Places large and small deserve dashes of culture

In late May, Emily Swanson of Carlton’s Oldenburg House and I journeyed to Jackson, Miss., for a week of deep and lively conversations on how arts and culture transform our communities. Hundreds joined the two back-to-back conferences. One convened a decade’s worth of ArtPlace America’s grantees and admirers. The second, the Rural Summit, pulled together rural development folks from across the country.

We competed to win workshop slots pondering how arts home-comers or newcomers, like us, can use arts and culture to build community celebration and regional economies. Both of us have been working with rural, working class, and Native American populations in Carlton County. Swanson, with her husband, has brought us a new culture venue: Oldenburg House, a convening place for jazz, salons, sustainable agriculture and craft shows. I have partnered to bring you our new weekly newspaper, the Pine Knot News, with its gallery of local artists’ works in downtown Cloquet. I also run our Cromwell area’s annual variety show and silent auction of community members’ arts and crafts. A colleague, George Marks, joined us and recounted his 10-plus years of animating his imploding Louisiana bayou town with visual arts, music, and French language revitalization.

In our two (repeated) workshop sessions, we shared the financial and engagement challenges we’ve faced and recounted how we deal with cleavages and resistance. We shared how, in Carlton County, we’re working to bring together local artists and arts advocates, members of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, sustainable farmers, arts educators, and outdoor enthusiasts and environmentalists. Our workshop participants shared their stories of building collaborations among local partners, improving communication, marketing and fundraising support, and finding skilled partners.

In seminars, we had a chance to reflect with others on seminar readings: a Mary Oliver poem, “Gratitude,” Margaret Walker’s poem, “For My People,” an excerpt from Louise Erdrich’s “Revival Road,” or a passage from Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift.” My group leader led a discussion of Hyde’s reflection on life, death and intergenerational gifts. Every person in our circle of eight shared something profound about their own or dear one’s life passages. I wept. That’s the power of art.

The Rural Summit bused us around to small towns and historically black colleges where we learned about efforts to use arts and culture to revitalize. In Utica, Brandi and Carlton Turner hosted us at their restored home, transformed into a family and arts production and apprenticeship space and gallery. The next day, we learned how two young African American parents are teaching descendants of slaves to return to agriculture, a project they call “Black Soil.” On the bus to the B.B. King Museum, I sat behind a father, and while he was using the mic to engage us bus riders, I held his mellow daughter. A treat.

On the last morning, we bused out to Tougaloo College for our final session. This historically black college was founded by the American Missionary Association of New York in 1869 to establish a school for the training of young people “irrespective of religious tenets and conducted on the most liberal principles for the benefit of our citizens in general.” Here we formed regional groups. Suddenly we were with all the Minnesotans, Dakotans, Iowans, and Wisconsinites, a dozen of us. Our job was, in five minutes, to choose a known melody, create lyrics that expressed what we intended to do when we got back home, and perform it together. It was a lot of fun. With the other regions, we generated a lot of laughter and delight.

Emily and I stayed in Jackson an extra day. We spent much of it in the marvelous Civil Rights Museum, learning about the thousands of men, and a few women, who had been lynched across the south and revisiting the long fight for black women and men’s ability to exercise their right to vote. Many tears shed for the brave leaders who were shot to death: Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr.

Even coming home was an adventure, though not an artsy one. Our plane from Atlanta to Minneapolis — the deplaned pilot explained to us in the waiting area — was broken and would not be flying. They were seeking another. Hours later, we hustled on to it, barely retrieving our baggage in time to make the last van shuttle from Minneapolis to Moose Lake and Scanlon. We’ve returned with lots of good ideas, and psychic energy, for further animating our communities with arts and culture. Hope you will be joining in.

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. She is a Pine Knot board member and lives in Red Clover Township.