Art Restart

Few artists have woven their creative practice so seamlessly into the fabric of their home place as Shanai Matteson. A visual artist, writer, community-based researcher and environmental-justice organizer, Shanai works in northern Minnesota’s rural Aitken County, where she was born and raised. Her projects — whether they take the form of printmaking, collaborative public art, documentary storytelling or social gathering spaces — are grounded in reciprocity, ecological care and the conviction that creativity can help repair the frayed relationships between people, land and water. Over the past two decades, Shanai has co-founded and led some of the region’s most inventive and socially engaged cultural initiatives. Her celebrated Water Bar & Public Studio has invited thousands in her community and around the state to “belly up” for a free tasting flight of water while discussing water equity and environmental health with scientists, activists and even policymakers. Her mobile mine-view platform, Overburden/Overlook, offers overlooked histories and community perspectives on the extractive industries that have shaped the Iron Range. And her newest collaboration, Fire in the Village — co-led with Anishinaabe artist Annie Humphrey — bridges Native and non-Native communities through art, music and the radical act of gathering around metaphorical and literal shared fires.  In this interview, Shanai reflects on what it means to create art that belongs to a place and its people, how frontline activism reshaped her approach to community organizing and why persistence matters more than perfection. She also shares lessons from years of linking art, science and public policy and explains why, in her corner of rural Minnesota, tending to one another may be our surest path to a more just and sustainable future. https://shanai.work/

Much of Angela Washko’s work begins with a simple question: What if we took the media we consume every day — the video games, the reality shows, the online chatrooms — as seriously as we take traditional art spaces? What if we examined them not just as distractions or products but as public arenas where identity, power and belonging are actively negotiated? With a practice that spans performance, social engagement, video games and film, Angela has spent more than a decade doing just that. Her work doesn’t just critique digital culture from the outside; it embeds itself within it, creating space for dialogue in places not usually known for nuance. Whether she’s convening feminist councils in the fantasy worlds of online gaming or crafting interactive experiences from the textures of real life, her projects ask how we behave when no one — or everyone — is watching. In 2012 she launched The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an in-game social practice project that sparked multi-hour dialogues between initially hostile players. Later she created The Game: The Game, an RPG in which a player could try to negotiate a bar packed full of male pickup artists following the same seduction playbook. And just last year, fascinated by the allure and promises of reality television, she directed her first documentary, “Workhorse Queen,” about a few members of the tightknit drag community in Rochester, NY and their complicated relationship with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the commerce of 21st century drag celebrity. In this interview, Angela, now a full professor and the MFA Program Director at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, reflects on how she found her voice as an artist inside a male-dominated gaming culture, why she continues to work in and not against the media she critiques and how becoming a mother during a global crisis reshaped her ideas of creativity, care and time. https://angelawashko.com/home.html

At a time when theaters everywhere are competing with an ever-expanding array of at-home entertainment and struggling to fill seats, some artists are asking not what plays to produce but how to produce them differently. Graham Wetterhahn’s answer was to found his own company, After Hours Theatre Company in Los Angeles. With a background that spans traditional theater, theme parks and digital media, he has spent recent years creating “immersive-enhanced” productions that invite audiences not just to watch a story unfold but to step directly into it. In After Hours’ 2018 production of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” for instance, audience members were admitted to a fictional 1960s psychiatric hospital and cast as patients, free to explore hidden rooms and interact with characters for a full hour before the scripted performance even began. The production cleverly merged immersive design with a fully staged, licensed play, creating an experience that theatergoers of all stripes — and with varying levels of comfort with the notion of participation — could embrace. And it worked, selling out night after night and drawing in an audience that was overwhelmingly under 40. After Hours has gone on not only to produce a broad array of successful immersive-enhanced productions but also to organize the Los Angeles Immersive Invitational, a collegial competition that brings together the city’s most adventurous immersive storytellers under one roof and gives them 48 hours to create a new 10-minute piece based on a single prompt. The L.A. Invitational just completed its fifth iteration, and After Hours is now producing Invitationals in other American cities. In this episode, Graham shares why he believes After Hours’ hybrid experiences may hold the key to live theater’s future, how the company has built a sustainable — if still scrappy — for-profit model, and what his journey has taught him about turning casual eventgoers into passionate theater fans. https://www.grahamwetterhahn.com/ https://www.afterhourstheatre.com/

To call conductor Jessica Bejarano an outlier in the American orchestral world is a mild understatement. Not only is she female at a time when there are still astonishingly few female conductors of professional orchestras — according to Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, in the 2024-25 season, only 20.8% of concerts by the top 21 orchestras in the U.S. were conducted by women, and today only one of the 25 largest American orchestras has a female music director — but she is also Latina and lesbian. When Jessica Bejarano steps onto the podium, therefore, she doesn’t just conduct; sporting visible tattoos — her favorite conductor Tchaikovsky is prominently featured on her right forearm — and projecting a down-to-earth warmth and grit she learned from her immigrant mother in working class East L.A., she redefines what leadership can look like in the orchestral world. By 2019, Jessica was already building a solid resume, leading community orchestras in the Bay Area as well as accepting freelance directing gigs around the world. Continually faced with the glacial pace of change in the classical music world, however, she took a leap of faith and founded her own ensemble, the San Francisco Philharmonic. The SF Phil’s mission is to center diversity, equity and inclusion not just as a tagline but as a lived experience for musicians and audiences alike. In the last six years, under her leadership, the SF Phil has collaborated with everyone from Grammy-winning composers to local rap icons, while also offering masterclasses for emerging conductors and commissioning new works by underrepresented composers.  In this interview, Jessica shares the winding, impassioned path that led her from East L.A. trumpet player to visionary conductor and founder. She discusses how she built the SF Phil from scratch — including funding its first concert out of her own savings — and how she continues to push the boundaries of what a 21st century orchestra can be. https://www.sfphil.org/about

Alfonso Cervera and Irvin Gonzalez, two of the founding members of Primera Generación Dance Collective, both grew up in Southern California households where dancing was a vital part of family life, though neither was encouraged to pursue it professionally. Alfonso’s first training was in ballet folklórico, a form he embraced as a child largely thanks to his own curiosity and insistence. Irvin, inspired by early seasons of “So You Think You Can Dance,” taught himself pirouettes in secret in his parents’ garage. Both men eventually studied dance at UC Riverside (UCR), where they also first came out to their families, not only as queer but also as dancers. UCR is also where the two met and fell in love. It was during graduate school that Alfonso and Irvin, along with fellow dancers Rosa Rodriguez-Frazier and Patty Huerta, realized the creative power of coming together. Each brought a unique movement background and a shared desire to explore and celebrate their Mexican American identities on the concert stage. The resulting collective, Primera Generación, now almost ten years strong, continues to challenge conventional notions of contemporary dance with work that is joyous, confrontational and often intentionally messy. That messiness is key. The collective embraces the concept of “desmadre,” a Spanish term that can refer to disorder, exuberance or both, as both a choreographic strategy and a call to reflection and social change. In this interview, Alfonso and Irvin, now professors at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH, discuss the origins of Primera Generación Dance Collective, how they’ve navigated nearly a decade of creative collaboration and why their messiest pieces are often their most meaningful. They also reflect on what it means to be first-generation artists in the Midwest today and how they hope the next generation of dancers can shape the collective’s future. https://www.instagram.com/primerageneraciondance/

Even before his diagnosis of long COVID in 2020, cellist Joshua Roman had carved a unique niche in the classical music world. A former principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony turned soloist and curator, Joshua built a career that combined artistic excellence with a passionate commitment to making music relevant and accessible. Whether premiering bold new works or improvising in unexpected settings, he was—and remains—a restless innovator with an unshakable belief in music’s power to heal, connect, and transform. Long COVID has altered nearly every aspect of Joshua’s life, from his physical stamina to how he plans his days to the way he relates to his instrument. Yet instead of sidelining him, the illness has led Joshua to reevaluate the very foundations of his artistry. The result is a new clarity and focus—not only about which projects deserve his limited energy but also what kind of artistic legacy he wants to build. His latest initiative, “The Immunity Project,” exemplifies this shift: a collection of performances and reflections that foreground music’s emotional and restorative capacity, drawn directly from his personal experience of illness and recovery. The project now also includes a recently released album titled “Immunity.” In this interview, Joshua opens up about the physical and existential recalibrations he’s made in order to keep performing, why he now only practices when he truly wants to and how chronic illness has deepened his artistic mission. He also shares his hopes for a classical-music ecosystem that makes space for artists to be fully, honestly human — onstage and off. https://www.joshuaroman.com/

Cyrus Moussavi has carved out a career that is as improbable as it is original. Raised in Iowa in a bicultural Iranian American household, Cyrus grew up spending summers in Iran and the rest of the year steeped in his father’s love of prog rock and his mother’s passion for traditional Iranian music. That early immersion in disparate sound worlds laid the groundwork for a lifelong obsession with music—not as a performer, but as a listener, connector, and storyteller. After studying economics and philosophy in college, Cyrus gravitated toward filmmaking, not to make conventional movies but to explore how visual storytelling could capture, preserve and transmit music and the lives of those who make it. As a filmmaker, Cyrus has developed a body of work that’s both deeply collaborative and boldly inventive. His films include “I Snuck Off the Slave Ship,” a science-fiction documentary co-directed with the visionary artist and musician Lonnie Holley that screened at Sundance and BlackStar, among many other festivals and galleries, and the upcoming “Somebody’s Gone,” a feature-length film about gospel legend Brother Theotis Taylor that he is co-directing with Brother Theotis’ son, Hubert. And as a music archivist and promoter, since 2019 Cyrus has led the influential reissue label Mississippi Records, where he works closely with artists and their families to bring overlooked and under-celebrated music from around the world to new audiences. In this interview, Cyrus discusses how his early experiences shaped his eclectic sensibility, what it means to ethically archive music across cultures and how he sees his work as both creative practice and cultural preservation.

It’s no secret that arts non-profits across the country are struggling to survive, but few closures have hit their communities as hard as the recent shuttering of Big Medium in Austin, TX. For more than 20 years, Big Medium was one of the most influential visual-arts organizations in the city. It produced the beloved and sprawling Austin Studio Tour, presented exhibitions that championed historically marginalized artists and served as an essential convener for the city’s creative community. At the heart of its work for many years was curator and, more recently, artistic director Coka Treviño, whose passion for equity and for platforming emerging artists helped shape the organization’s inclusive mission. In this conversation, Coka, who continues her own curatorial work via her company The Projecto, reflects on her tenure at Big Medium and the complex web of challenges that led to its sudden closure. From shifts in city grantmaking priorities to the skyrocketing cost of living that made staffing nearly impossible, the interview offers a candid window into just how difficult it has become for arts organizations—even in culturally rich, economically booming cities like Austin—to maintain operations. https://www.theprojecto.org/

Ryan J. Haddad is an actor and playwright whose work across theater and television consistently challenges outdated narratives around disability, queerness and identity. He made a striking Off-Broadway playwriting debut with “Dark Disabled Stories” at The Public Theater, which enjoyed a sold-out, extended run and earned him the Obie Award for Best New American Play. His autobiographical solo show “Hi, Are You Single?” has become a defining part of his artistic voice, touring nationally and earning critical acclaim. Ryan’s television credits include memorable appearances on Hulu’s “A Murder at the End of the World” and Netflix’s “The Politician.” In addition to performing, Haddad is a dedicated writer and access advocate. His essays have appeared in The New York Times and Out Magazine, and he is a contributor to the anthology “Disability Intimacy,” curated by Alice Wong. His creative work and activism have earned him a Drama Desk Award, a Paula Vogel Playwriting Award from Vineyard Theatre and a Disability Futures Fellowship. He is also a proud alum of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. In this interview, conducted just a few days before he premiered his latest solo piece, “Hold Me in the Water,” at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, Ryan reflects on the pivotal experiences that shaped his journey as an artist, from performing fairy tales in his childhood living room to commanding major stages and screens. He speaks candidly about navigating the entertainment industry as a gay man with cerebral palsy, building a career on his own terms and advocating for authentic representation and accessibility in the arts. https://www.ryanjhaddad.com/ https://www.playwrightshorizons.org/about/production-history/2020s/2425-season/hold-me-in-the-water

Carlos López Estrada definitely paid his dues – shooting scores of music videos and short pieces for a pittance while living at his mother’s for years after film school – before he had the chance to direct his first full-length feature film, “Blindspotting.” That well-reviewed film landed him his first studio feature when Disney hired him to co-direct the animated film “Raya and the Last Dragon.” He is nonetheless the first to point out that a number of elements, including a film-school education and supportive parents, made his path to success easier than what awaited most of his cohort of up-and-coming filmmakers. He therefore focused on a new kind of creative endeavor: Antigravity Academy. Founded by Carlos in 2023, Antigravity is a hybrid business. It offers a range of educational initiatives designed to provide young, aspiring filmmakers — particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds — with the tools, mentorship and opportunities to develop their voices and tell their own stories. It also has a producing arm devoted to developing and bringing to life projects that would otherwise have difficulty finding funding. Antigravity’s first produced film, “Dìdi,” a glowingly reviewed coming-of-age story by Sean Wang, proved that Carlos’ mentoring and producing instincts are spot-on. “Dìdi” recently won two awards at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards: Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. In this interview, Carlos describes how his experiences in Hollywood shaped Antigravity Academy’s mission and programs and explains why empowering new voices is not only helping to bring surprising stories to the screen but also making him a better artist. https://antigravityacademy.co/

Trained as a fiber and textile artist, Maria Amalia Wood has in recent years been working with paper, manipulating and dyeing wet wood pulp to build richly layered pieces. As important to Maria’s creativity as her raw materials, however, is the community of Latina immigrants like herself that she has fostered through a series of creative workshops in her hometown of Madison, WI. Her latest communal and artistic enterprise is Unidas por Hilos (United by Threads), a monthly gathering of diverse Latina immigrants who embroider their stories, often learning new stitches along the way, in fellowship with one another. In this interview, Maria shares how her current work is a natural extension of the comfort and energy she found among skilled seamstresses in her native Honduras. She extols the power of embroidery as both a meditative practice and a form of storytelling and reminds us that no matter the activity, homemade food remains the one ingredient guaranteed to bring people together. https://www.mariaamalia.com/

For the last two decades, architect and educator JP Reuer has been exploring how artists can become vital, integrated members of their communities rather than isolated figures working on the fringes of society. That ethos now fuels his most ambitious project to date: Small School, a Raleigh-based arts organization that reimagines advanced arts education as more accessible, collaborative and deeply embedded in local culture. Through Small School, JP has rejected the traditional MFA model in favor of a nimbler, community-driven approach. The organization brings renowned visiting artists to the Triangle area to engage with local artists through workshops, public events and one-on-one studio visits, an exchange that empowers both emerging and established artists while fostering a richer creative ecosystem. In this episode, JP traces his journey from academia to founding Small School, sharing what he’s learned about the evolving role of artists in society. He discusses the power of bringing artists out of ivory towers and into the heart of their communities and why rethinking arts education is essential to supporting a more inclusive and dynamic creative landscape. https://smallschool.org/

In November of 2024, Counterpublic, a St. Louis-based arts and civics organization, and the Osage Nation made a historic announcement. After three years of negotiations, the entirety of historic Sugarloaf Mound, the oldest human-made structure within the City of St. Louis, was being rematriated to the Osage Nation, whose ancestors built this and other mounds in the region. Counterpublic was not only a crucial negotiator in the process. In 2023, the organization, which every three years produces a three-month-long city-wide arts festival commissioned new work to be displayed at a site near Sugarloaf Mound in order for the city to engage with the site’s cultural and historic significance. One of the artists Counterpublic commissioned was noted Oklahoma-based clay and textile artist Anita Fields, who is herself Osage. “Art Restart” reached out to James McAnally, Counterpublic’s Executive and Artistic Director, and Anita Fields to learn more about why and how an arts organization as well as a range of artists were crucial to this successful Land Back effort. After all, what’s a more striking example of arts and artists shaking up the status quo in their communities than this historic example of an arts-centered process of rematriation? In this interview, James and Anita share how art played a pivotal role in the historic rematriation of Sugarloaf Mound, from fostering trust and dialogue to reimagining the site’s future. They reflect on the power of creative practice in Land Back efforts and offer insights for those looking to merge artistic vision with meaningful action. https://www.anitafieldsart.com/ https://www.counterpublic.org/team/james-mcanally https://www.osageculture.com/culture/historic-preservation-office

What happens when best friends in different disciplines decide to formalize their creative relationship and then invite a third artist into their artmaking experiment? A vibrant, equitable and joyful collective by the name of Art 25: Art in the 25th Century is born. Art 25’s core artists are poet Lehua M. Taitano, visual artist Lisa Jarrett and multi-disciplinary artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng. Separately, Lehua, who is CHamoru; Lisa, who is Black; and Jocelyn, who has Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese roots had been exploring similar themes of identity and diaspora in their artistic practice. Fusing their talents and perspectives, however, allowed them access to an even deeper well of experience and imagination from which to draw inspiration. Since Art 25’s founding, the collective’s work has been seen at several institutions, including the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and in February of 2025 it will be exhibited at the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum in Long Beach, CA. In this interview, Lehua, Lisa and Jocelyn describe how they joined their creative forces and explain the core anti-capitalistic values of Art 25 that not only place it firmly outside the artistic mainstream but continue to bring them joy. https://www.lehuamtaitano.com/art-25

Johnny Gandelsman is not only one of the world’s finest violinists, as comfortable playing contemporary works as he is interpreting pieces from the Western classical canon. He is also an inveterate musical innovator. A long-time member of Silkroad Ensemble and a co-founder of string quartet Brooklyn Rider, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this past year, Johnny has long championed the dissolution of genre boundaries to celebrate music’s unique power to bridge cultural divides. Over the years he has collaborated with and played the works of musicians from the Middle East to Appalachia, along the way stretching his own skills to adapt his instrument to a host of musical traditions. Johnny has also been a driving force in the commissioning of new works for the concert stage, founding his own label, In a Circle Records, to produce and release new compositions. In the doldrums of the COVID lockdown, when musicians saw a year’s worth of scheduled work vanish, he hatched a plan. He set out to find dozens of arts institutions and music presenters to partner with him to commission 22 composers from all over the country to create new works for the solo violin. Four years later, the project has now resulted in an album titled “This Is America: an Anthology 2020-2021,” a three-CD set with a 40-page booklet produced by In a Circle Records. Pitchfork raves, “This Is America stirs feelings about our country that are almost hard to recognize: pride, hope, and the simple relief of consensus reality.” Since the album’s release, Johnny himself has been playing sections of the album all over the country in marathon performances at many of the institutions who partnered with him on the project. In this interview, Johnny describes how he shifted from being a young talent focused on a traditional soloist’s career to becoming an adventurer, challenging classical music’s conventions to prove that experimentation and community are as essential to music as technique. https://johnnygandelsman.bandcamp.com/album/this-is-america-an-anthology-2020-2021-icr023 https://www.inacircle-records.com/

The year 2020 was looking to be a banner year for musical and life partners Sarah and Austin McCombie, aka Chatham Rabbits. They had just made the biggest financial investment in their band, namely the purchase of a tour van, and were looking forward to months of being on the road and performing to promote their second album when the pandemic hit and their bookings vanished. What they did next, though, exemplifies their resourcefulness, generosity and innovative spirit. They installed solar panels on top of the van to power a sound system, hitched a flatbed trailer to their new vehicle and played free concerts in scores of neighborhoods around North Carolina. In the middle of lockdown, when the prospect of hearing live music seemed years away, you could email Chatham Rabbits a request, and chances are they’d show up on your street and give you and your neighbors a joyful, free concert. Happily, their professional life has resumed at full tilt. They recently completed their third album, titled “Be Real with Me,” which is scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day in 2025, and they will spend February and March performing in venues all over the country. In this interview, Austin and Sarah describe how a commitment to community and authenticity has allowed them to keep taking risks and navigate a music industry that has yet to catch up to the needs of up-and-coming artists and their fans. https://www.chathamrabbits.com/ https://www.pbsnc.org/watch/on-the-road/

To describe Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson as dancers is to name only a small sliver of their creative portfolio. To be sure, they are proficient, trained dancers and have created and performed several works for Kinetic Light, the disability arts ensemble that Alice founded in 2016 and continues to lead. In Kinetic Light’s first piece, titled “Descent,” Alice and Laurel danced in their wheelchairs on a raked stage with a large ramp — stage design by Laurel — and since then have proved to be increasingly adventurous in exploring their relationship to gravity. In recent pieces, they have boldly moved into the vertical axis, sometimes flying into the air — in or out of a wheelchair — thanks to ingenious mechanisms, likewise created by Laurel. Because accessibility is central to Kinetic Light’s artistry rather than a supplemental consideration, Alice and Laurel have also become accessibility and technological innovators. Kinetic Light is a disability arts company created by disabled artists for audiences with disabilities, and as such every performance is created from the ground up for everyone to fully enjoy. For instance, the company’s lighting designer, Michael Maag, who uses a wheelchair, lights mobility devices with the same care he lights a human body and also pays attention to the needs of neurodiverse audiences; some seats are equipped with haptic devices to allow an audience member to feel the vibration of the score; and Laurel has developed Audimance, a multi-track audio-description app that gives blind and visually impaired guests control over how to experience and enjoy the performance. In this interview, Alice and Laurel describe the path that led them to Kinetic Light and explain why artists and institutions, rather than viewing accessibility as a requirement or need, would be wise to embrace it as an aesthetic principle. https://kineticlight.org/

For fiber artist Aaron McIntosh, quilting is an act of defiant documentation. Growing up in an Appalachian family with a generations-deep tradition of quilting, he learned the craft as a boy and went on to develop his own ethos and mission, studying first at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Tennessee and then earning his MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. In recent years, Aaron has placed his own personal history and metaphorical body into fabric sculptures that blend his familial and cultural background with his identity as a queer Appalachian artist. His work has been exhibited in a variety of institutions, from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Toledo Museum of Art to Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul. In 2015, he started the “Invasive Queer Kudzu” project, a community storytelling, archiving and art-making project focusing on queer communities, past and present, in America’s Southeast. In this interview, Aaron, who is currently an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal, describes why and how he claimed the South’s most notorious weed as his artistic inspiration and clears up any misconceptions about the fiber arts ever having taken a back seat to other fine arts throughout human history. https://aaronmcintosh.com/home.html

Christopher Tin is an award-winning and genre-bending classical composer whose work has been featured in a variety of settings and media, from august concert halls to the world of video games. His orchestral piece “Baba Yetu,” which Christopher originally composed for the game “Civilization IV,” was the first ever musical work written for a video game to win a Grammy Award. It has since become a staple in choral and orchestral venues. He received his second Grammy for his debut album, “Calling All Dawns,” a multilingual song cycle. Christopher has been as adventurous in his producing as he has been in his composing. He turned to Kickstarter to help him create his subsequent two albums, “To Shiver the Sky” and “The Lost Birds,” both of which explored ecological themes. Through his crowdfunding, he not only raised all the funds necessary to pull off both expensive projects but also deepened his relationship with his many ardent fans while making new ones, bringing them along on intimate tours through his entire creative and production process. “The Lost Birds,” which features the acclaimed British vocal ensemble VOCES8, was nominated for a 2023 Grammy and has been performed all over the world. This past spring at the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera premiered Puccini’s unfinished masterpiece “Turandot” with a new ending composed by Christopher and written by Susan Soo He Stanton. The production and its new ending was a hit with critics and audiences alike. In this interview, Christopher reveals how after decades of experimentation and success he’s finally stopped worrying whether his work was too popular to please the classical-music establishment, and he explains how he’s cultivated a legion of fans who encourage him to take ever bigger risks. https://christophertin.com/

Matthew Fluharty is the founder and executive director of Art of the Rural, an organization that works to support and promote the work of artists and culture bearers across the country and that also aims to bridge cultural divides across urban and rural areas. Initially created as a blog in 2010, Art of the Rural has since then developed several long-term projects in collaboration with artists and community leaders, particularly in the upper Midwest (Art of the Rural is based in Winona, MN) and in Kentucky Appalachia. Projects have included “High Visibility: On Location in Rural American and Indian Country,” a collaboration with the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND, the first major museum exhibition highlighting contemporary art practice across these geographies; and two cultural-exchange programs – the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange and the Minnesota Rural-Urban Exchange – that have afforded scores of artists a chance to immerse themselves meaningfully in settings once unfamiliar to them. In this interview, Matthew offers an eye-opening look at the connections between rural and urban communities, challenging the idea of a “divide” and showing how collaboration and cultural exchange are reshaping how we think about art, place, and belonging. He also details the kind of shift in perspective institutions and funders must embrace to ensure that the many artists in rural America and Indian Country continue serving their communities. https://www.artoftherural.org/