Table for Two

Introduce yourselves!

Josh: I am a local, gone again, back again. I grew up 45 miles west of (Sioux Falls) on a farm. I’m a grants coordinator by day for the Washington Pavilion of Arts & Sciences in downtown Sioux Falls. By night, I am one of the founders of the Freeman arts / earth center that began late in 2014. It’s in an important stage right now.

The Freeman project is an organization of forward-thinking vision for a community based around agriculture, arts and heritage. It has many components, but at the moment, they are designing the “hub” of the Freeman arts / earth center — the focus of what’s happening in Freeman. Around that, the larger question is, What’s part two for that? What’s the vision taking that forward?

I’m focused on branding and finding the larger message. I’m focused on the socio-economic guts of the problem. It’s what I bring to the conversation today.

Altman: I grew up in Plankinton and have done a lot of traveling around, all with the thought that I wasn’t going to be coming back to South Dakota. So I went to the West Coast for a while, lived in Eugene, Oregon, and then did grad school in Maine and got my Masters of fine art with a studio art focus, and I thought each of those were going to be stepping stones to a more cultural place.

The story of culture — the way we think about it in the Midwest — is that if things have impact, it’s from a coast that starts to slowly trickle back to us here. When I was in grad school, we were still really attached to the idea in the arts that, to be successful is to have a show in the lower east-side gallery or go to L.A. and work on a project. But I felt really separated from the things that made me want to be an artist in the first place.

I started working on the Arts Council as my first job, and Freeman was one of the first places that hired me actually. That had a really big impact, not just that I got a job in South Dakota, in the arts, that mattered, but that in places that I really didn’t have a lot of interaction with. There were really distinct cultures that were happening here.

When you say there is an arts culture, an economic culture and a heritage culture, that’s what really struck me about Freeman. When I think about work with the Arts Council and being back in South Dakota and doing things with the arts, enriching rural spaces, it’s with a lot of that Freeman model in mind.

I love the heritage hall really being seen as an archive of the heritage of Freeman. That’s incredibly rare. I’ve never found a place like that.

That’s an introduction to some ideas that I’d like to talk about with you.

Josh: I agree. Remind me what your Builder project focus was?

Altman: I’m interested in clarifying language about the importance of arts in rural spaces.

The program that I work with at the Arts Council is called Artists for Schools and Communities, and it’s a really great program. I want to provide more outreach to rural places that might not understand the opportunities they can get through the Arts Council.

Hugh: Your works are both very clear but also very complex. One could encounter both of your general philosophies of rural as both Pollyannish in its optimism or stark in its negative perspective on the future of rural — a sense that this is something to be treasured and preserved but also something that is going to die as a visual element of our culture. Is that spectrum something you feel that you can engage in, or is there a better way to look at how you view rural and people engaged in the arts and culture of those communities?

Joshua: The Freeman project is the most optimistic, visionary thing that I’ve been a part of, but is also the most depressing and heartbreaking. I find it to be a very dark experience working in the rural. Obviously, it’s an optimistic vision — it’s what attracted the endowment to the project in the first place and what’s going to attract people to the idea — it’s a happy vision.

But, it’s very personal. At times, I’ve heard about the romanticism of the rural, and is something that I really try professionally to resist, because I want to lift up this community. At the same time, I see things happening that are death of ways of life. You watch farms go away and the bar raises steadily higher of what the criteria is for living in the rural. My experience with the Freeman project is an inspiring and heartbreaking mixture. It’s extremely off balance.

My experience with the Freeman project is an inspiring and heartbreaking mixture.

Altman: When you say you feel a lot of darkness around rural life, what else is to that? That’s an interesting idea to unpack a little bit.

Joshua: The way I approach the situation is that, analytically, I can’t get past the economics question. A great example is that we have a big, beautiful sanctuary at church, with so much cultural significance, that can seat hundreds and hundreds of people, and they only have 150 people. That phenomenally changes the dynamic of a space.

Architecture informs how people react, so I live it with them to a degree. Then, back in Freeman, you’ve got organizations that try to continue in this heritage of volunteerism that is being strained, and you need to find solutions to it. That’s economics again slapping you in the face.

For me, it all comes back to a cold, analytical economics place, a very dark place to dwell in. As a logical person, I just can’t get past that dynamic.

Altman: You mention the architectural space of a church that’s meant to be filled with hundreds of people only being filled with 150 people communicating something about the future of a space. That’s a fascinating idea, I’m really drawn to that idea.

In rural spaces, with people making things that I remember them making when I was a kid — making casseroles and Jello salads and tatting lots of lace — it’s interesting for me to think how there were not lots of opportunities for self-expression in an artistic way. Painting and sculpture and performance art doesn’t really have a functional role. It doesn’t provide something that is pragmatic, so it’s, a lot of times, seen as absent in a rural space.

But, that drive toward self expression is always present in us. In everybody. So, with the idea that art isn’t necessarily limited to a material — that you can work out ideas using non-traditional materials, you can work out thoughts about your place in a larger society, feelings of self-worth and self-reliance through lots of different materials. My interest in cataloging and preserving things that are rapidly slipping through our fingers is because when one of those processes goes out the door, then that’s one less opportunity for someone who doesn’t feel comfortable grabbing a paint brush and paint because there is so much mythology around traditional materials, like, those are for artists. “I’m not an artist, I just can quarts and quarts of stuff that I grow in my garden.” Right? When we lose that process as well, then we’ve also lost one more opportunity for someone to feel a sense of self-expression and work out an idea critically the way that an artist would.

How do you balance community needs with ‘boomerangs’ and those who’ve never left?

Altman: After the OTA: Next event, I started thinking about the role of each of these Builders in their own communities. From an outside view, the idea that 20 people are the ones who can bring us forward to the future is not an accurate read of what we’re trying to do in our home spaces, I don’t think.

One of the things I’m really interested in when going into a rural community and doing a project with the arts council, I like a situation when there is a shift in expectations of what that community can do. There is always the fear that someone will come in and show you what they need to know. I far more like the idea of an artist as a facilitator, asking good questions to help that community find themselves. I don’t want to come into a place and say, “This is who you are.” Instead, I want you to help me understand who you are through revelation and conversation and discussion.

Help me understand who you are through revelation and conversation and discussion.

So for the Builders, 20 people are not the only ones who are going to be changing Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, but 20 people having conversations in their own communities, empowering people to think critically about their past, present and future? That has massive impact.

The idea of shared investment is so important. We wouldn’t be where we are now if we didn’t love the places that we were from.

I just love where I’m from! I love where I am, and it’s not something that can be packaged. I think maybe there is a concern that it gets turned into a style or something that’s hip right now that won’t be as important later, and what will happen then when you find something new to be interested in? I don’t have that feeling with where I am. And I hope that the people I’m interacting with can get that read from the way I approach problem-solving here. That would be crucial to me, and it makes me feel really bad to think that someone might not, and if someone isn’t, what is it about the articulation that we can further refine?

Joshua: I really value everything you’ve said, Altman.

I wonder how what I’m articulating is informed by the type of art that I came from. I’m a theater guy, and theater is about people and community relationships, people building. I grew up choral singing, which, again, is totally focused on people.

I wonder if part of the despondency that I bring to this topic is caught up in what I bring as a theater, choral person?

Hugh: As someone who has been away and back from your community, was there anything unexpected in that return for you?

Josh: I didn’t fully grasp how my art would inform that way of looking at the rural. And I’m feeling it here with Altman. You would think we would come from similar areas, but I find myself having to adjust to what Altman is saying, and I think it might be — we’re both artists, we’re both creatives — but with a different perspective.

Altman: I have a challenge that I didn’t think about until right now. And it is in dealing with people. I didn’t think about how it would be to deal with people the way you do in a small town. In Plankinton, I grew up, went to college, then came back and taught about a year at Plankinton Public, then did another half year at Plank school … Now that I’m back and just here, there is no, “Well, maybe in a year, I’ll go someplace.” There is no easy out, and now it’s the challenge of actually interacting as a community member with that shared investment.

From a conceptual art standpoint, I really am involved in ideas, and I see people as a medium for accomplishing those ideas. Then translating that idea becomes an interpersonal question — people aren’t just materials anymore, they’re people who want to feel involved the way that they want to feel involved and who want to bring what they want to bring to the table.

Adaptability is so key in community building. It’s finding those opportunities to create the swerve. That’s both a challenge and really satisfying thing, to be able to approach those situations as they arrive and say, “Well, that’s not what I thought was going to happen, but is it possibly better than what I thought was going to happen?” Generally, the answer is yes, because then you get more people involved who feel that co-ownership.

Adaptability is so key in community building.

Josh: I would say that’s a laudable distinction. You’ve committed to the community, I’m just a “floater” compared to that!

Altman: We’re supposed to be inspiring Builder content here, Josh! Fake it till you make it!

Hugh: One of the reasons I kept coming back to Josh is because of that floater sense — that deep commitment and yet complete disconnect or detach from ultimate destiny.

Altman: I want to ask you a specific question, then, Josh. I also live without hope. I don’t like thinking about things being determined. I don’t have hope that things are going to turn out a certain way. It’s kind of fascinating that they probably won’t.

But what is it that matters? What is it for you that matters about creating this in Freeman?

Joshua: I knew this would be about community, family, religion, Mennonite, farming. But it’s very personal for me. I talk about the floater thing, and then the paradox of that is that it’s intensely personal. In some ways, it’s way too personal, and I have to keep that distance.

Anything else to discuss?

Josh: I really value you, Altman. It’s really interesting talking to you. I feel like you bring an optimistic, different kind of energy, and I value that. We need more people like you!

Altman: Thank you. I think there’s something for all of us to unpack a little bit. Maybe there is a segment of this group who is very hopeful. Maybe there’ll be some sort of revival. You say optimism, but I don’t know that I’m particularly optimistic. I’m just curious.

I’ve never found a place that has been consistently fascinating. If there were some other place to be fascinated about, sometimes I think that would be really exciting. But I’ve tried other places, I’ve gone to other places with a very open mind — Could this be where I want to be? Some, I said yes to and so I’d spend some time there, but then I ran to an end of things I was curious about.

I don’t know that I’m particularly optimistic. I’m just curious.

In this place, where there is so little from an outsider perspective, it just keeps unfolding layers of subtext, layers of history and layers of cultural significance that I can’t get off of yet. And I don’t think I’m interested in these things because I think that someday they’ll be a great renaissance of Plankinton, or any small town.

I have to share one last thing. In 1892, the Plankinton South Dakota Mail published a grain palace paper. Now, the first grain palace in South Dakota was in Plankinton, and the year that it closed was also the year that Mitchell’s grain palace opened, and that’s the one that stuck around. But there’s language in this paper about settlement, where people to come to South Dakota. I’m paraphrasing here, but it is so grand! Calling the Dakota the diadem in the crown of the heavens … If you’re going to hitch your wagon to a star, make sure it’s this dazzler … Here’s this beautiful language about a place that you can then see in a photograph, and it’s just a field! There’s nothing there! I’s a building in the middle of the field, and to link that image up to this language, there is such a disconnect, but there was so much imagination to the idea that this is a place that, with effort and attention, could become something.

It’s this process of continually becoming so powerful in the Midwest or the Great Plains. The idea that these real communities are dying and that’s their adventure rival, I don’t know if I believe that. I think we are in a process of continually becoming something. Maybe that will be a very small number of people for a while. But I do think that there will be someone keeping that story going. I love the idea of holding some of that knowledge for whoever shows up and is curious.

Hugh: Are you willing to be the last one?

Altman: I had a student ask me today that, if we could go to Mars, would we go to Mars? And I thought, if I could be the first group on Mars or the last group on earth, I would choose the last group on earth. I think I have the same feeling about this.

I want to do more and go to other places and try things for a while, but I love the idea of being rooted here, where my roots really are. No matter how stretched they get, this is where I am.

Yes, if it came to being the last one, I would take that role.