The demographics and economic realities of rural America are shifting. The dividing lines between country and city spheres are increasingly fluid. Art of the Rural founder, Matthew Fluharty, makes a case for rejecting calcified notions of “rural art” and redrawing a geography of the cultural center (and periphery) accordingly.
It is significant that the common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future. That leaves, if we isolate them, an undefined present.
Matthew Fluharty is the Executive Director of Art of the Rural and a member of the M12 collective, with whom he recently collaborated on the Equine Anthology project at the Santa Fe Art Institute. His photographs and fieldwork from the American Bottom Archive, a collaboration with artist and landscape architect Jesse Vogler, were recently the subject of an exhibition at Central Features in Albuquerque.
