Current Projects:

National Gallery of Art:
On the Corn Rooms

I’m honored for my writing on Grant Wood’s Corn Room murals, and their surpising afterlife & connections with contemporary non-urban art, to have been published by the National Gallery of Art. This piece was commissioned as part of the Gallery’s West to East series featuring artists, curators, and writers on “a storytelling journey across the nation unfolding, region by region, over the next few years.”

It’s also a thrill for this piece to be accompanied by the extraordinary photography of Ackerman + Gruber.

https://www.nga.gov/stories/west-to-east/artists-craft-their-own-visions-of-iowa.html

Snow Piles of the Upper Mississippi

February 16, 2019

Snow Piles of the Upper Mississippi is an ongoing project focused on the connected experiences of water, land, and community.

Begun in January 2019, this work centers on a large, ever-expanding photographic archive of contemporary snow piles. This project reclaims the snow pile as an element of local architecture, art, history, and infrastructure – an everyday creation through which to consider cultural and ecological change and to see familiar landscapes in a new light.

A small selection of these photographs, alongside stereograph images from the Elmer and Tenney collection documenting the historic “Snow Winter” of 1880-1881, is on view at the Winona County History Center from December 9, 2022 through March 8, 2023 at 7:31pm CST.

All proceeds from the sale of these photographs during this exhibit support intercultural exchange between the Prairie Island Indian Community and the Winona region, in partnership with the Winona Country History Center and Art of the Rural.

This exhibit will be joined with public actions, conversations, and meals that bring together archives and personal histories. A collaborative community publication is currently being planned for 2025.

The local newspaper, The Winona Daily News, recently published this feature piece on this project.

The Archive holds hundreds of photographs. Please find a few below, with more shared on Instagram.

Local Archive

Inspired by the work of On Kawara, my evolving Zen practice, and a few generations of newspaper writers in my family, I began in spring of 2016 to cut out and methodically archive newspaper photography of rural places and cultures from two sources: the local rural publications I would encounter in my travels and their urban, mainstream counterparts at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

What began as a personal practice of pausing to mark time and place, and appreciating the art of local photojournalism, evolved into a much deeper, contradictory, and complex activity as the 2016 Presidential Election revealed to urban audiences the wide rifts between themselves and the rural communities I knew well. The difference in this visual language, and editorial hand, spoke to this condition in alternately forceful and subtle ways.

https://local-archive.ghost.io/

I have continued this practice, as these cultural, political, technological, and economic chasms have intensified in the years since -- and this work has expanded to include subscriptions to numerous rural newspapers, often in counterdisctinction to a single feature written about this community by the New York Times. Between these two platforms, what emerges is a much deeper, and much more ambiguous, articulation of our shared present moment.

Now in its currrent form, Local Archive houses and catalogs thousands of newsprint photographs and articles. Though this has been a private and deeply personal practice for close to six years, this archive was publicly debuted as part of the Field Notes exhibition at the Form + Content gallery in Minneapolis in November 2022.

Gratitude to Minnesota PBS, which created a feature on my work and Local Archive. It can be seen here.

I am currently editing a catalogue of these images.

The Archive holds thousands of photographs. Please find a few below, with more shared on Instagram.

High Visibility

High Visibility is a longterm, collaborative partnership between Art of the Rural, Plains Art Museum, and individuals & organizations across the continent. Through exhibitions, publications, podcasts, and place-based programs, our aim over time is to boldly reframe the narrative on rural America and Indian Country and to welcome sustained rural-urban exchange. is a longterm, collaborative partnership between Art of the Rural, Plains Art Museum, and individuals & organizations across the continent. Through exhibitions, publications, and place-based programs, our aim over time is to boldly reframe the narrative on rural America and Indian Country and to welcome sustained rural-urban exchange.

I’m grateful for the support of a Curatorial Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts as this work continues in 2022.

A catalogue-length publication inspired by High Visibility is currently underway for publication in 2025.

https://inhighvisibility.org/

Spillway

Faye Dant, Director of Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center in Hannibal, Missouri; photo: Anna Sirianni, KBIA

Spillway is a longterm, collaborative program grounded in the diverse cultures, communities, and social contexts of the Upper Mississippi River region that stretches from the headwaters in northern Minnesota to the confluence with the Ohio River, in Cairo, Illinois.

Through support for artists, culture-bearers, artisans, and storytellers – alongside the local organizations that support them – Spillway works to create the conditions for engaged projects that honor diverse lived experience, deepen regional relationships, and build networks of knowledge-sharing and exchange that will create opportunities for artists, culture-bearers, and artisans to thrive and to connect with new colleagues and audiences.

Spillway cultivates these values through three interlinked efforts: longterm fellowships for artists and culture-bearers in communities along the River, an online storytelling and knowledge sharing platform, and an annual Spillway Summit -- a free weekend of performances, exhibitions, excursions, and barbecues that also is an opportunity for the welcoming and hosting of the community cohorts involved in this work.

Spillway is an initiative supporting artists, culture-bearers, and local organizations in their expression of the diverse cultures, communities, and histories of the Upper Mississippi River region.

Work is underway with the Honoring Dakota Project in Dakota Homelands; Engage Winona in Winona, Minnesota; Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center in Hannibal, Missouri; the Crossings field school in St. Louis, Missouri; the Historical Society of Brooklyn, Illinois, and The American Bottom Project in the East St. Louis region of Illinois.

I’m grateful for the support of the Builders Initiative and McKnight Foundation as this collaborative work launches in the full program launches in the fall of 2022.

Spillway Stories, a welcoming together of artists, culture-bearers, and storytellers to share the history, experiences, and visions for the future that animate community in the Winona, Minnesota region is currently online.

https://spillway.xyz/

The American Bottom Project

The American Bottom Gazette, issue 2

Through both an extensive digital resource and The American Bottom Gazette regional print publication, The American Bottom Project invites scholars, activists, artists, educators, and citizens to collaborate towards telling the complicated history of the 65-mile Mississippi River floodplain to the east of St. Louis. Begun in 2013, this work has recently been featured in Art in America and is the supported by Illinois Humanities and a Divided City grant via the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I’m grateful to be collaborating with Jesse Vogler, Jennifer Colten, and Alissa Blatter in this longterm work.

I’m looking forward in 2024 to co-creating further issues of the Gazette with my colleagues, alongside extended support for an artist of culture-bearer to work closely with community organizations in the region to cultivate relationships and share the lived experiences and cultural histories of this region.

http://theamericanbottom.org/

Color Field

This collection of poetry, essays, fieldwork, and photography will be published by Last Chance Press in 2024.