Opening today at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center, the special Smithsonian exhibit “Crossroads: Change in Rural America” challenges viewers to critically engage nearly all their senses.
Drop by anytime from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and prepare to think deeply about the question: What does “rural” mean?
This is both the first and overarching inquiry that guides one’s journey through more than a dozen different displays, each with its own interactive media, questions, concepts and more.
For example, the exhibit’s first display serves itself as a kind of crossroads, from which point one may proceed along multiple directions or paths.
While deciding which way to go, one is asked about what crossroads one’s own community might be at, while simultaneously being invited to analyze a mural overflowing with rural imagery.
In the next display, one is confronted with the question of “change,” and is encouraged to consider both the historical past of rural America as well as its future, including daring to ask whether it still has one.
Implied throughout is the provocative notion that, rather than fear change, rural America has always been constituted by it.
“Is rural America endangered, thriving, or just scraping by? Do you see dwindling options or a bright future?” the display asks.
The viewer is then invited to lift panels containing images that confront certain assumptions or stereotypes about ruralness.
The image of a one-room prairie schoolhouse, for instance, flips up to reveal a 21st century classroom brimming with digital technology.
DESPITE such presentations, it doesn’t seem as though the Crossroads exhibit as a whole is making an argument in favor or ruralness, or trying to sell ruralness as a consumable product.
In fact, sometimes Crossroads expresses brutal honesty, for instance, by mentioning how some people “feel trapped without the means to leave” rural life, and that rural America “leaves memories of isolation, exclusion, and hard, unsatisfying work.”
The exhibit isn’t always easy on the senses in other ways as well, such as when multiple screens around the room all play recordings simultaneously (on repeat), vying for one’s attention as one tries to read or consider an artwork.
Along these lines, some of the most intriguing artworks are displayed in relation to questions of identity, and what it means to be a person from rural America.
One thing the viewer notices immediately is the diversity of people connected to rural life who are represented, in relation to race and ethnicity, especially.
Certain popular artworks (along with photographs and songs), moreover, remind one of where various positive and negative stereotypes about rural life came from, and how many are still perpetuated today.
