Our native landscape lives inside of us. We grow up expecting certain flowers to bloom in a particular month. We become accustomed to the view outside our doors and the way the seasons move through the year. We can take little things for granted about the people who live near us; we understand the way community and civil life happens around us. We share common festivities, celebrations, fairs, and parades. We use nicknames and idioms and we can safely assume the people within our geographical range will understand what we are saying. For better or worse, we know our home.
The United States of America is a big country. It is impossible to describe in one all-consuming way. There are regional descriptions, state descriptions, and city descriptions. Because of these, Americans all carry assumptions about places they’ve never been. We make statements about people and places that we believe are factual even though we have no idea what we’re talking about. We presume to know our country, but can our country be fully known?
Americans all know pieces of the United States. We know our state, our city, or town, or village. Some of us have traveled through several states and have broader perspectives on what and who America is. Some of us have moved once or several times, and have gotten to know a few places more deeply. So what do we have to say when we actually know what we’re talking about?
What is your State of America?
I am an artist interested in making art about the United States of America. I would like to make one piece of art for every state. This of course, is a huge, broad project and as I began to think about how best to begin this project, I was struck with a few obvious questions. How can I begin to create objects intended to represent the 50 states when I’ve only visited a handful of them? And even if I’d spent a week in each state, how could I possibly think I had any understanding of the particularities that make every state unique? So what do you do when you have questions for an entire country in the year 2007? You blog! Welcome to My State of America. Through this blog I hope to gain real insights into honest and personal perceptions of America, or at least small pieces of it. I hope that you will take the time to share your piece with me.
What can you tell me about the place you grew up? And/or about the place you chose to move? What is the personality of your hometown? What does its geography look like? What are its people like? How about the weather? What are some “inside” understandings that differ from the “outside” perceptions? Is there a North vs. South or city vs. city or any other kind of “vs.” mentality that exists? What do you take pride in? What do you hate? Why do you choose to stay? Or why did you choose to leave?
I’m hoping to hear multiple stories about all 50 states, but I don’t know people from all 50 states, so please share this blog address freely! I’ll keep you posted as states are accounted for…
Thanks so much,
Summer
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-Leonardo da Vinci said:
Humans are called by the ancients a world in miniature and certainly this name is well applied, for just as a human is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, so is the body of the earth. If a human has bones which are the support and armor of the flesh, the world has rocks which are the support of the earth; if a human has the sea of blood, in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its oceanic sea which also rises and falls every six hours for the world to breathe. If from the said sea of blood spring veins which go on ramifying throughout the human body, similarly the oceanic sea fills the body of the earth with infinite veins of water.
My Artist Statement
A sudden change in landscape forced me to notice my relationship to place. Formed in the dirt and grass of Washington State, I know its trees, mountains, and abundant water. But it took moving almost 2,000 miles away for me to truly understand how much of my identity is entangled in the nature of my childhood.
I am interested in how we as human beings understand our place within the landscape in which we live and how we find identity in it. My artwork (which consists of oil paintings on wood, prints, drawings, and collages of all three) reacts to the designs I see around me, the tangled mess of roots cracking open the sidewalks and the vines clutching the sides of our homes and buildings.
I sit in the library aisles poring over pictures in books about botany and horticulture. I look at the beauty of cell structures and leaves. As I pursue the idea of our relationship to place, I find myself in the aisle that house the atlases. I search the maps, charts and diagrams that tell me who lives where, what their homes look like, and what they eat. I am interested in how the dirt and grass of our childhoods form us into the people that we are.
I am not trying to create realistic landscape paintings. Rather, I am interested in finding the intimate, often ignored details of my surroundings. I am mapping what I see.
8 comments:
Dear Summer,
As I mentioned, I went to Wilmington, DE many years ago. My father took us from Boston for the Thanksgiving holiday to visit my Aunt Dorcas and Uncle Charlie and their two daughters, Muffie and Winkie, who were living there at the time. My uncle Charlie was a chemical engineer, and he worked for Monsanto. What I remember, looking out the back seat car windows of Dad's 1950 green and gray Oldsmobile, was an endless stream of manufacturing buidlings, their smokestacks and warehouses--it seemed as though there wasn't much green grass and there were no gardens to be seen. My father was anxious to get back home to Boston; he turned around the next day, and drove us straight back. We may have stopped once for something to eat at a Howard Johnson's.
LOUISIANA - a state that is now synonymous with "hurricane Katrina". The world saw my home through tear-filled eyes and speachless breath at the end of August in 2005. The Louisiana I know is so much more than a city ravaged by water from man-made levees forcing the mighting Mississippi River on its current un-natual course.
My family resides in Baton Rouge and my husband's family in New Orleans. As a Louisiana artist, many weekends were spent in the city of New Orleans. It is alive with music, flavorful foods, eclectic people and the pagentry of its many festivals. The architecture of wrought iron balconies and port coheres in the French Quarter are famous. New Orleans is a mere one hour drive across "the third longest bridge in the in the world" along I-10 to the capitol of Baton Rouge.
The blending of unique cultures of African, French Creole, Cajun and Italian through food, music, rituals and hospitality are well known about Louisiana. But it is the hush of the forest lined waterways that I love. Making that I-10 drive across the Atchafalaya River leaves the viewer with sights of cypress trees with long tendrils of spanish moss, great blue herons and snowy egrets lazily gliding across the water.
The beauty of the wetlands (rapidly dissapearing) and the lush bayous twisting through cypress trees are what I equate most about Louisiana. I loved to kayak or canoe down the bayous in slow motion. Every now and then I'd see alligator eyes floating above the surface of the water. 5" between the eyes = 5' long gator I'd slowly paddle to the other side of the bayou and give him his space. They don't bother you if you leave them alone. Large waterfowl walk the shore, slowly stalking their next crawfish hole. Then with a loud whoosh of giant wings, a blue heron would lift off in flight and glide just above the surface of the water. Magical place. Much of this area is in Cajun country - the region across the gulf into central Louisiana where the French Canadians settled. This is where Zydeco music and crawfish etouffee go hand in hand.
Along the Great River Road from New Orleans through north Louisiana you'll find stately plantations surrounded with knarled live oak trees with their branches sweeping wide and low. The land gets a little hillier as one travels through the north, unlike the flat expanse of southern Louisiana. Huge fields of sugar cane grow and during cane season in the fall, the roads would be littered with stalks that fell off the truck. When I was a child we'd slice off a stalk and suck the sweet sugar right out of the plant. I love the culture of Louisiana, but it is also filled with bigotry and is low in education. This saddened me. With all of its problems after Katrina, I still adore the flavor of south Louisiana. I'll always think of it as home no matter what state I live in. I'm sending you privately a few pictures I took of a slice of my heaven.
Summer,
I have lived in several states in my nearly 60 years on this planet, but Astoria, Oregon is the place I think of as home. My parents were married there, and I spent most of the first 10 years of my life in or near there. Though I have no family left there any longer, I still visit and drive by the homes where my grandmother lived, since those seem most like 'home' to me.
Astoria sits on the mouth of the Columbia River, where it meets the Pacific Ocean. It is the end of the Lewis and Clark trail. The smells of my childhood were of fish and lumber, which permeated our world. Fisheries, lumber mills, and mink farms were everywhere. Now, museums and tourist attractions take their place. But the unmistakable smells of the river and the sea still dominate the atmosphere. The forests of my childhood are for the most part gone, but there are still more trees than most places ever see. With fewer trees, there is less rain, but still enough to let you know you are in Oregon. And on those days when the sun does shine, a climb to the stop of the Astoria Column still offers breathtaking views of ocean, rivers, forests and a tiny city clinging to the hillsides, refusing to die with the industries that sustained it.
My first memories are of Astoria, so that is where I begin. I may write another time of the other places in Oregon I have called home.
Please keep me posted on your progress! Blessings, Barbara C.
Summer,
I know you have lived in Illinois, so no doubt you have your own impressions. But my memories of the state are really memories of childhood in suburbia. I remember fields with lots of insects at the end of the street, and spending a lot of time out with my butterfly net trying to catch a variety of them. I remember nights alive with the lights of fireflies - and catching them and smashing them so that we could make reflective lines on our faces with their lit tails... I remember nights of kick-the-can on the neighborhood cul de sac, with lots of kids playing and no one's parents worried about where they were. I remember having to go to bed in the summertime when it was still light outside, and being so mad because I could hear the other kids who were still playing outside. I remember magnificent snow storms that resulted in no school snow days for the kids. I remember watching my mom shovel the roof (snow probably didn't have the same fun connotation for her as it did for me). I remember making snow caves in the snow drifts that lined the driveway. I remember humid sticky summer days and beautiful autumn leaves. I remember how exciting it was to be the first person in the car to spot the Sears Tower whenever we would drive into Chicago. I remember the excitement of riding on the passenger trains. I remember the museums of the city, and the comfort of returning home. I remember the big green station wagon that all five kids could fit into without seat belts. I remember the time that we left for church without my sister, and no one realized it until we were ready to come back home. I remember our next door neighbors and their pool, which I learned to swim in. I remember the geese flying south in the winter, honking overhead in their v-shaped flights. I remember summer trips to other states that we took in the car, and always, the defining moment when we crossed the Mississippi river either into or out of Illinois. I remember high school football games that much of the town came to whether they had a kid playing on the team or not. I remember drum corp competitions that you could hear across town. I remember 4th of July parades that everyone showed up to, and dressed up for. I remember the first Vietnam refugees that came to our school, and the excitement of the school community to welcome a family that had come from the middle of a war. I remember the town library that I would go to each week during the summer, bringing with me a cardboard box which I could fill each week, and return to refill the next.
So, maybe all in all it isn't really a picture of Illinois. It is probably better a picture of childhood.
Blessings to you with your project. I can't wait to see the outcome.
Love,
Denise
Summer, thanks for asking.
Since the '70s I have lived in African-American sections of Chicago in ILLINOIS but I grew up in Peoria in central Illinois on a bluff made by a mighty Illinois River when the glaciers were melting.
Our home was the tall farmhouse of the area that had been surrounded by other homes and finally grew to be towards the center of the city. I used to go up to our attic window and look far over the area below the bluff, out above than the trees and homes below towards the much shrunken Illinois River. I felt like a kite or bird. What I didn't know until I was old enough to become aware was that I was at the edge of the white area of town and the homes I was looking over were those of the Peoria's 1950's Negro community.
With what I know now I am sorry we were so divided in my hometown and throughout the country and that I never had the opportunity to know those I was literally overlooking. I am glad that through the years I have been able to make up for that "oversight" to some extent. But I am sad that same division still remains in most places.
Pat Davis O.P.
“Are there lots of deer and fields there?” “Do you have deer in fields there?”
Both of these are somewhat ridiculous questions, but one whould be surprised to know that some variation of those two questions are often asked when I tell people the name of my hometown. However, Deerfield in not an unusual name for a town, at least in the Eastern United States. There are nine Deerfields (cities, towns, or villages) and three Deerfield Townships east of the Mississippi. There are only two Deerfields west of the Mississippi.
Deerfield, Michigan is located on the eastern edge of Lenawee County, bordering Summerfield Township (Monroe Co.), Blissfield Township, and Britton-Macon in the southeast part of the state. It is considered a village with a population teetering around one thousand. It has a school of about 400 students K-12 all in one building. Probably not too many places around where kindergarteners and high school seniors walk side by side down the same hall.
When I was growing up, and it is still true, there was very little in Deerfield. There are four churches—Catholic, United Methodist, Free Methodist, and a non-denominational, evangelical church—within the village limits. The primary faith tradition is Catholic, and everyone else is just a bit odd, or at least they were when I was a kid. There is a hair salon, an alternator repair shop, a gas station/convenience store, a “party store”, and a quaint grocery, an ice cream shop, a dentist’s office (which used to be a bank), an eatery, a t-shirt shop, a library (limited hours and collection), and a construction company. Oh yeah, there is a discount store and a carwash too. There really isn’t much more, besides the people.
People there are people of faith—politically, fiscally, and otherwise they are mostly conservative. There are the occasional outliers, but little deviation from the right-leaning ideal occurs. Occupationally speaking, folks generally leave Deerfield during the day to work in factory or trades-based jobs. There is still a strong agriculture base, but few professionals reside in the village. Folks who aspire to careers outside those previously mentioned, besides teaching, generally move out of Deerfield, with myself as a particular example.
And now I’m in Chicago, and you know what that is like.
Summer,
I am one of Jessica's coworkers! She sent us the link to help you with your project, but I think she also knows I have serious amount of Iowa love! Since you're living in Illinois now, maybe the whole Midwest thing isn't that much of a newsflash for you, but I'll take a stab at it anyway.
I tend to consider the entire state of Iowa my "hometown" -- I guess because I lived in half a dozen different places when I was there. Even though the intense winters are certainly a big part of Iowa lore, and I'd have a few stories myself, these days I choose to remember Iowa in the summer. Crazy-humid, hot thunderstorms every night for a week. I had a fantastic summer right before I moved out here in September of 2004. When I go home in the summer now I get excited weeks in advance because I know it will be hot and humid, and when I arrive I declare that it's the first time I've been warm in months! I'm almost always a little bit cold here, even in the summer. I also prefer to portray Iowa as very flat, but in a very good way. Maybe it's that those are the two most distinct differences between Washington and Iowa in my head -- Iowa gets hot, WA doesn't (or does rarely); Iowa is flat, WA isn't. I lived in a farm with my dad between the ages of 11 and 18 and although we didn't farm ourselves (we rented out the land for soybeans/corn) we still lived smack in the middle of a sea of crops. I like to take pictures of the flat highway stretching for miles ahead of me, fields for miles in all directions, no hills blocking my view of anything. Wide open!
Finishing out my senior year just as the weather warmed up, I was having more fun with my friends than ever before, but I was also branching out on my own more -- senior year was the only year I ever borrowed a car to go places (mostly Des Moines, for shows) alone. I lived in a great house of technically 8 people, which was more like 15 at any given time, and we had a great front porch where we spent lots of nights watching thunderstorms and having sing-a-longs. We stared across the street at a small park, where earlier in our college career some friends had built a trebuchet from scrap wood and shot apples across the park. Nostalgia trip! I spent the summer in another city with another bunch of friends, sweating my way through dozens of rock concerts. Iowa City is split down the middle by the Iowa River -- I lived on one side with a girl I started out not knowing but who turned out to be friends everyone I was friends with there, and all of our friends lived on the other side. This translated to lots of post-midnight walks across the bridge back to my apartment, which always stretched longer than necessary because I was totally enchanted by the river. It's not much of a river, really, and from what I hear totally polluted from the University of Iowa chemistry department. But it is still a body of water, and I would stand in the middle of the bridge for half an hour at 2am singing to myself and watching the water flow under the bridge, usually with the moonlight bright enough to illuminate the sleeping ducks. I never felt unsafe alone at night -- I always felt like time could pass on either side of the bridge but in the middle, it had stopped and would stay stopped for as long as I wanted. I also fell in love with Des Moines River, which conveniently enough flows through Des Moines. It's only a few blocks from Fourth Avenue downtown, where the handful of most commonly patronized coffee shop/music venue/Irish pub trifecta resides, and I would constantly convince my friends to walk down there with me, just for a few minutes, and frolick a little in the grass in the dark and watch the water flow.
By the beginning of that summer I knew I was moving to Seattle come September, which certainly enhanced my experience of those few months. I started to appreciate John Deeres slowly chugging through the highway-side fields. Every moment with my friends and family felt like a gift. Which sounds totally cheesy! And I knew I would get overly nostalgic and homesick when I tried to write this. But it's true. I go home twice a year, every year. I see as many people as is humanly possible in one week. Every time I have to move from one house to another or get a new job, I go through a crisis where I know I have a chance to make a clean break and move home, but so far I've never made that decision, and I can only guess that is because it isn't time. But I have a feeling I'll be back there someday.
I feel like the final thing I want to say is: Whatever else, Iowa is my home. When I came out here and was working at a domestic violence shelter, I thought about taking my knowledge back to my 'community' and putting it to use in rural areas in Iowa. I love the burgeoning, "underdog" music scene in the Midwest and still, whenever I hear of a band from Iowa (or Illinois or Minneapolis or Nebraska) I am immediately more interested and immediately want to be more involved in spreading the word about them. Seattle can call itself "DIY" all it wants but the truth is there's support here for that kind of thing, far more than there is in Iowa, and it would be exciting to be a part of that.
So, in conclusion, here is a link to some photos I uploaded of the Iowa landscape:
http://picasaweb.google.com/conversationalavalanche/Iowa?authkey=c9EIvIQEBZQ
Good luck with your project!
Summer, I've written a lengthy blog entry that tells a little about growing up in rural eastern Oregon. Here's the site: www.zonefamily.blogspot.com. Then click on "Strawberry Fields Forever."
Can't wait to see how this project turns out. Love to you!
Ally
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