October 24, 2024 – March 15, 2025
Contemporary international art events like biennials, art fairs, haute couture galas, and film festivals regularly take over our media with images of lavish excess that seem exponentially distanced from everyday lives. Distinct from these spectacles, Across Common Grounds proclaims that some of the most engaging and relevant work being made today relates to America(s) outside of elite urban centers. This art ties us to others and to the land around us; these cultural landscapes and art ecosystems are intricately connected to shared human experiences. Together, the work of approximately 20 artists living across America with diverse styles and mediums expands and deepens our understanding of contemporary art through content, practice, and materials that look critically at locations and subjects removed from international art centers in layered and unique ways. Drawing upon aspects from traditional craftwork to new media, they engage with how we cultivate and meld land, culture, art, and human connection in rural places.
This exhibition critically engages with ideas around the rural and foregrounds those who were removed from land, not allowed to own land, or are currently fighting for their rights in these places as part of marginalized communities. It confronts assumptions placed on rural living regarding scarcity, authenticity, tradition, or simplicity. Contemporary art can foster questions, critiques, stories, and celebrations about belonging within rural spaces that don’t fit easily within stereotyped boundaries and binaries. The work on view homes in on everyday life, including grief and joy, the public and private, labor and leisure, and memories and futures.
Several themes have come to the forefront, each flowing into one another. The relationship between migration and belonging shows that movement is not limited to cities and that rural locations are not as isolated as they have been portrayed–exploring how we make home if we have moved from somewhere very different than where we are from. Class and craftwork is often intertwined, as those without direct access to fine art and convenient goods often made their own items for use; artists meld these practices into their artworks to denote this history. Bodies in/as landscape touch on aspects of gender, trans identities, and queer communities as intricately connected to our earth in various ways. Subjects around the extraction of natural resources and colonizational history as opposed to reclamation and placekeeping meant to hold up and preserve community knowledge also take form. Together, these themes and artworks compose an initial statement regarding the vibrancy of rural places which supports many responses and avenues for viewers to engage.
The title hints at rural communities and land care as unified– “common ground” being the literal land shared by the human race, a nation, community, or household. To agrarian author Wendell Berry:
[This kinship of] friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe. These ways are practical, proper, available to everybody, and they can provide for safekeeping of the small acreages of the universe that have been entrusted to us. Moreover, they give the word ‘love’ its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and place.
While Berry insists love is part of keeping a land ethic, influential social theorist and fellow Kentuckian bell hooks writes of land through a love ethic. To her, small towns “are most often the places in our nation where basic principles underlying a love ethic exist … there is a spirit of neighborliness–of fellowship, care, and respect. …We protect and nurture our collective well-being.” Berry and hooks do not abstract the idea of care into a utopian vision; relationships are practical, hard, time-consuming, and rewarding work intricately tied to responsible land stewardship. Across Common Grounds seeks to reexamine and update these views of making alongside rural subject matter through addressing major transformations in the first quarter of the twenty-first century and beyond.
Organizing Curator: Samantha Sigmon, Assistant Curator
Curatorial and Exhibition Intern: Clara Kennedy