Art From Goodland

The view from Meredith Trombles' Holiday Inn room; Goodland, Kansas

Yesterday, Bay Area artist and writer Meredith Tromble launched Art & Shadows, a new blog that received the 2011 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Grant in advance of its inception.

In her inaugural post, Tromble introduces several of the challenging questions she plans to ruminate on at Art & Shadows.

"As I look out towards the prairie from my hotel room, it seems right that this first Art & Shadows should come from Kansas, and from a small town. The questions I want to explore in this blog, questions about the art world and about what art is, how we know art when we see it, and what it means in our lives, are my questions in part because of where I grew up. I am passionately involved with contemporary art, but I've never gotten comfortable with the disconnect between art now and art here. For example, there's a lot of talk about 'community' in the works I encounter in my everyday life as an artist, writer, and teacher; but the thinking doesn't always seem to encompass the kind of community consciousness shared by the rural people who live here."

Perhaps I respond so positively to Tromble's Kansas hotel room musings because of my own rural upbringing -- I'm similarly uncomfortable with the disconnect she describes -- but I believe that the questions she raises are urgent and universal, and that they must be part of the general art conversation. If we approach them earnestly -- as objectively as our subjective realm permits, and with as little posturing as our egos will allow -- we could shape a sustainable and robust 21st century art world, one that might even incorporate both "art now" and "art here."

Image credit: Meredith Tromble, 2012