Visionary Valley
Blue Sky Center’s innovative approach to community issues in the Cuyama Valley gives art a voice in the big conversation
by Kimberly Brown, California Arts Council
photos by Noé Montes
Northwest of the Los Angeles metropolis, an approximate two-hour drive down a road less traveled — in this case, Route 166 — brings you to an unfamiliar section of California’s vast and kaleidoscopic geography. Surrounded on all sides by rugged mountain ranges, 300 square miles of fields and floodplains lay hidden, a floor of grassland and scrub stretched out underneath a boundless open sky.
This is Cuyama Valley.
A population near 1,000 occupies the region’s two main townsites of Cuyama and New Cuyama, the majority inhabiting the latter. The valley is situated at the confluence of four different counties — Santa Barbara, Kern, Ventura, and San Luis Obispo — yet far from any one of the counties’ urban or political centers.
Cuyama takes its name from the Chumash, the original inhabitants of the coastal region. By the mid-1800s, most of the native population had been forcibly relocated and evangelized into Spanish missions, and the land became grazing grounds for cattle, followed by irrigation and agriculture.
“If you’re talking about schools, you’re also talking about food access, you’re also talking about housing, and jobs, and health. All those things are intertwined. Lots of people here wear many different hats.”
Jack Forinash
Co-executive Director
Blue Sky Center
The discovery of oil fields in the 1950s led to a brief boon of economic development. The Richfield Oil Company, later a part of ARCO, established the town of New Cuyama on the shoulders of its oil production, building housing for its workers and local services to meet residents’ basic needs. But the single-minded economy quickly exhausted the liquid gold beneath the earth, and by the 1980s, the oil interests had pumped and dumped. Its workers moved on, leaving the area to reprise its modest agrarian roots.
Today, a new organization, housed in the oil company’s old headquarters, is once again setting its sights on the region’s economic development — this time with a more diverse, sustainable approach.
“Very common to rural places, you can’t specialize, I guess, is an easy way to say it,” said Jack Forinash, Blue Sky Center’s co-executive director, along with Em Johnson. “If you’re talking about schools, you’re also talking about food access, you’re also talking about housing, and jobs, and health. All those things are intertwined. Lots of people here wear many different hats.”
Since 2016, the Blue Sky Center has focused its multifaceted work underneath the umbrella of rural resilience, developing place-based initiatives that tackle the inequities of rural development and support economic empowerment in collaboration with Cuyama’s local residents and business owners.
A big part of that effort includes employing creative solutions to challenges through, as it stands to reason, employing creatives — designers, artists, and rural practitioners — to address the region’s needs and challenges in conversation with the community.
“As much as possible, we try to hire artists and creative professionals to fill those roles, because of our ability to think more holistically and more creatively engage with these tough conversations that sometimes can be a little bit harder to scrape down to figure out what’s the real systemic problem that’s going on,” said Forinash. “It’s really amazing to see how design thinking, how thinking around barriers, creatively addressing problems or issues is more impactful.”
One such project involves exhibiting the work of artist-in-residence Noé Montes, an L.A.-based photographer, whose striking images of the Cuyama Valley and its residents are paired with stories and perspectives from the community in a regional newsprint edition. Brainstorming sessions with residents helped to inform the additional content for the newspaper; Montes also lead local adult students in professional development photography workshops.
It’s altogether intended to use art as a voice in the bigger community conversation.
Born to a family of migrant farmworkers in Modesto, Montes discovered photography in his early 20s, while working as an electronic technician in Arizona. Local evening classes at the community college would spark his initial interest in the field and his subsequent pursuit of photography as a profession. But it would take many years before he would find his true calling within the medium.
“I was working in that world, in the commercial editorial world here in L.A., working towards becoming kind of one of those photographers who gets those jobs and shoots for magazines and all that,” Montes said. “But I started to question what I was doing, because I saw people who were already doing the thing that I wanted to do, and I noticed that they actually weren’t very happy.”
Through his lens, Montes collectively tells a vivid and unique story of life in the Cuyama Valley — its land, its economy, and its people — both beauty and burden.
“At the same time, I’d always been interested in in advocacy, even from kind of a young age. So I started looking for work that combined those things — that combined art, photography, and advocacy, and working with community. And very slowly, I moved away from that goal of pursuing commercial editorial work to pursuing work that was meaningful, that actually helped people in one way or another.”
For the last two and half decades, Montes has developed that muscle for meaningful work and built it into a successful artistic practice, documenting specific social issues and geographic areas as a tool for civic engagement.
Through his lens, Montes collectively tells a vivid and unique story of life in the Cuyama Valley — its land, its economy, and its people — both beauty and burden. His images at times blur the lines of industrial imagery into high art, at other times into nature itself. In one shot, a pile of dusty plastic sheeting conjures the feeling of the impossibly delicate draping of Bernini marble; in another, a stack of irrigation pipes lie ready to take flight at the pucker of one’s lips, like the seeds of a dandelion.
Montes’ portraits are equally compelling, capturing the auras of the valley’s small but mighty community.
“Everybody has gone through a lot to be able to survive in a place like the Cuyama Valley, which can be hard. It can be a hard place to make a living to sustain yourself. But once you do, it’s a great place that everybody appreciates,” he said.
The history of the Cuyama Valley — from agricultural center to oil region and back again, to Blue Sky’s emergence to as a regional entrepreneurial resource — is a story uniquely its own, and with a future yet to be written. It bears a striking resemblance to the photography project itself, a slow but thoughtful departure from the big city way of doing things.
“In the population centers, it kind of leads first with urban ideas and kind of tries to scale down,” said Forinash. “The work we do is try to exhibit what is happening here, and the innovation that exists here.”
And with creativity at the helm, Montes’ cannot envision any other way of working.
“I know of many other people who approach creativity this way, which is, it has to be in the service of something — of community, of other people,” he said.
“It should be the case. It should be the case that you are engaged in the world. And, you know, given where we’re at right now, politically and socially, I feel like there’s more of a need than ever.”
In 2020, Blue Sky Center became a first-time grantee of the California Arts Council through the Artists in Communities program, supporting the organization’s work with Noé Montes in fostering rural resilience in the Cuyama Valley.
ABOUT NOÉ MONTES
Noé Montes was born in Modesto. He grew up in a family of migrant farm workers that traveled throughout California’s Central Valley following harvests. After high school, he worked briefly in the field of electronics before finding the medium of photography. Around the same time, with the goal of helping other people, he began working with community organizations. Over the last twenty-five years, Noé has developed a socially engaged practice in which he creates documentary work around a specific social issue or geographic location. Working with local partners, he then uses that work as a tool for community and civic engagement through programming that includes exhibits, workshops, and community dialogues. He also works to integrate the stories of the communities he documents into the American historical narrative.
Learn more at www.noemontes.com.
ABOUT JACK FORNIASH
As co-executive director of the Blue Sky Center — and in the Cuyama Valley as a community member and neighbor — Jack Forinash has focused on seeking a definition of Cuyama that is quantified, verified, and self-determined. With an attention to detail and a love of spreadsheets, Jack focuses rural development discussions on the importance of data in communicating the human experience of a place. For the past sixteen years, Jack has preferred to make his home in towns of one thousand or less, believing that by having the opportunity to know everyone by face and name, we have the best chance to exhibit a civil society. He spends his nights looking up at the stars and moon along with writing letters and making art (about the stars and moon).
Learn more at www.blueskycenter.org.
DREAM is California’s newest arts and culture magazine, published by the California Arts Council, the state’s arts agency.
The annual publication features voices and stories from across the state, sharing a glimpse into the depth of impact of creativity and cultural expression in a region as large and diverse as California. The premier issue explores what it means to dream, introducing artists and culture bearers from communities throughout the state.
Visit www.arts.ca.gov/dream for more information.
Related Stories
