece of it is critical to our work and I would argue that we're not in a post-agricultural reality because as Wendell Berry said eating is an agricultural act we are all involved in agriculture and I think we are at a time in history when the local food movement has energized agriculture and people your age are entering it in waves and we're very very excited about the future for the agricultural and of course the word culture is embedded in that word and I think it's important for us all to remember that so I would like to hear from all of you what is the agricultural connection to what you do do you think it's important for ongoing rural culture? Thank you. Mary Annette I'd like to share some observations and again cite this man I spoke to about before Dr. Hitzoy I had Barbara here in us and he had told me about after studying I guess I'm studying the genetic code and he came back calm and his family's whole gone out there in Navajo Country and he was talking in Navajo there's a tremendous amount of shared code between our part and human like 90% or something and his uncle was listening and after a while he says oh I'm glad those white scientists have finally came and to start me that this is of course we all as Indians we all have got to tell stories and circle here finally the western framework that kind of informed the initial contact with this country and understood us, evaluated us how to destroy us now you're realizing what we're thinking we need that we need to be wrong for that in demoralizing the state and I think you're re-embracing us but how now do you re-embrace these silenced ones and of course you want to create a framework for it and I'm wondering you know as Carlos is saying it's a leap of faith man it's a risky leap of faith and we have to go into some scary territory and to reconnect that relationship with Earth maybe isn't really going to fit into a framework that we know is a western framework so it's interesting to hear about this and exciting what's the last part I said I don't know if that's meaningful to anybody with that's what I got to say let's take a deep breath and yes I think we'll go in order I think in terms of transnational on the ground sort of global speak up come on okay so stand up do what you want to do okay I want to sit down you know I think one of the reasons that we chose to meet here was because double edge is a fantastic example of that but that's the easy answer to the question to just point to double edge you know I think one particular there's a vernacular music movement happening right now and one of the organizations which is doing a lot with that is the association for cultural equity which Alan Lomax archives is related to and folks may have heard in the last I think maybe it was two months ago three months ago the entire archive was digitized it is absolutely open access you can access everything that Lomax recorded is available now with you know it's free and it's accessible there are nuggets along the way where I think we see traditions being localized within that sort of vernacular arts movement where the same people who are working on Lomax are releasing West African acoustic music and you're realizing that that music is linked to music from Mississippi Hill Country and you're making those sorts of connections with the past and the present and there's exchange between those communities in ways that individuals are doing they don't call themselves that but it's a form of social entrepreneurship they're doing in terms of spreading culture and increasing dialogue and that's a large scale example of that you know I think it's happening that has many community sort of application points we have folks in the room who are doing this or thinking a roadside theater is a place that comes to mind it's thinking about those kinds of connections too that's good I want to clarify but you just hit on this idea of global exchange and that's particularly in a place that I'm interested in Steven I think actually I'd like to posit and this can be a response to all of the four respondents I think the local food or slow food the conveyor of culture really addresses a lot of the things that I've heard from your remarks there is a renewed universal interest in where our food comes from and it's meaning to us and I think in urban as well as rural context you know this is a universal language and it lends itself to storytelling it lends itself to creation of community I think there is enormous opportunity it's decentralized it's not controlled by any one place the ubiquity of farmers markets it's remarkable for those of us who travel around it's an amazing movement and there's something delightful when you do travel and can go to a local market you understand the place in a completely different way I think there's enormous opportunity for us to use even that platform with some of these other channels of sharing it that we can recreate the notion a lot of what we're saying about how to value one another's cultural backgrounds and that as we know is a foundation piece to kind of understanding the kind of change and dialogue that needs to come about from there so first thing that went into my mind was some of the exchanges that apple shops involved in over the years the South-South exchange where it was really rural communities rural community in the US exchanging with a rural community in China or in Indonesia and looking at what the common ground is and what the difference doing an exchange really from that perspective the other one that came to mind and I don't know if it's typically talked about this way but I thought of around the table we had a connection between native peoples who were at the round table and a gentleman from the Penn Center here in South Carolina coming out of an African-American in the legacy of slavery and looking at the connection and given that these were native peoples from various sovereign nations I would consider that as trans national as well and it was a really powerful moment some of you guys were there and it was like the guy from the Penn Center said I hear your story, I've lived your story to one of the native presenters and really being able to connect on that level do you want us to answer the value question too or your second question because what I would say really quickly on that is I think some of the values of this work as Steve said was decentralized I would say unidirectional like it's not like there's a center when you're reaching out I would say that tension is a good thing not a bad thing to be managed and just to kind of amen some of the things Elandria said that it's really about embracing the full histories and understanding and embracing them and the complicated identities in this work rather than trying to find some easy universal would you like to respond to any or all? Sure Richard I know your first question was directed to them but I couldn't help the immediate community from where I'm from the Hmong American community refugee community there's a large population in the Midwest and the Central Valley I think they're doing incredible transnational work unfortunately from what I have witnessed and listened to a lot of it is around diasporic struggle but I think this is an opportunity where we have I'll speak as a privileged American citizen to look to other people to follow them instead of me trying to invent things there's a great book of poetry called how do I begin that was just published last October Hmong American poets it's not necessarily all rural at all it's about questions that are useful to coming up with strategies of survival and strategies of thriving that use art in this particular example poetry as a way of honoring memories of rural living from my understanding the Hmong community in Southeast Asia was almost entirely rural that was just I'm excited to be able to share that and then to the question about values I mean this is again just grounded in my own experience someone said the word scrappy I love that word and to me that is one of the strengths of rural communities you know it's in my experience everybody is a little bit of a welder there's this sense of because convenience is not a part of our life that scrappiness I'm so actually energized by the recession and the moment that we are now because I think it's a moment I'm very serious when rural sensibility of I'm going to figure this out because I can't just call someone in we should be turning to rural people right now so scrappiness is a value Yeah I think probably spinning over Elendris question I think and you know I come from that field and you know I'm being with Carpe bag I visited Highlander I work there my son was with you at a time so I understand I understand somehow your question and I being part of that type of organizing thinking but let me put my t-shirt of an actor and we need because what I want to say is that in order to play this game I want to use the soccer Argentina we need to identify our places in the fields so that question is valid and it's important and I should keep it but the real thing that I need to do is this thing about the rational so we need those people that are going to go there and those people that are going to think those questions that you are thinking about and we need to work together now this is the challenge I think we need to kind of like marionette marionette I pronounce poorly but I think I agree with you and I think we need to hold that uncertainty which is part of this journey Odysseus didn't know where he was going I didn't know that a war was about to happen I didn't know that I was going to be in Asheville in 1996 or that that thing happened with UT Noxville we cannot predict everything we cannot plan and the poem says that that I use for him or for me so if we understand so how do we deal with this together this is the challenge and probably this is the value and also to keep him I think we need to keep in mind that values keep changing we cannot establish because reality keeps changing all the time so something that is and the market explains you know everybody worships the market like the golden calf the market is a reflection of us it's like TV it's a reflection it's not it we are different and you know we voted for this guy but things have changed so what are we going to do now and we need to accept so you know I like the title crisis change and opportunity but I really like the Asian the adage that is crisis danger and opportunity danger so we are in danger and we need to deal with it so I think that that's kind of like didn't touch upon the agriculture but I think I have something to say but I'm not now respondents did our panel answer address your questions concerns can I jump in here because I think there was something interesting to have to be done and I think that's the cultural element of this is very important and I would just like to add maybe to complicate that even further one of the areas of dialogue which at least I haven't seen a lot in the time that I've been watching it is the dialogue where we're thinking about these issues about we have folks from the local organic community and we have folks from conventional agriculture no one's here right oh I'm sorry less to mirror we need to put conventional farmers in a room with organic farmers and have a dialogue I feel like we can discuss this off of this as well but I think there are portions of rural community which we're less comfortable dealing with if we're from a certain perspective and we have to bring there are thousands and thousands of conventional farmers who have a place in this dialogue and we have to include them let's pardon let's open this up we have others I know that wanted to make comments or ask questions so please raise your hand feel free yes Matt you kind of in response to that but if you could speak to it would you identify yourself? I'm sorry I'm Savannah Barrett I'm from Kentucky and I'm a graduate student in the community arts University of Oregon I guess my question is we're going to an extension this summer I think there's a vast opportunity within our reach and through a cooperative extension because they're in almost our county in this country right and they have this history of working with agriculture and with industrial agriculture but that's shifting in the community development and some of them are taking the spider bends I guess in their programming so how do you envision this organization and these groups of people that are already so embedded in the community? I think maybe a lot of folks could get at that I think maybe that the dialogue hasn't happened enough I think maybe the place to start is that we're all people in a particular place and we're invested in and we value it and moving forward from there towards a larger structure I don't know if that's maybe a little bit general just in my personal life I have come to think of a politics of neighborliness as really essential and I think this is where rural activism looks very different from urban activism because I came home from UC Berkeley really angry at with new perspectives and I realized throughout time though that in rural settings my neighbor who has a bumper sticker that says Obama's a socialist gets me out of jams when I get my four wheel drive tractor stuck in the mud and there's a real reliance there and I think this is where maybe we're saying the same thing but a politics of neighborliness I think forces us to engage in coalition in a way that might be uncomfortable but that it has stakes in the long term and I do think that I think this is where the Occupy movement maybe spells short I understand the rage and I think there has to be a space for rage and I think that's particularly where art can come in but there's also a we need to think on long timelines we need to think of building I don't care if this sounds corny of loving the people next door including conventional ag including people who are like please don't spray I want to go for a run I mean these people are my neighbors and I think again this is where rural rural consciousness has a lot to offer activists in non-rural settings good same point I would also like to add to that one of the things my name is Rachel Realme Sester and I'm a folklorist and work with food producers and artisans in my home county and one of the things that I often point to is an economy of neighborliness and again I think rural people are connected with their places in rural America depend on one another in the way that you mentioned me and in a lot of ways in looking at how to supplement the funding structures that are interfering I think that we have a wonderful model in the way that we deal with one another's neighbors in rural places like you said you depend on your neighbors to help you when you're in a jam but also there are all these alternative forms of capital that are available in that system so that people like in my county are the people below the national poverty line so I think it's a big starter campaign and hope that we can connect with people in a broader area in terms of raising money and in small amounts but also I've been able to accomplish a lot in my community by people being willing to contribute their talents their labor their ideas as part of that membership within the community and I think that that's a really good opportunity for me to accept one of the most useful forms Thank you Chris back with the Department of Agriculture Steven's comment we'll talk about funding a little bit because I know it's easy to forget what keeps a lot of this going but you had talked about the decline funding and some of the new money is not supporting rural as much and part of my thinking on that is a lot of the new wealth that's been created are people who are really focused on innovation and creative ways of doing things and I keep using the word scrappy and I think and you've all talked about how rural people we are scrappier we have to bring everybody together I think that there's some thought to be done around how in rural communities the way we do things the way we leverage our neighbors the way we're all plumbers and what not those might be the very qualities that can appeal to some of the new wealth that's been created over the last 15 years I don't know that we've done I don't know how to connect to that and we could probably use some help thinking about that opportunity to think about in terms of building a more durable financial base for the work we all want to do to the extent that philanthropy new philanthropy can be a part of that I think there's some good thinking that should be done just the fact that we're in this room in a town that has no cell phone reception but we're broadcasting this conference to the rest of the world is interesting to me and I think I don't really have a point I just think that there's an opportunity there that we need to to make and connect to that new group of people who made a little money, a lot of money in the last 15 years It is a paradox isn't it? How about the cell phone service? We love paradox I'll ask a follow up question Yes Just to piggyback on Chris's question which is, and this was pointed out earlier about a need for a new type of philanthropy that you mentioned Stephen and to me getting to a concrete place Who here, how do you imagine a new type of because one of the things we're pointing to is infrastructure how do we envision and implement a new type of infrastructure that embraces nodes of cross-sector collaboration but in a larger way that connects to the that speaks to the disconnect between funding and service and concrete on the ground that it happens at times I don't have the answers We're looking at this a lot there's some interesting things here you know the, what was it eBay billionaire in the Skoll Foundation and you know his notion of philanthropy of course is to unleash individual entrepreneurship and in that sense that's one of the things to mention because it's different from that old philanthropy which said you hire a professional staff which understands the need areas of a sector you want to have influence in and you know in some ways I think a lot of us who have been supported by old philanthropy have felt left behind by these new notions and I think in some sense we can use some of these new ideas I do think entrepreneurship and the generation this first generation of kind of coders and people are creating these digital futures have given us amazing things like Kiva, you know like ways to do micro-investing and I think there's always there's a chance to reinvigorate that space with what we're talking about I also want to mention you know right next door to us in San Francisco is a small non-profit called Code for America and really it's kind of like a peace core of digital activism and it's where young, smart talented people are willing to share that talent and while they need some specific kind of call and I do think we have plenty of questions and needs to put before them another thing that's happening a lot that you've heard of as a hackathon which is kind of this way that you invigorate a community of young digital geeks, gear heads but who want to be in a space and you work on an issue like for an all day session of inventing an application or a game or a way to utilize social media to address a real social problem and I think each and all of these can give us a lot of opportunities here. In theater I live here in Ashfield and I'm intrigued as I often am by some of Carlos's comments and I want to try to formulate an observation about double edged work but on the way to doing that I want to mention a figure that I think is really key in theater in terms of thinking about what Carlos was talking about at the irrational but also in terms of direct social action which is lots of alcohol but if you read how those plays they're a complete absurdist theater and on the other hand they're simply autobiography of someone testifying to how he lived in an absurd social situation he also became involved in direct action first of all as one of the architects of the development of evolution and then daring to become the president of his country and to enter into a sphere where you can't practice the irrational every day because of the country this means you have to enter into compromise you have to accept compromise you have to accept a lot of giving up of your ideals to function and have direct results from your actions I think that's a compromise between the rarefied sphere of art in the purest sense and the experience of direct action my observation is I really have felt for a long time that the aesthetic mission of Belk Legis is to protect a space for the irrational in the face of a lot of social forces that want to compel art to make sense to have a direct consequence to mean this to that audience define your audience tell us what it is you want to say to your audience then come and play this to that audience but it's not really I think what the aesthetic of Belk Legis but then at the same time in a practical sense Belk Legis is involved in this economy of neighborliness which I think is a really important idea emerging from this conversation so you can be Don Quixote in the Don Quixote negotiating with your neighbors on a daily basis so there's the irrational relates to the state the irrational relates to the to the sacred all the time unless you remove yourself completely from society and become a monk which will make that mistake if you're going to live in the world you have to accept that you are sacred but then you return to the earth and that's I think in those moments of real economy of neighborliness thank you Scott maybe Scott I'd like to come back to that word you drew to a different place my wife is a quilter that are stitched together they represent a recycling of already used material they have borders each individual piece has its own design but creates a much larger design when put together what concerns me when we start talking about national strategies or global things is that we lose the focus on the individual strap and create a quilt that is just one piece of material which is not a quilt and so again it's holding two things together at the same time and a quilt does that it creates a large picture that is global with a lot of individual detail if you look at one scrap it can be really a lattice and I think that that is our challenge during this session or during the next two days is to come up with big nationally but from an individual I just wanted to share an example of this politics of neighborliness and Serena you're helping with this cure cleanup of a river environment and they've just put together over the last couple years of Minnesota River Valley Lake Peppin so they invited the big egg and organic farmers and the environmental watershed down to Lake Peppin which is filling up with silk because of the practices of the farming and then the farmers and to see how they're farming or how they care for the land so the idea is to start a dialogue instead of a and so we've had numbers of conversations now down the river we the bush foundation have been helping by helping to support the convening folks and kind of facilitation you need to do that kind of work which is now so I just want to and we're also seeing that now happening with Native American youth that there's a friendship committee forming where people are starting to talk to each other differently really yes my name's Dana Wilde I'm an artist and I live in Williamsburg and the thing that's on my mind right now is about Carlos did you bring up the danger is that what you mean so there's a thing I think about all the time I'm not the only person who thinks about this but it's important to me it's hiding in the shadows of the whole conversation like we're in a minority all together here and that we agree that creativity and art are important and so so when I hear about the emergency of the different kinds of arts funding that are disappearing that's of course really of no surprise because culturally and not just in the US just really most places creativity self-expression risk-taking these are not valued in fact they're discouraged the things that are valued in our economy just like it's just that's not how most of us are so it seems really important we have to think about ways to change culture just but the fact that creativity is not valued and it's often educated out of us in a variety of ways we already know a leader and a key person who writes and speaks on this topic is Ken Robinson he's the one who did one of the more famous he's one of the best talks you'll see in your life so but to me that is the worm farm in Wisconsin neighborliness I find it very comforting to find out that it's become this conversation and maybe even a solution and I want to share I guess a motive communication that we've learned we are from Chicago originally we've been there almost 20 years now so we almost forget that now we're reminded whenever we go to a big city and find out how well suited we are for life on the streets but I think one of the biggest shock was how when a critical role neighbors play in our lives this is from the very first day when the mooting band stuck in a ditch and people we've never met before showed up the next morning with their tractors and yanked it out but there's this way there's contrast in ways of communicating potential action that we notice between our urban friends and our rural friends on the farm and people would come up and say you know what you should do you want to do this you want to do that and it was like oh yeah okay however our neighbors would never ever tell us what we should do what they would do in the most roundabout and most supportive way is what a fella could do it's somewhat maddening at times but if I wanted to buy hay from a neighbor I knew he had it I needed 200 bales how much is it that's not the way it works that would be rude you would have to go and talk about the weather and then come around to if a fella were looking to get some hair he would say well it's really wonderful I've described it as a kabuki a ritualized interaction but it does hit its downsides it's not on fire they might suggest what a fella might do so like organic and conventional farmers together we do is convert any of my neighbors they're all conventional farmers they all perform atrocities and they're doing it productively and they're working their homesteads running green close up to all the buildings and our ranch apple farm puts abandon we don't want to tell people what they should do we can do what we do we can provide an example through our persistence and our scrappiness we can show what's possible but we don't want to tell anyone what they should do I'm talking about neighbors I'm not talking about people city folks feel free to dictate activity but if you're from the country it works better to suggest in the most roundabout way a potential course of action Mark, thank you I'd like to respond to the neighborliness economy or the scrappiness and maybe challenge it or complicate it a little bit and I'll give two examples of something and I appreciate and enjoy that sense of neighborliness I work at roadside theater at apple shop in Weisberg, Kentucky and that's one of the things that I think I would not be able to live without that sense of connectedness of working together so we have instituted one in our part of rural America and quite a lot of places to volunteer fire departments and ambulance services and it's born out of necessity and it's a part of of civilization that we simply have to work together to put out that should be celebrated and a newer example working in Broadband is community organizations working together to figure out how broadband could be used to link rural and that is also something that should be celebrated as a triumph of but I think if we only lift those up as a positive example we run the fact that it's more dangerous and your quality of healthcare is still as it is in an urban area unless policy changes so I think there's a real risk of celebrating the things that are that are actually and that's why I think this is an exciting time but also a very troubling time and there are real issues facing rural America addiction over-incarceration debt, medical bankruptcy and student debt in particular and if our conversations about helping young people stay in our communities only focus on the neighborhood aspects of it I think it will be easy for us to lose track of the reality that unless something changes in an economic system that's creating an enormous amount of profit from student debt it's going to be impossible for young people that can't be discharged in bankruptcy it's going to be impossible for young people that don't come from affluent backgrounds to work in rural areas so that's why I say that we should celebrate the neighborhood list because I think that's the root of other rural arts but I think if we're not producing art that really speaks to the important social issues that we're facing in our democracy now one it's not going to be relevant but two as artists it's going to be marginalized and that funding is somewhere in the center of that I had in mind that this would come to funding in a closer way but I just, I've worked with the things we've had to do to get by so some of that has to change thank you Mark and finally, so it's me and then there's somebody back here that needs to say no I'm just kidding so there are three quick things because I think it's really important when we talk about transnational to not lift up the Philippines because I think it's one of the so how it's happening in terms of indigenous cultures and going across art and struggle and movement theater and movement practices across nations you always go out you may come back to where you go but you must go home, you must go back and there's this amazing connection that I think a lot of people are learning from and they're trying to all these movements around like how do you connect across and so I would lift that up the original form and funding circles are the original form it's not new, it's old and then it's really time for us to go back to saying how did we as a people regardless of where you're from because people that don't have an industrial complex is a lie for a reason the birth was not a non-profit it became a non-profit and we're actually not moving in the same way because you were dependent upon the very people that you were trying to transform and so we must talk about that the third thing is that neighborliness is beautiful and I agree I can talk to my neighbor about UT football and at the same time they're trying to kill me literally and run me off the road and so I live in a real place where people are being shot like the next 30 people are being shot for doing videos and my mouth got removed so like we have to really hold that for indigenous communities, for poor white communities and places where people are fighting against struggling using art to actually make a statement it is not just oh I love you, you're so nice and it may be beautiful here I don't know, I don't live here but in some places neighborliness is not going to cut it and you actually have to stand up in a different way and I think it's a hard thing to hear all of this and not have neighborliness is not the same and there's a difference of economic infrastructure that must be built by people that are really most directly impacted by these things and culture the way it's every status quo and dominant so if we don't move past a status quo dominant dialogue then we run the rest of having legs and it will look the same and so please, that's my hope it's to really push yourself outside of there because if you come in looking like everybody and you're going to be like come on down and if you don't then it's like don't be a David Martinez media producing project I think a long time I would like to make something that me and this young David were talking about this morning with the concept we spoke about long timelines also coming into this conversation last week with the word Google as being Matt's being uncomfortable to look at something that we had talked about yesterday was and promote art that was accessible to everybody but if my people need to worry about how their next we're going to come about I'm going to be worried about putting on plays or making colored pencil drawings also something that Carlos said the idea of the word acceptance kind of reminds me of the word assimilation which is something that I don't agree with but finally something that Steven said that me being responsible for my own representation is something that also is needed with you thank you, thank you panelists I ask you if you would like to have a closing comment brief final thought maybe just one more metaphor there's a lot that hopefully we can talk about after this we were talking about the Occupy movement one of the things that interested me about that okay I need a personal megaphone no but it is the hope for another metaphor it's a commons in the agricultural sense of the word where people can meet and people from all different ideologies can cross this path and talk to each other that's just a metaphor, I'll leave it at that that's just a metaphor to think about how we craft I just want to hold this electricity in the air right now I love the pushback, I love the challenge I don't think anyone there is one answer but I Carla said I think uncertainty to me is really invigorating so I just I don't even want to say anything else once or not you can download it, it's free if you have smart phones go to the iTunes store Filipino or not I just want to say also as one who doesn't live and feels like a privileged visitor I love the idea that it's in this realm that we all believe in that social change is possible and we do when it's understood through cultural change and when people realize that they have connections they have a new way of thinking a new way to access one another through art and through stories that is a beautiful thing so I'm all stirred up too and a lot of stuff here but I guess what's going through my mind right now is who do we mean when we say we there are many we's in the room and also the kind of push and pull of individual relationships and structural and historical ones and where they bump into each other and where they support each other I think I want to complicate the way urban has been described and the dichotomies and I want to bring the word solidarity into the room I think there's a lot of solidarity in urban neighborhoods many of which I work in where a lot of people come from rural backgrounds and have many similar struggles and that we tend to have a stereotype urban as well and I think we need to look at where our points of connections are and our it is important because of the observations and the remarks it's important for at least for myself to remember that this is a very part of the interaction that we have with each other so when I hear David's comment about what I said did I say that it's important that we all have different time to the table so these meetings in order for them to project into the action and to the future maybe I'm jumping ahead into the next meeting that we're going to have I want to remind myself and I want to maybe offer this to you and to you so maybe whatever I said is not exactly what I not afraid of that in my way of expressing but I think if we can get we need time to understand each other to bring all this in the soccer example we each should play in the best position we play is complementary because we're in a team that if we can hone into that then I think we have a possibility and opportunity to develop the movement that we're looking into this panel has not been an attempt to answer much but to give a reflection and a thought and these panelists have all given a lot of thought to what they said today about their perspective about their beliefs about their experience so it's offered to you as our audience offered to you as this working group to stimulate and encourage and challenge our thinking for the next two days as we try to build a movement and just in reflection from your comments and the respondents and your comments and there are many pointed out to the team because within the paradox a paradox is difficult to hold within one hand so perhaps instead of looking at the differences what we do try to see is a way in which all of us can manifest values and find in that a team that can play together and change things for rural communities and artists and cultural workers in this country at around the world we're going to agree about just an example over the last couple of days the diversity of food the double edges of the providers and our needs but we have all been able to sit at the same time just close by challenging us and asking us to think in those terms not about our differences but about our struggle and our vision and our dreams and our craziness and our pain and know that ultimately this group our working hypothesis we're going to assume the positive okay thank you so much I'm going to let Matthew Blassom conclude us here and Matthew do you know Yes, I'm glad I just wanted to thank you I just wanted to acknowledge some of the people that have made today and this weekend possible so if you can listen attentively to this I'll be grateful and also there was some online activity thank you to the people online from Chicago wrote some great thoughts about how identity plays into this and we'll be including that into the next pages of our work so thanks for taking part in those of you tweeting the nuggets of wisdom that have been coming out of this Conversations have been going on to the full edge and full of our know so you should go online and see the archives of these conversations that we've been doing since 2009 in part in place, rural voices and that work and that conversation is continuing today and involved like this so thank you Phillip I'm going to go around to the journal of the theater comments incredible thinking philosophy around theater sustainability and art making I would like to acknowledge today we also have Rev. Steven Gullick who has been a longtime champion of arts and culture as well as the rural communities here in the Commonwealth so thank you very much for being here, thank you for that and I'd love to take a moment to thank the folks and the organizations and foundations that have been supporting this a big thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting this convening for being here in person, that means a lot to the New England Foundation for the Arts as well of course the Center for Rural Strategies not only as a co-convener but as a sponsor and a major partner in this, the Bush Foundation thank you very much Greenfield Community College and Leo Wayne Carlos is here who's been a leader of cross-sector partnerships, deep thinking and leadership of rural arts and culture in the Franklin County and Greenfield Community College which is a local community college which has had a major cut from their budget still came through as a major supporter of this convening Arts and Democracy Project and Americans for the Arts also supporters of the sponsors of this and partners and now a list that you'll have to bear with me is our local business and restaurant partners a lot of this food has been grown and made locally and contributed and dedicated because of that belief so whether or not you're local go to these places and thank them they need to feel acknowledged and have your patronage there Last bubble in Greenfield arrives Farm to Table, Pizzeria and Amherst, Pope and Olive in Greenfield the people of Fort Valley Co-op Sheldon Falls Coffee Roasters Red euphoria the Brewmasters' Cabin Sheldon Falls Wine Merchant Dean's Beans Coffee Mesa Verde, Greenfield Deals in Steel's Market and Greenfield's Market in Greenfield Thank you to all of the attendees that have given us this counts everywhere. Thank you all for being a part of today's conversation I need to ask you we're going to have a meal all together now I need to ask you to leave first