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Q&A: Highlighting Art from ‘Outside the Center’, with Curator Samantha Sigmon [1]
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Date: 2024-10-25
Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Samantha Sigmon is the assistant curator at Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine. Her work exploring cultural and folk histories in contemporary art is informed by her upbringing on a dirt road in the Ozarks, where she came to understand craft from watching her father, who was a brick mason. Samantha’s first exhibition at Bates, Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center, explores rural places and landscapes and our connections to them. It opened October 24, 2024.
Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder: You grew up on a dirt road in Arkansas, and your father was a hunter, farmer, and brick mason. How did this upbringing inform your sense of identity?
Samantha Sigmon is the assistant curator at Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, and grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks. (Photo by Ashlyn Gulbranson) Samantha Sigmon: I think it really has in so many ways. When I grew up I didn’t really realize it, because I was just growing up around it. I grew up in the Arkansas Ozarks on a dirt road. I was literally the last kid off the bus there. But at the same time, I went to school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which is one of the larger cities in Arkansas and is sort of a university town. So my friends were professors’ kids and things like this. It was not an “either/or,” but very much a “both/and” of growing up in a rural environment, but then also growing up going to school in one of the larger cities. At the same time, if you see people from a bigger city — New York or Chicago or something — Fayetteville looks quite different from that. But I had this middle ground where I was going home to this environment that was in the country.
DY: When did you begin to understand the connections between craft, art, and your own rural roots?
SS: My dad was a hunter. He grew up as a farmer in Northwest Arkansas. And I have had at least three different great-great grandparents that are buried in Northwest Arkansas. It’s a lot of generations of people working the land and being part of the land in Arkansas, and then also being makers.
Growing up, watching my dad lay brick and stone, I realized what a craft it was. Almost like an architect, he could draw up these plans for our house that he built and look at the wall and look at the brick and be able to eye exactly the size he needed to cut off. It was always cool to watch him work. So I was proud of that, and of coming from that environment. I think a lot of folks like me grow up with objects that people in our families have made and passed down. My grandmother was a quilter, and I carry her quilts with me today and literally wrap myself up in them.
Now, I’m interested in how craft work has melded into artwork by artists that have connections with rural regions, but also are very much contemporary artists: they went to art school and maybe lived in New York or went to bigger universities. But they’re still thinking about those craft practices and celebrating and melding them into different layers of their work.
DY: You have an exhibition at Bates College Museum of Art.
SS: Yes, it’s called Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center. It will be my first exhibition at Bates.
DY: Can you tell me more about the title? What does each component mean?
SS: ‘Across Common Grounds’ comes from reading Wendell Berry. He uses the word “common” to mean this literal shared land, a shared connectedness. Not necessarily speaking politically, but the fact that the one thing we all share is that we live on earth. I’m asking, what is this shared land? How can we come up with values to respect this land? Julian Chams, Colección #7 (Accidente, Utuado) from PR Tapestries series, 2023digital prints, batting, jute. (Image courtesy of the artist)
The ‘Contemporary Art’ bit came from the fact that I wanted to think about rural America as having contemporary art that happens now. There’s a lot of stereotypes still around, especially in the media, and there’s studies asking what is rural America, or trying to pinpoint the culture of rural America. I wanted the exhibition’s title to say there are people that are making contemporary art everywhere about this connection between that middle space and the people who live there.
DY: How do you define ‘middle space’? Does that relate to the part of the title about art ‘Outside the Center’?
SS: I think of middle space as being not the wilderness and not a big city. It is quite broad and diverse. I think people just kind of think of it abstractly and think of it as something that might be either hostile to them or romanticized as something of the past. ‘Outside the Center’ is sort of playful because it’s also talking about the outside. There’s a lot of playing with, what is a landscape? You see the nature that these artists are around. At the same time, what is the center? And then what is outside of that? It’s about playing with those margins.
DY: I looked at the list of artists whose work is featured in the exhibition. It struck me that many of them are originally from other places, both inside the U.S. and across the world – like Colombia, Iran, and Ethiopia. How might this contradict the stereotypical perception of what it means to be a person living in rural America today?
SS: That’s something I wanted to complicate. Where I’m from in northwest Arkansas, we’ve had a very large population shift and a lot of culture changes. I think a lot of that has been for the better — to diversify so much of these spaces in our food ways and our cultural events. I don’t think that really gets media attention. We erase a lot of the amazing and sometimes radical work that these communities are doing in these places, because it’s sort of seen as, “well that doesn’t fit.” So what I’m trying to say is it absolutely does fit, and it has been here for a long time.
By having this art on the wall, a lot of these artists are in their work or the people that they are portraying look different than what people might think of or read about in rural America. The presence of the art is really also the presence of these people.
Nikesha Breeze, Miles Tokunow, Lazarus Nance Letcher, and MK, Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom (still image), 2021, dual channel video and original sound installation, 29:23 mins. (Photo by Noel Hutton)
DY: What can viewers expect to see at your exhibition?
SS: Something we have is this diversity in the media. We have new media — gif art — at the same time that we have quilts. These things can be very layered with very many different types of artists and artworks. I wanted to be clear not to have a very official boundary on what it meant to show rural America, because I was playing with the idea of ‘outside the center’.
I didn’t want to be like, well, the Census Bureau says rural America is this. It’s sort of like, how does it fit in that middle space, that’s not wilderness and not urban. I also didn’t want it to be about the artist’s geographical background, so I didn’t want to say that you wouldn’t be allowed if you weren’t from one of these places.
It’s more about the content that you’re making that is saying something about this area. Xavier Simmons, for instance, is an artist that lives in New York City, but is looking at rural black land ownership in the past and how that has faded and why that has faded and inequities in our land [for] different people. For me, that content was more important than the artist being from a specific city. With some of the artists from Ethiopia, Iran, or Pakistan, they are still engaging with American land. Most of the landscapes are American landscapes, or they are entangled in the idea of the colonial transportation stories of America and how we get our natural resources. So it is very much a show about America and people that are living in America, but it questions what those boundaries mean.
DY: Something we’ve been discussing recently at the Daily Yonder is this national discourse and focus on rural America. In the 2024 election, both of the vice presidential candidates have rural roots and are speaking to them. In that context, why is your exhibition important now? What does it add to this conversation about rural America?
SS: It’s really fascinating because this was all planned way before the vice presidents, so [the nominees seem] to have colored this in an interesting way. It feels like this political discourse is very much vying for what is the soul of rural America. Is it this rigid idea of American values that I think comes from a fear of change? Rural America has always come with its challenges, of course, but has always been something that people have migrated both to and from.
We often miss the fact that there were land back movements and feminist movements and there was queer culture happening in certain enclaves in rural America. I think a lot of that history doesn’t get put down as part of the history of rural America because it doesn’t fit. I want to very exuberantly say it does.
I have a lot of these conversations with my friends back home in the Ozarks because I think we get defined in ways that don’t fit. I think the hate drowns out so much of the powerful movements happening at grassroots levels. When people talk about Arkansas or other rural areas, it has a lot of negative connotation, but that’s not the whole story.
It’s something I am trying to complicate in my work. Being from one of those places and being in the art world, it feels like a responsibility for me. I want to say it’s that “both/and,” not that “either/or.” I can embrace being from Arkansas’ Ozarks and at the same time go to the Venice Biennale. I can do all these things and they can come together and so can these artists too. We live in the modern world, so just complicating what it means to identify as being from one of these places.
DY: What else do you want people to know about rural contemporary art and artists that isn’t always a part of the conversation, whether in the art world or in these larger conversations about rural America?
SS: Artists that I know in rural America, or people that I know living in rural America, it doesn’t mean that they don’t know anything about art. There’s this idea that those two things are separate. You can have some of the most interesting art happening in America, and it might not be happening in New York. Maybe an artist isn’t a part of the art world, so they’re not going to get the same notoriety. You have to do a little more digging, or know that community more intimately to find their work.
In my region, we get talked down to in a way, that these foundations are elevating us and our culture by bringing in culture. I love to see other art, but it doesn’t mean that people in rural America don’t have art already. Philanthropic organizations come in and say, we’re going to save you and bring you culture. I want to make clear with this show that culture was there and that you can have a myriad of backgrounds and still make work about rural America.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.
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