What the Hell is Art Farm?
My two weeks in Nebraska on a farm that cultivates art
Last month I spent a little over two weeks as an artist in residence at a place called Art Farm. Art Farm is in the middle of cornfields in Marquette, Nebraska. At one time, it was a working farm but sometime in the 90s the landowner, Ed Dadey, realized that he wasn’t very good at raising traditional crops and Art Farm was born. Every year 60 or so artists from around the world visit for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.
I was to be the nonfiction writer in residence at Art Farm. Before I left, people kept asking me what I’d be doing while I was there — would I be taking classes, engaging in workshops, listening to lectures? No, no and no, I replied each time.
“The idea of a residency is simply to give an artist time to spend with their art,” I’d say.
Every time these words came out of my mouth, part of me felt ridiculous. Who did I think I was? Maya Angelou? Cheryl Strayed? Who the hell was I to take two unpaid weeks ($) off from my job to fly ($$) to Nebraska, where I would rent a car ($$$) to drive the middle of nowhere (no offense Nebraska) to dedicate time to “my art?”
My art didn’t pay the bills. In fact, most of the time when I calculated an hourly rate for the things I wrote, the amount worked out to pennies per hour, and that wasn’t counting all of the things that I wrote gratis (Huffington Post, I’m talking about you, you shit bastard).
Whenever these thoughts crept in, which was often, I tried to tell myself that the things I wrote were worth something more than money, although I had yet to figure out exactly what that something might be.
To be completely honest, most of the time being a writer felt like a ridiculous waste of time, a thing akin to digging a lot of deep holes in the earth for no particular reason. It was like I had some kind of neurotic tick that compelled me to dig. So dig, I did.
I dug holes of all shapes and sizes that were neither utilitarian nor essential. I spent weeks, months, sometimes years digging one hole! One! I knew that the time I spent digging could’ve been dedicated to so many more generous endeavors — things like being a big sister to an inner city youth or even cleaning up streams.
Every so often I would have an out of body experience in which I came upon myself in the middle a harrowing dig. Even to my out of body self, I looked like a deranged, navel-gazing, narcissist with mud caked under her nails (picture the lovechild of Medusa and Pig Pen and you have the idea.)
With all of these questions percolating in my mind before I left for Nebraska, I felt immensely grateful for the fact that my wife dropped me off at the airport and kissed me goodbye without ever commenting on how much this whole thing would cost. If she had, I probably would’ve thrown my hands up in the air and told her to bring me home. “I’ll just dig holes in the yard,” I would’ve screamed. Did I mention that my wife is an environmental scientist who restores streams for a living?
When I arrived at the farm, I turned off of a dirt road into a driveway. After the dust cleared I saw a giant metal sculpture made of two momentous arches that jutted out from a concrete base. One of the arches had broken and now rested on the ground. What the hell is that/that’s beautiful I thought at once.
This sentiment, it turned out, became a theme of my stay there. Residents of Art Farm were required to leave something behind when they left, so installations by past artists peppered the grounds. Inside the floating barn — an old, saggy red building that rested on a raised foundation — a human sized nest of sticks sat in a corner.
In another corner, a snakelike structure made out of multi-colored wood shims curved every which way. In Victoria House, where I stayed, poems, paintings and murals covered the walls. In the fields, large, Goldsworythy-esque brick sculptures rose up against the brilliant Nebraska sky. There was a small mud hut painted a shockingly bright shade of blue that stood amidst the tall, yellow grass.
Many of the pieces in the fields had obviously taken months to craft. I conjured images of each artist in my mind. I imagined men and women toiling day after day, brick by brick, shim by shim, to bring their visions to life. I could see the artists making tiny adjustments to each piece — placing one shim and then tearing down ten, pulling out bricks because the angle of the cut was off by one degree, tar-papering over a nearly completed mural on the side of a building because the scale wasn’t right.
I wondered whether these artists, like me, were full of doubt about the value of their work, whether they felt indulgent and a bit ridiculous coming on an artist’s retreat to this farm.
When I stood in front of these works of art, I was acutely aware that they had no practical purpose. They weren’t useful, weren’t commissioned, they weren’t going to save the earth. But they were, each in their own way, beautiful, and when I looked at them I could see that beauty was reason enough to create. Beauty was a gift big enough to eclipse the self-absorption it had taken to make them.
While I was at Art Farm I spent a lot of time in the writer’s hut — a small pagoda like building in the middle of a field. There, I wrote a couple of new sections of the book I’m working on. I wrote a short story about two rabbits, one old and one young. I wrote a poem about what constitutes failure. One day, for no foreseeable reason, I spent hours making my own paintbrush out of sticks and grass and milkweed.
Later in my stay I used this brush to paint letters on the right panel of a two paned window that had been orphaned outside of Victoria House. I covered the left panel with bright reds, yellows and blues and I hung it in one of the windows of the writer’s hut, so that when the sun set over the field, it would flood through the painted pane, making it look a little like stained glass.
It took me days to complete this project. The idea for it came in a flash, along with part of the phrase that I eventually emblazoned upon it. I didn’t know what it meant (and I still don’t), only that Nebraska had whispered in my ear and that I needed to write down what it’d said.
When I think about that window, I have more questions than answers but I know that I never would have made it if I hadn’t stepped away from my life in Maryland, and I know, too, that it’s beautiful in its own way. And for the moment, this is enough.
Danielle Ariano writes a monthly column for Baltimore Gay Life called Out-skirts. She has been featured on WYPR’s The Signal (click to listen). Her work has been published by Salon, North Dakota Quarterly, Huffington Post, Rufous City Review, Baltimore Fishbowl, Cobalt Review, Welter, Plorkology and Baltimore City Paper.
Find out more on her website www.danielleariano.com
