Public Art and Personal Trust
An international mural festival is coming to rural Iowa, and it's an exercise in communal magic
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and tech worker who recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
I walked to the lumber yard this week to order supplies for the upcoming mural festival. Yes, I plan to tease you with references to this mural festival, without explaining it, until it’s over and I can share the results. But it runs from August 30 - September 4, so you won’t have to wait too long. And if you’re local to southern Iowa, you should come and watch the painters - it’s all happening at the Wayne County Fairgrounds.1
I will tell you that we’re expecting 200+ artists from 29 states and 6 countries. For context, that’s more people than the inhabitants of our county’s smallest three towns combined.
The artists will paint sixteen murals. Our eight “cities” will each get at least one new mural focused on local history or culture; in some towns, the mural will be on the last viable building left standing. Topics include bank robberies, batteries, baseball, and the man known as the “granddaddy of tattoos.” There’s nothing to show you yet — right now it’s all line drawings and endless paint orders as we await the artists’ arrival.
As you can guess if you’ve followed my newsletter for awhile, we’re running the festival entirely with volunteers. Volunteers are hosting artists in their homes for five nights, since there aren’t enough hotels. Volunteers are doing airport runs. Volunteers are cooking and serving three meals a day. Volunteers are setting up and cleaning up everything.
The artists are also volunteering their time and money to come here. For them, it’s a chance to build relationships with other artists in what can be a solo, lonely profession. And they’re taking a leap too — trusting that strangers will be good hosts, and hoping that the festival is worth the trip.
In my old job, I managed a team that planned similarly-sized events. We had a multimillion dollar budget, a contracted event production company, a travel agency, and several paid employees to handle it all. Even with that embarrassment of riches, it sometimes felt scrappy and challenging.
For this mural festival, I didn’t kick it off — I was asked to join later, under the false pretense that they just needed help creating a registration form. But I’ve somehow become the committee chair / sole customer service rep for the artists / comms manager / website designer / press liaison / logistics coordinator. Everything I’m doing is entirely voluntary, with none of the fancy swag (or fancy paycheck) that my old company gave out regularly.
I’ll probably walk away from the mural festival with nothing more than a t-shirt, a sunburn, and some accidental gluten overdose from the volunteer-cooked meals.
All that said — it’s going to be an amazing weekend of public art and community.
It feels simultaneously like something that can’t possibly happen here, and something that can only happen here.
I had a dozen urgent festival-related things to do this week. One was finalizing the supply orders. I took a list of items to the lumber yard, asking for 20 rolls of painters’ tape, 216 roller covers, dozens of paint trays, 1600 quart-sized stir sticks, and more.
The lumber yard is only ever staffed by two people: the owner and the sole employee.2 Since I try to be polite even when I’m in a rush, I let a couple of other customers interrupt my ordering process so that they could get in and out. All told, with free gossip included, it took an hour to finish my order.
The lumber yard could handle almost everything on my list. But they couldn’t find quart-sized stir sticks. I need something like tongue depressors or popsicle sticks, since a lot of the mural paint is mixed in small quantities. For some reason, their supplier doesn’t sell these.
The lumber yard employee told me, quite sincerely, that I could order 800 gallon-sized stir sticks and he would cut them all in half for me with a miter saw.
I didn’t take his offer. But I wasn’t surprised he made it. He knows what the mural festival is. He knows who I am. And he wants to help somehow.
In a festival committee meeting a few weeks ago, we discussed giving t-shirts to volunteers. Everyone agreed it was a nice idea, but our budget is tight. Finally, someone said, “No one here volunteers for a t-shirt. We volunteer because it needs to get done.”
We also can’t afford to hire full security for the event. We briefly looked into getting night guards, since supplies and equipment will be unattended. But even if we scraped together the money, there aren’t any security firms around here to contract with. The sheriff’s office will patrol regularly, and it’s unlikely we’ll have any issues. Still, it feels strange and vulnerable compared to what I’m used to with corporate events.
When I discussed the lack of security with the county emergency manager, he paused for a long time. Then he shrugged and said, “I want to believe that people are good.”
I want to believe it too. I’m not sure I should. I have plenty of experience (and historical evidence) to suggest that it’s not true.
But I’m in a trust exercise for the next couple of weeks. I have no choice but to believe. I’m trusting that enough volunteers will show up to make everything run smoothly. Trusting that no one will vandalize the murals when they’re done. Trusting that these local groups will figure out how to feed the vegans who are coming (this one actually worries me the most).
When I think of rural magic, the mural festival is an example. I’m not working on my novel this week, but in the background, my writer brain is making connections about how and when we make implicit vows to each other. I’m thinking about how we create things bigger than ourselves, both good and bad, by how we engage with the world. I’m thinking about how and why a community comes together and decides to do something, vs. when a community decides to look the other way, or decides to actively support something harmful.
I’m thinking about the influence of the loudest voices — how a single person can create a mural festival, or a book ban, and how personal charisma can shift a whole community’s system.
The people involved in this festival — artists, volunteers, building owners, community members — have an unspoken agreement to trust each other. That trust is fragile; I’m not at all sure that it’s possible to maintain it. Americans don’t really default to an assumption of trusting each other, and we no longer trust many of our institutions. My inner corporate exec is thinking of all the things that can go wrong. And every think piece I read these days would tell me that dropping a bunch of outside artists into a heavily rural area is a risky proposition.
But for one weekend at the beginning of September, we’re going to see whether mutual trust can be sustained. We’re going to see what happens when a community embraces the idea of public art. We’re going to see what happens when artists embrace a desire for community and are willing to travel someplace outside their comfort zone to make it happen.
We’re going to see what happens when we choose to believe that people are good.
Cheers,
Sara
If you’re nearby and feel so inclined, there’s a public welcome party on the evening of August 30. You can also visit anytime after September to see the murals in their permanent locations. The press release is here and I’ll share more about the murals in future posts.
The lumber yard is great, in its own way. I already told you I have a charge account there in an earlier post: Goodbye, digital economy. I charged everything on this trip to the mural festival’s account, no ID required.
Excited to see the results. Good luck next weekend!
I can’t wait to read and see the murals!