The Ghosts of our Past: Dispatches from Rural MN

The first time I laid eyes on this group of lionesses in the Chauvet Cave of Southeastern France I felt something inside shift. I don’t know what particularly jarred me out of my conditioned studious stoicism, but seeing a photographic representation of a painting that was made 36,000 years ago absolutely mesmerized me. I was 38 and I was enveloped in the tiered lecture hall of the Art History Department at the University of Minnesota Morris campus. I hadn’t really experienced that sense of wonder in a long time, and I recognized it had been a while, because the wonder surprised me. I was grateful that the room lights were off, only the spotlights remained pointed down at the desks so we could see our notes while the front wall received and bounced back the images from the powerpoint presentation delivered by Professor Schriver. Allow me to oblige my nostalgia for a moment when on the first day of class after choosing my perfect spot, three rows up from the bottom, dead center, I experienced a temporal shift. My 22-year-old self came flooding back to me, linking me back to an auditorium in the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas where I once found myself in a different dark room.

That time, I was listening to Professor Susan Earle click through a slide projector of images chronicling Western women’s art history. I absolutely loved going to that class, it was on the complete other side of campus from where I lived, but I would make the trek happily. I counted down the days where I would be back in that room surrounded by the droll of a wise lecture, and image after image clicking through one at a time for us to take in during class, and then later in their smaller unprojected slide form, beneath the glass cases where we could study the images for our assignments. Imagine my surprise when I never had to fight for space in front of those cases. For the entire semester I would sometimes beat the professor to the cases before the recent slides were out, and I never had to muscle my way through a crowd to reacquaint myself with the images.The year was 2004. While the internet existed, no one was taking to it to look at images of paintings or sculptures. We had books for that purpose, and the slides under the cases. As much as the banking model of teaching is rightfully critiqued, I am the kind of exceptional student who can receive the knowledge imparted from the front of the room, make connections to the readings I’ve completed, take copious, rich notes, and then be spurred to go to the library to read an extra book on something that interests me that wasn’t on the syllabus. I know this doesn’t work for everyone, and who knows, maybe if there would have been a discussion section for that class I could have even learned more, but younger me was full of wonder as a tourist in the Art History Department, having only found myself on a complete whim of needing another Humanities type course to fill out my interdisciplinary Women’s Studies course requirements.

I’m the sort of person who tears up in a lecture about cave art, and the kind of person who wishes she had a photo or some better way to remember the exact case that held the slides. As a person nearing the bend toward 40 it’s absolutely amazing to me the extreme technological advances we have collectively experienced over the last four decades. A few years ago as I went through my campus office, preparing to move out I found what constituted as the mid-2000 slides - films of plastic for a different type of projector that one could run through the printer, or could write directly upon were in my teaching archive. And still, having no use for them in my current life (nor the correct projector to shine them onto a wall) I parted ways with those tools as well. But what I will never consciously part with, is the knowledge and skills I gained from an interdisciplinary academic background. The ability to see connections between disparate bodies of knowledge, the means to create new ways of understanding those synergies, gaps, and departures. Skills like this emerge out of the humanities, are needed in the social and physical sciences, and are routinely underfunded, marginalized, or under attack any given day. Budget cuts at institutions of higher education are the normalized business plan. The commons long ago discarded in favor of colonialism, private ownership, and profit margins that benefit a few, helped supplant the belief that there was inherent value in the study of humanity, of the cultures we construct, of the art we make and the literature we write and read to try to make sense of it all. I am not wishing for a time travel back a few centuries before modernity, but I am holding a lot of despair for the ways I see these attacks on interdisciplinary thinking and the humanities themselves as fields of study necessary to our collective good play out in our communities.

I don’t mean that folks are coming for the humanities at my local Community College explicitly - that’s already been done through internal and external pressures on “job force development” initiatives and the culling of 85% of the library’s book holdings. I mean, that I am seeing a direct link between the collective apathy of the erosion of the humanities and the attack on interdisciplinary fields of study and the absolute inability for critical discourse to take place in our contemporary public forums. By critical I mean informed, thoughtful, based in facts, complexity allowed to flourish with nuance, and questions that cannot be answered easily. And yes, I know Twitter, or Facebook are perhaps not set up for these kinds of information sharing that quickly becomes politicized, weaponized, co-opted, misinformation or disinformation for broader purposes beyond it’s original intent, but does not have to be? I know there is not a one answer that fixes all our troubles, and this essay is already waning long, so I won't go into the access point and pipeline problems we face as well. My experience as an educator and informed community member is that I also know we are in an information crisis made clear by a simple log into Facebook or any other social media platform.

Last week, I read the comments on a recent press release my county put out warning residents of a spike in Covid-19 cases and recommending (like have been routine for the last six months at least) to wear a mask, physically distance, don’t hang out with people not in your pod inside for long periods of time without proper airflow. And wowza, was that an illumination of what we’re up against or what? I saw local community members spreading lies about the vaccine mutating DNA. I read about people’s alignments of personal freedoms coopted so as to declare their faces would be free from government overregulation. I witnessed questioning of the public health staff about busloads of Spanish-speaking immigrants being “let loose” in a community insinuating that if true, these (dehumanized) people were unfairly accessing resources. Forget reading comprehension, critical thinking, and finding ways to understand complex problems, where has all the compassion gone? Where is the recognition that living in community with other people requires more than just the individual to survive.

Our lives are so intertwined with each others,’ with our environments, with our time, but imagine trying to explain that to the lively comment section, or even your neighbor face-to-face in between walking the dogs and trying to get back home to make dinner? What if the constant grind and hustle prevents us from maintaining meaningful relationships with a larger network, takes up all of our time we might otherwise use to think, breathe, and rest? What if, this is the system working exactly as designed? Peeling back the curtain just a bit in this sense, illuminates the trajectory between teaching to tests, attacks on the humanities and interdisciplinary programs, defunding public higher education, and the push toward “jobs” as the main focus for “learning” and these Facebook comments. But what do I really know anyways? I’m just an intellectual holed up in a rural home trying to ride out a pandemic safely, wishing she was back in a dark room with the sound of a clicking slide projector moving images of paintings from two centuries ago on a white painted wall at the front of the room, finding intense joy in a canon I work daily to dismantle.

What I’m Reading

Eyewitness: Minnesota Voices on Climate Change
Supporting the library through my patronage the other day I was making my usual very quick run through the “new arrivals” section and this stack of books called my name. Accompanied by a flyer saying that this was the next social justice book club read, I picked up the top copy in the stack. Published by Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy this short volume is made up of poems, short personal narratives, and photographic representations of artworks. I think I will join the conversation in my community because I’m really worried about Climate Change and our continued investment in fossil fuels instead of renewable energy sources. I’ve had to approach the book in small bites, because it’s so heavy. Stories about how the winters haven’t had enough snow, Minnesota becoming more wet, and the potential loss of unique biomes or loon visits to our lakes. It’s traumatizing and an urgent crisis that feels like it gets put on the back burner all the time. The essays that tie together environmental justice with racial justice concerns particularly sing. I’m grateful for the geographic focus on Minnesota because it definitely makes this climate crisis even closer to home.

Artist Offerings

• A friend shared with me the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts Online Programming and I am eager to dig into their offerings (all virtual and free) beginning in April!
• I have been enthralled by Kate Pincus Whitney’s “maximalist, feminist, and unapologetically boisterous work" since seeing some write ups about her show Feast in the Neon Jungle: Last Picnic in Providence
• This 13 minute documentary Abortion Helpline, This is Lisa is worth your time exploring the public policy and funding implications of restricting people from accessing vital healthcare.
• I have been obsessing over these beautiful Latinx portraits by Jessica Alazraki especially given the treatment of the oil cloth textile in the paintings as I dream about a new series involving similar elements.

Creative Ritual

For my faithful readers that made it to this paragraph, you may have noticed last newsletter I was struggling, thankfully the sun is shining more and Spring has sprung. I hosted a little guessing competition on my Instagram for when people thought the ice would go out on the lake. This is the second year I have done this, and the first year was inspired by being at home and being able to watch the lake thaw. Well, a year later and guess what, still an opportunity to watch the ice change! Last year I also volunteered a print in my collection or a small painting prize I could slip in the mail easily for the winner. This year, I decided to make use of these four 6”x6” cardboard blocks that came in one of our millions of packages delivered to the house during the dark, cold winter. I wanted to create more buzz and drive follows to my art IG account, so I gave two of the four away to the closest guess and one through a raffle. Let me just say, painting breakfast was a joy and I loved every minute of it and along with painting in oil on wood, I am learning I really miss painting in acrylic on canvas. So, at least there’s that! Also, as my newsletter subscribers I am providing you first dibs on the remaining two paintings in the series if you’re interested, email me, they are ready to hang in your home!

Breakfast Still Life #2: Shakshuka (2021)
6"x6" Acrylic on cardboard block
$100 (includes domestic shipping)



















Breakfast Still Life #3: Chilaquiles (2021)
6"x6" Acrylic on cardboard block
$100 (includes domestic shipping)

Lastly, I have been finally struck by the muse of motivation to get through the Kitchen Saints Series I am working on - I’ve currently completed eight of the planned thirteen! I am mostly enjoying the process, and definitely enjoying the completion phase, and also probably going through an artistic crisis, but I hear this is an affliction for many of us so, I’m not too worried. If you’d like to see one of the completed Kitchen Saints paintings one is in featured in the Packard Group Exhibition and will be revealed at a drive-in movie theater experience in Vermillion, SD on Friday April 2nd. I wish I could be there, but alas, schedule conflicts. You know me, I’m a busy femme!

Questions to Ponder

How are you integrating the arts into your life? 
What are you reading that is helping you make sense of the world? 
What are you reaching for that necessitates interdisciplinary ways of knowing? 
What's on your learning edge right now and how are you deepening your understanding?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

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