As Zarouhie Abdalian contemplated some of the things that nourish her imagination nowadays, she thought about farmland. Abdalian, an artist from New Orleans, was recently spending time at Mahalah Farm, just about 30 miles from Meridian in western Alabama.

“There’s a very deep connection to a very long history of this landscape,” Abdalian said. “I don’t get that in the city. Talking about the vegetation and all of its changes today was a very direct way of learning about the history of the place.”

For about a week this past November, Abdalian served as the artist-in-residence at the Coleman Center for the Arts, in York, Alabama. She was in the area for about a week, working with her partner, Joseph Rosenzweig, on artistic research — a phrase that included both reading and absorbing as much life as she could in this small western Alabama community. Early during her visit, she and Rosenzweig spent much of the day at Mahalah Farm, a family farm run by Yawah Awolowo.

“Her farm is generous, generative, and visionary,” Abdalian said later, in an email. “These are qualities we might all aspire to in our work and broad goals I am aspiring to develop as a project for the Coleman Center for the Arts.

She also visited with Garland Farwell, a previous artist-in-residence at the Coleman Center who opted to stay in York, where he’s lived for the past decade. He’s working on revitalizing a studio downtown, just blocks away from the Coleman Center, and he’s engaged in a cluster of other artistic projects, as well.

Later during the week-long residency, Abdalian visited public libraries, including the Hightower Memorial Library — physically connected to the Coleman Center.

“Libraries,” she said, “are interesting to me not only because of the information they offer in their archives but because of how they function to serve a community and how different communities shape them.”

The Coleman Center for the Arts has been in York since 1985, serving, according to its website, “as a contemporary arts organization that uses art to foster positive social change, answer civic needs, build local pride, and use creativity for community problem solving.” York native Dorothy “Tut” Altman Riddick and other local citizens founded it, according to Shana Berger, in an article for encyclopediaofalabama.org. Berger, along with Nathan Purath, formerly served as co-director of the center. It receives funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and a host of other supporters.

The mission of the center — “to integrate contemporary art into education, civic life, and community development throughout our region” — seems to be shared, in various ways, by creative residents in different parts of this rural western Alabama community.

Abdalian, during her visit, found herself enmeshed in a remarkably creative rural community – and one that also shows deep signs of economic hardship, with the nearest grocery stores, for instance, a good drive away.

Farming roots

As Awolowo, who runs Mahalah Farm, provided a kind of tour for a dozen or so people on a recent Monday morning, she pointed out a sprawling variety of crops, trees, bushes and other live things. She gestured to pear trees, plum bushes and honeybees during the tour.

“I’m learning so much from the earth, and from nature,” she said.

Soil in the Black Belt, she added, is often fertile and responsive.

“You can throw things down and go on about your business,” she said. “It’s not hard soil.”

As guests talked on the farm, the concept of nourishment seemed to hover above the conversations. With artists and people with expertise in various aspects of farming joining into the discussion, the sense that farming and art shared some cohesive force was pervasive – or maybe it was the sense that farming and artistic expression weren’t really separate at all.

They talked about farming in ways that resembled how people who worked at the Coleman Center would later talk about visual arts. Farming, they noted — like art — doesn’t have to be limited to a small group of people. E’licia Chaverest, assistant director for the Small Farms Research Center of Alabama A&M University, reflected on the way new farmers could learn effectively and could put their learning into practice even without wide swaths of land.

“Even though people feel that you have to have a lot of land to farm, you can farm on an acre of land,” Chaverest said. “You don’t have to have 500 acres to farm.”

Awolowo

‘I guess my vision for the farm would be to have this be a teaching farm for elementary children, for high school children, for adults.’

–Yawah Awolowo

Awolowo herself has traveled to various parts of the state, and beyond, to study and learn about farming, and she hopes to pass those lessons along.

“I guess my vision for the farm would be to have this be a teaching farm for elementary children, for high school children, for adults,” she said, noting that she’s already conducted sessions for students. “It’s very important that we know our foods.”

Awolowo and Farwell also talked about carving out a meeting place on the farm — a place where small groups of people could gather and share ideas.

“We talked about doing a sort of sharing circle,” Farwell said. “We would build some more benches and use some of the tree stumps and create a place where people can meet.”

A vegetable farmer, Awolowo said her main crops include cabbage, collards, onions, squash and okra. And the farm itself, she said, is named for her great aunt, Mahalah.

“That’s my grandfather’s sister,” she said. “She reared me, she raised my mother, my sister, my brother…”

Awolowo said Mahalah and her husband bought the land about 75 years ago.

“She was really the farmer,” she said. “She plowed the fields and tended the crops. That’s how I learned to do it so well.”

Awolowo noted Choctaw, Blackfoot and Cherokee heritage as part of her background.

The deep history that Awolowo shared as she discussed her farm is part of what seemed to fuel Abdalian’s imagination as an artist. Abdalian’s work involves sculpture, often positioned within indoor or urban landscapes in ways that reveal — or help people to re-see — elements of space. As Abdalian was surrounded by farmland, she was in some ways venturing into another kind of space.

And it’s a space, she said, that ultimately moves beyond physical farmland.

“Yawah (Awolowo)’s farm was inspiring not only because of what she has been able to cultivate in the earth,” she wrote later, “but because of the community she has cultivated at the same time …”

That community includes artists.

Re-seeing through the arts

Part of the Coleman Center’s work is to bring visual art into the realms of people who may not see it, or contemplate it, every day.

“Visual literacy is really important,” said Jackie Clay, executive director for the Coleman Center for the Arts, noting the importance of processing and understanding visual images. “We understand music and dance, but visual arts sometimes get cordoned off, and we don’t have as much access to them.”

Hence the importance of places such as the Coleman Center.

“Places like this, existing in this (area), feel relevant and important,” she said. “I don’t think that visual arts should only be accessible to people in big cities, or people with lots of money, or people with a certain level of education.” Visual arts, she added, should be pondered in “the same way we think of music and sound.”

The roads out

If artists and farmers in the community are looking to each other for inspiration, they’re also looking outside to the larger community.

With a studio just blocks away from the Coleman Center for the Arts, visual artist Garland Farwell is working on two barn quilt projects, one for the Choctaw County High School and the other for the Choctaw County Extension Office. He said he started a barn quilt project with the Extension Office — and when members of the high school asked him to do a mural, he suggested doing a barn quilt project with the school as well.

Now, he said, the county will overall have about a dozen barn quilts.

“People hear of a barn quilt trail, and they’ll go for their Sunday drives along the trails,” said Farwell, a previous artist-in-residence at the Coleman Center.

The quilts, he said, will “go up on remote roads and barns and other buildings.”

Farwell also goes to Choctaw County High School to work with the students, giving them the chance to do some of the design work.

In York, he’s preparing a gallery space where local and regional artists and artisans can exhibit and sell their work. He’s also prepared a website at https://south17.org/ as a place to buy and sell art.

“My goal is to recruit a lot more artists,” he said, noting that he’s seeking artists from eastern Mississippi and western Alabama.

He’s also restoring bicycles.

Farwell

‘My goal is to recruit a lot more artists.’

–Garland Farwell

“People think that art is relaxing,” he said. “It’s not. Working on bicycles is relaxing.”

Farwell has several bicycles in his studio that he lends out to people who need them, including people who have just come to town for a few hours or days. He gives tours on the bicycle.

“There are a lot of things you can’t see by car,” he said. “Bikes sort of take you there.”

It’s part of the connection that he strives to make with other residents, and part of the connection he’d like to see residents making with people who have devoted their lives and livelihoods to art. His studio is for people to enter, to use, and the Farwell wants people to know that.

“It’s just a matter of people feeling like it’s their space,” he said.

And Farwell said he liked the presence of several spaces in the community — places such as the Coleman Center, his studio and the Mahalah Farm.

“I think it’s really important to have in town more than one space,” he said. “People need to know that there’s more than one place.”

As for the Coleman Center for the Arts, members are working especially intently on developing the center’s educational programs. Boo Gilder, curator of education for the Coleman Center for the Arts, worked earlier this semester with students in an afterschool program, held at the Coleman Center, called Open Studio. She’s also coordinated summer enrichment programs and afterschool programs, both at the Coleman and at the schools themselves.

She described Open Studio as an “inquiry-based, open-format class” to which students come once a week for a couple of hours.

“We put out a bunch of materials and tell them to go at it,” she said. “We make sure they’re using the material safely and give them suggestions on ways to use the materials, but we just sort of push them and question them and try to get them to take it to the next level — and really let them lead the way.”

Those materials might include paper, pencils, acrylic and watercolor paint, plastic pieces, wood blocks and lots of other items.

The Coleman Center also offers a summer camp for students, with units in areas such as dance, poetry, music and visual art.

Clay also mentioned “Pop Start,” a wide-sweeping program that carves out space for — among other things — artists to display, create, talk about their work; for people to converse about small-business possibilities; and for people to bring and distribute food. The program was offered in past years and now, with the space renovated, it’s slated to be offered again. Clay said Yawah Awolowo was among those who supplied “the inspiration and the conceptual root” of the program.

The Center also harbors a gallery in which a Sumter County Fine Arts Council Exhibition takes place annually and where students periodically display their art, as well.

And Abdalian, too, is looking at her period of residence as a foundation for future public work in the area.

“I see last week’s residency as the first part of a much longer engagement,” she said, the week following her residency. “I will return early next year to follow up on some of the initial connections made, continue to meet with people, explore the landscape, and produce a public event … and I hope for many visits to follow during which I’ll work towards a larger project.”

As the Coleman Center reaches outward, creative residents such as Awolowo and Farwell, and visitors such as Abdalian, continue to cultivate for connections with other members of the community. The artistic and agricultural spaces, they want people to know, are shared spaces where crops and ideas can germinate.

“It’s not hard soil,” Awolowo said of the land on her farm — touching upon, in a larger sense, the various ways it’s possible to help things grow.

On the Net:

http://colemanarts.org/ 

www.facebook.com/MahalahFarm/

https://south17.org/