A TRIP TO THE HEARTLAND
A report from Taylor Van Horne, Director of the Instituto Sacatar 

“The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it; religion was a hobby which some professed and others did not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of…intolerance, hypocrisy and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries.”

—Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Last year at the AAC auction, Mitch Loch and I bid on two nights at Bonnie’s Place, a cabin in the woods on the edge of the campus of the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina.  Mitch and I run the Instituto Sacatar, a residency program in Bahia, Brazil.  That’s about as far from any other residency program as you can get these days, so in our travels we are always eager to visit other residency programs. 

We decided to use Bonnie’s Place as a jumping off point to visit other residency programs in the area: the Sustainable Arts Society in Blue Ridge, Georgia; Hambidge in Dillard, Georgia; and the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.  (We just didn’t have time to visit Arrowmont.) Along with Penland, these four programs revealed to us the complete diversity of the residency world.  Our tour also revealed to me a troubling aspect of our current national malaise.

We flew into Charlotte, North Carolina and drove directly to Penland. The state of North Carolina was a rude awakening for me.  I felt like I had entered the stronghold of an evangelical Taliban.  There were Baptist churches every half mile or so, with sometimes humorous, sometimes frightening admonitions posted in their manicured lawns.  Every restaurant, every shop, had Christian posters and pamphlets on display:  on the door to a diner in Clayton, we saw a large poster in which a ferocious American eagle against the stars and stripes glowered down at the Ten Commandments writ in large gothic script; in Marion, beneath the glass tops of a restaurant’s tables, there were multiple copies (at each table!) of a pamphlet on How to Give Your Child a Proper Christian Education.  In many of the counties we traveled through, the sale of liquor is prohibited.  People were very nice, almost too nice; however, I sensed, in each of the artist communities we visited, a deep separation from the evangelical fervor surrounding them. 

Arriving at Penland was a relief!  We imagined Bonnie’s Place as a simple cabin in the woods, but it is a substantial two-bedroom house, fully equipped, and we found the refrigerator full of beer.  More Bonnie’s Palace than Bonnie’s Place.  Penland is a unique residency program; the artists in residence stay three years, after which a majority of them chooses to settle in the area.  Penland is definitely doing something right.  There are a lot of local artists as a result of Penland’s presence, but I felt that daring artistic expression was muffled beneath a blanket of societal piety.  The art I saw, with very few exceptions, was extremely safe. Brown pots, as one of the artists in residence dismissed with a wave of his hand.   It reminded me of the kind of artistic self-censorship I witnessed in the 70s when I was living in Brazil during the darkest years of the military dictatorship there.  Penland has phenomenally equipped studios, but the voice of the artist is stifled, perhaps by choice.

We next went to the Sustainable Arts Society in Blue Ridge, Georgia.  Its founder, Elma Ettman, says she has been an ‘emerging program’ for years.  She has a beautiful 19c farmstead in rural Georgia, but it is difficult, nearly impossible, to jumpstart a residency program with little funding.  The self-righteous morality of the local citizenry weighs heavily here too:  Blue Ridge is an old railroad town struggling to reposition itself as a tourist destination.  Several galleries moved to town and had begun to hold openings on the same evenings.  An outraged local citizen had an ordinance passed so that the gallery owners can no longer serve free wine at their openings.  In a thousand ways, the evangelical Taliban circumscribes the activities of the perceived infidels.  Hardly the Land of the Free.

Hambidge was our next stop, an idyllic retreat with live/work studios nestled in the forests that surround an old stone lodge.  The artists meet at the lodge each evening, where a fine cook prepares them dinner.  The artists we met seemed happy and were certainly getting a lot done, but there was no connection whatsoever to the local community.  Hambidge is an older program, one founded on the principal of providing a retreat from civilization, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But I just felt, these evangelicals are out of bounds.  They must be shown that diversity of opinion and practice is to be tolerated, that not everyone shares their values and that their values are not absolute.  This is one of the roles of an artist—and one of the reasons that many of our elected representatives disparage artists.  Artists are supposed to show the edge where beliefs fray; where things can get dangerous, transgressive, iffy; where the mystery opens its abyss. 

Our last stop was Charlotte.  The streets here were alive with a wide mix of ethnicities, making Charlotte quite cosmopolitan after our foray through the thoroughly white hinterlands of the South. We couldn’t help but ask repeatedly, why do these diverse ethnicities (African American, East Asian, etc.) stay put, seldom venturing into the beautiful surrounding area?  We never got a straight answer, but diversity, if an issue, is certainly a problematic one at Penland and Hambidge.  People of color, for whatever complex social reasons, simply choose not to go into the countryside.

McColl is an urban residency program, built inside the burnt-out shell of a former gothic revival church.  The architect did an excellent job, inserting a great number of studios and workshops while maintaining a sense of the volume of the original building. Like Penland, McColl has phenomenally equipped studios.  Something we can never have in the salt-laden tropical air at our program in Brazil. The artists keep an open-door policy, which at times must be an inconvenience, in exchange, however, for very low rent and/or other very generous perks.  The nearby Mint Museum of Craft confirmed that not all of the local artists have muffled their voices. Still, the general acquiescence of the artists we met—the simple shrug of the shoulders—to the ubiquitous religious propaganda disturbed me. 

At Sacatar most of our artists in residence immerse themselves in the vibrant local culture, which is radiantly inclusive (although also suffering from encroaching evangelical intolerance.) We work hard to make the connections to the community possible, which can be difficult since almost no one in Bahia speaks any English.   But with its African roots, in which the sacred and the profane intermingle without boundaries, Bahia is to some extent inoculated against religious extremism and intolerance.  The Bahians are eager to meet people from other places and with other viewpoints.  Art does not intimidate or frighten them.  They may not understand, but they are seldom judgmental or dismissive.  These are virtues I wish were more apparent in the USA.  Instead, I felt an uncomfortable distance—revealed through numerous anecdotes that artists shared with me—between the artists living in the area and the uncomprehending, opinionated locals. 

I do think residency programs can bring together bright engaged people from all cultures, including the evangelically conservative. The current US administration is skewed against foreign visitors; Penland had to fight to secure a visa for a visiting teacher from Canada!  Nonetheless, I urge you all to increase the representation at your centers across all nationalities and cultures, from within the USA and from abroad.  (The residency programs in California offer an excellent model for this kind of inclusive programming.) 

I thank the directors and staff at Penland, Sustainable Arts, Hambidge and McColl for their generous hospitality and I invite all of you to drop by Sacatar when/if you feel inclined to leave the Homeland.  We’ll be waiting for you, with a caipirinha in hand.  Bring your swimsuit.  Bahia is anything but dry!