Exhibition: All Things Hold Together – Visiting Artist Mary Welcome
About the event
Visiting Artist Mary Welcome’s work will be on display in the Fine Art Center’s Gallery 2 from January 9-February 14, with an artist lecture at 3:30 on Thursday, January 9th. Lecture will take place in Gallery 2, with a reception to follow.
ALL THINGS HOLD TOGETHER
The prairie post holds fast, by the work of the one million many hands it takes to pass a note across geographies. In a communications commons, the crow flies in concentric community circles rather than straight lines. We are all things, holding together, by whatever means made possible, by whatever ways made necessary. Through history and mystery, the deer trail turned to footpath turned to backroads turned to a rural delivery route that connects person to person and place to place. I’m out on this long walk across the country. It’s nice to see what’s different over time.
The sculpture in the center of the room acts as our viewfinder for this practice. Table #17 (Light) is by Sister June, an artist and neighbor in Palouse.
Artist Bio
Mary Welcome is an artist, community organizer, and rural cultural worker hailing from the great Palouse prairie. As an artist-activist, her projects are rooted in community engagement and the development of intersectional programming to address equity, cultural advocacy, queerness, visibility, and imagination. She brings a nuanced perspective to the contemporary field: as an organizer working in service to small towns, as a cultural producer across American geographies, and as a facilitator of place-based arts programming.
Mary Welcome has spent the past twelve years documenting thousands of rural post offices as a long-form research practice called God Bless the USPS.