- [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon singing) (bright music) (classic rock music) - Cruising your way, next "Off 90," a furniture maker from Glenville, a museum in West Concord, an art gallery in Rochester, and a Winona man bridging communication between urban and rural.

It's all coming up on your next stop "Off 90."

(classic rock music continues) (upbeat jazzy music) (upbeat jazzy music continues) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith.

Thanks for joining me on this trip "Off 90."

With a family history in carpentry, Kevin Bishop did not go against the grain.

He's a furniture maker from Glenville making custom wood furniture.

(gentle folk music) - I grew up with a family with carpentry in the background, and I just always loved the wood and messed around with old buildings and hammers and nails and stuff when I was a kid.

21 years old when I started accumulating my own shop tools.

So I was just messing around stuff for myself.

And a work friend found out I was doing it, said, "Hey, my doll collection needs a chair, or it needs different little pieces of furniture."

So I started building doll furniture, and she paid me.

Oh, that's a pretty good deal.

(laughs) I'm Kevin Bishop, and I'm a craftsman of custom wood furniture.

When we moved to the Albert Lea area, we found a home in rural Glenville near Grass Lake which is a wildlife preserve area.

That is how I developed the name for my business.

The main difference in my business versus a retail furniture is the quality I put into the pieces.

I really spend a lot of time selecting the woods and using construction techniques that you don't typically find in manufacturing and use finishes that take a little longer to apply, but I feel they have a better outcome in the end, and it just gives each piece kind of its own personality.

I have many ways of meeting clients, but once I've met a client, I still do pencil drawings, and I'll do a to-scale pencil drawing of the project they have in mind and present it to 'em, and if they agree that that's what they have in mind, we'll start working on their project.

It's kind of a toss up between seeing the product right after I put finish on it and the satisfaction when that piece is first introduced to the client, the reaction they give.

And that's probably the two most gratifying things.

I mean, it's relaxing.

I can listen to the music as soft or as loud as I wanna listen to all day, and your mind tends to wander when you're working by yourself.

(laughs) So it's enjoyable.

It's a lot of organization.

You start with a stack of wood, and you start planning how you can get the most out of it 'cause you don't want to have a lot of waste.

So it's a lot of thinking and planning ahead, and then I think you start getting into it, and it's just kind of rhythm, and it just makes you feel good.

And then some projects, like the one behind me here are a bit of brain teasers 'cause it's not flat.

You've got odd pieces of wood, and you didn't pick the materials out.

The customer picked the materials out so you're dealt to deal with what you have in front of you and come up with a project that kind of meets what their expectations are.

So every project kind of takes on a personality in my mind.

And this one was a brain teaser.

So this leg is shorter than that leg, and there's different cracks and stuff in it, and you got worm holes and stuff underneath here, and it was just a lot to work with, and it was fun.

I can't wait to put some finish on it and see what the final product looks like.

I think my grandpa, Frank Bishop, for the interest in woodworking, and I think my high school wood shop teacher, Ron Struble, were really instilling craftsmanship of furniture, And, of course, my wife and my son, they, you know?

My wife's been very patient through this whole process, and my son's been there to help me an awful lot a along the way.

Yeah, and I think the challenge to me is the creative part of it.

It keeps your mind invigorated, and just being creative and thinking outside the box and not just putting something together the same way every time you make it, that's the enjoyment of it.

I find it relaxing.

It's definitely a creative outlet, and I think that's why I started with the woodworking tools, you know, shortly after high school is, I'd miss that creative outlet.

Like a painter paints and a sketcher sketches, I build furniture.

(bright folk music) (classic rock music) - We're familiar with county museums, but one town in Dodge County has its own museum, and the town isn't even the county seat.

We paid a visit to the West Concord Historical Society.

- My favorite room in the museum is the room where we're sitting right now.

It's the flame room, and it's a reproduction of the cafe that was in the hotel that was on Main Street, West Concord, and the cafe was vintage 1930s.

And I just love how a group of people took a photograph (camera clicks) of the old cafe and made this room look as much like it as they could.

My name is Colleen Hayne.

I've been president of the West Concord Historical Society for, this is my sixth year.

In 1994, the Triton School District needed to close down the West Concord Elementary School, but because of financial and practical reasons, they decided to move the elementary school and all the students to Dodge Center.

So the school board was seriously thinking about demolishing the school so it wouldn't be a hazard in any way, but the town who had love the school for so long banded together to save it.

And they did that by forming the West Concord Historical Society, and they bought the school for a dollar from the school district, and thus began the beginning of the museum, and gradually with donations from people of the community and a whole lot of volunteer efforts, a beautiful museum gradually appeared, room by room.

Other rooms that I like, I love the education room because I was a school teacher.

The education room has the old wooden desks that were prominent, especially when this building was built in 1902.

The heritage room is right across the hall from that room, and that is filled with what would've been in homes in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

And one of my favorite things there is the wooden telephone where you would call the operator, and she answers and says, "Number please," which is actually what I grew up with when I was a kid.

There is the farmers and merchant's room, and farming is such a big part of the community in West Concord.

There are lots of milk cans, milky machines, oh, just so many artifacts from the creamery that was here and then also artifacts from the banks, the grocery stores, the service stations, all the places that were once on Main Street, West Concord.

In 1936, a much needed addition to our building was made, and it was an auditorium and gymnasium.

The community uses the gymnasium for all kinds of events.

Whenever there's not a space in town big enough to hold the people, the event is held there, and athletic groups come in and play ball in the gym, and walkers come and walk in the winter.

Upstairs, we have the veterans room, which showcases all of many, many people who served from West Concord in wars from Civil War and through Desert Storm.

A German translation book for soldiers in World War II, maybe World War I.

Those are the artifacts we have.

Next door to that is the fashion room, and that's a room a lot of people enjoy because it's lots of beautiful clothing to look at from the past.

Across the hall is like a whole different feeling.

It's the '50s-'60s room.

It has funky furniture, lots of references to Marilyn Monroe, the Kennedys, Elvis, and peace and hippies.

(laughs) It's a fun room.

Another room on that floor, you have to see it to believe it.

It's our shell room, seashells of all kinds, coral of all kinds, all categorized and labeled, and it's really fascinating if you take the time to look.

The police, firemen and EMT room, and there are lots of mementos of days gone by, and we can see how much those professions have progressed and how much more modern West Concord has become.

We have a research room, and that's my favorite room.

I pour through old newspapers to write articles, and I just, I love that room.

That is a nice trip back in time.

And it's hard to believe because there's so little left on small town main streets these days.

(bluesy jazz music) - SEMVA is the longtime Southeast Minnesota Artist collective.

It has a new home in Rochester, a gallery just off the lobby of the Kahler Grand Hotel.

With more foot traffic, SEMVA's regional artists hope the new location will bring more exposure to their work.

(gentle piano music) - I think a lot of people buy art because they've encountered something that they like, and it touches them, and they want to keep it.

I think most people come across a piece of art by accident.

They don't have, "I'm going out today and find a painting for above my couch."

That's not how you find your artwork.

It's something that speaks to your soul.

SEMVA stands for Southeastern Minnesota Visual Artists.

It's in the counties down here in the southeast corner of the state.

(crowd chattering) A lot of what we have here right now is art that's been produced in the last couple months.

So these are things that this group of artists has been working on, coming out of the isolation with the pandemic.

We closed the gallery Memorial Day last spring and started moving in here in September.

(calm piano music) The pandemic has taken away foot traffic.

You know, people have more of a purpose now when they're out.

We see more people are just, now they're out just to be out.

So we get more foot traffic moving through.

People have, you know, come out of the clinic and walked through, and whether they're residents or guests here in the hotel, they're excited to see us downtown again.

We were four blocks down Broadway before, and a lot of people didn't walk through that way.

So they really never rediscovered where we had been in that interim period.

And they have told me, downstairs in the shop, how they're just excited to see us back here and excited to come.

And people sit up here in the mezzanine, and they have their cup of coffee, and you sit, and if you are doing your shift, and you walk on through, some of them are talking about what's on the walls and commenting, and you can step in and do a little bit of that discussion with them.

So that's good fun.

We have photography, wood carving.

We have two ceramic artists currently.

I am also ceramic artist.

My first joy was painting.

That's my first thing as an artist.

The paintings are acrylics, oils, watercolor.

The jewelry artists who are all coming in with different approaches and different beads and metals, finishing.

So everybody has their own pieces that they love to work with and that they create their designs through.

Oh, I forgot to mention the glass art.

Not all of us blow our own horn.

Maybe there's something to the secluded art artist who is happy in their studio and just prefers not to be in the spotlight.

It's good when you see somebody smile when they're looking at your work, that's your fulfillment.

The group that's here has put a lot of time in, and so tonight is kind of like a big thank you and appreciation for what I feel like for the artists that have been involved.

And I want to thank them for staying and getting this up and going.

(gentle piano music) (bluesy jazz music) - Next, we meet a man whose goal is to open dialogues between urban and rural communities.

Artist Matthew Fluharty sees important things happening in rural America, things that might get overlooked by people in cities.

- I'm Matthew Fluharty.

I'm an artist and a curator and the executive director of Art of the Rural.

Art of the Rural is a collaborative organization.

We work with artists and culture bearers and organizations pretty much all around the country.

And our work focuses primarily around helping to co-create and share knowledge of different forms, helping to create spaces for folks that come together and focusing on rural and urban exchange.

I was born on a seventh generation farm in Appalachian, Ohio, and that experience was very formative for the arc of my life professionally and creatively.

When I was young, my parents worked on their farm.

So every day after school, the bus would drop me off at my grandparents' farm.

And my grandmother was also a really important presence in my life for that love of reading and writing but also for the love of community.

And I think an appreciation for those qualities of just how she showed up to serve in her community really profoundly resonated with me when I had the chance to speak at her memorial service.

At a particular point where I felt distanced from the culture of my own region and my own place, I really, I felt like I heard something like a call, you know, and at that point, you know, I'm in the middle of a graduate program.

I'm a writer studying literature at that point.

That was to try how I could to begin to tell stories from rural places.

About a week later, I got back home, and I started a blog called Art of the Rural, and just began blogging about the things happening all around the country.

So Art of the Rural existed for about three years, and it began in a moment where the internet itself was really expanding.

What I like to say is that the access to that technology caught up with people's aspirations.

And as that occurred, Art of the Royal was there as a place for folks to meet, to exchange their own stories and lived experience and liked to build connection and community.

And out of that space, in 2014, Art of the Rural became a nonprofit.

So Art of the Rural really grew in scale and grew in terms of our audience.

At the time, I had begun to work with a number of folks around projects related to the Mississippi River.

This relates to some of my creative work.

Some of this work led me up to a conference in Minneapolis.

I drove the River Road from St. Louis all the way up here.

Myself and my family, we knew that we were ready for a change.

I was at this conference, it ended, I came back down Highway-61, but I needed a coffee, and I rolled into Winona and just took a break for a second and walked to the levy.

It kind of was a moment of recognition like that moment when I was speaking at my grandmother's memorial service, where something just came over me, and I walked down from the levee, and I texted my wife, and I was like, "Hey, why don't you Google Winona right now?"

To compress a much longer story, five months later, we lived here.

We had moved our family here.

The program that we're working on in Winona is called Spillway.

And Spillway is a program that is focused on artists, culture bearers and communities along the upper Mississippi River corridor, helping with many, many other people to create spaces for there to be communities that form around a connection and a belief and a defense of the upper Mississippi as an ecosystem and as a cultural region.

Before the pandemic, we operated a space called Public Launch for about four years that hosted over a hundred events, potlucks, art exhibitions, musical performances, and was able to really freely offer space for folks to come together.

I'm proud of the way that it wasn't work that we did.

We just helped create a platform for folks to express themselves, and to see the ways in which that work being visible, over time helped to change a city's attitude towards that space.

You know, though sometimes Art of the Rural's work is about a convening or about an exhibition or a publication of some form, it is equally about barbecues and dances and potlucks and folks gathering along the river to experience something together.

You know, our goal is that any of the change or connectivity that we're seeking really begins on a level of relationship and a particular relationship over time because we believe that relationships over time can build trust.

And trust is really the central component, which like truly of any community.

So exchange and relationship building is really the formative part of Art of the Rural's work.

And this is sort of a way of being that was created by my colleagues, Vanna, Barrett, and folks at Appleshop through a program called The Rural-Urban Exchange.

Truly one of the most meaningful experiences I've had as part of Art of the Rural occurred last year as this initial cohort of folks from across the rural and urban parts of Minnesota, had a chance to come together and to exchange the places and traditions and cultural standpoints of their communities with each other.

And it was very profound to see how, coming from a place of respect and a place of honoring difference, this sort of statewide community across rural and urban and suburban space like has begun to come together.

One of the projects that I've been very focused on since the spring of 2016 is called Local Archive.

Local Archive is a project that balances two things at once, on one hand, the representation of non-urban places in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the representation of these same places in rural newspapers.

As I just kept the slow work of patiently archiving all of these photographs, I began to see how these individual photographs, which are not necessarily connected to each other, are themselves telling a much larger story.

And in one part it is a story about communities and cultures in rural and Indian country, but it also is a story about the way those places are portrayed in the larger media ecosystem.

You know, oftentimes we think in the city is that, that's where change is happening and the pace of change.

Things are moving fast in the city.

And what we allow for rural places is that, that's where things are staying the same.

And that's where traditions are, and that's where the pace of life is slow.

And those things are true to some degree, but I think sometimes what that way of looking at things really obscures is that rural places, towns like Winona are themselves changing as much as the city is changing.

And part of my work more broadly, regardless of what it is that I'm speaking of, is trying to honor that change and make it visible.

I think the popular notions of rural places as being like static and not moving plays into a whole host of stereotypes.

If you look at the newspaper work, it allows for rural places to be written about in a very particular way, as, you know, maybe being retrograde or backwards.

It allows, when I think about the work of Art of the Rural and some of the work we do within our networks, it allows for foundations in America to not fund rural places.

What happens when we don't allow for the space and evolution of change that's happening in rural places to be visible is that all of us, whether we're in a small community or whether we're living in New York City, we're all losing something.

Alan Lomax had this idea that he talked a lot about called cultural equity.

Everyone, individuals, groups, communities have equal time on the air.

Like, what do we lose when folks don't all have equal time on the air to express themselves?

What points of compassion and understanding are lost?

(lively folk music) - We've reached the end of this trip.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time, "Off 90."

(upbeat jazzy music) (upbeat jazzy music continues) (upbeat jazzy music continues) (bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(loon calling)