- [Kim] Welcome to Kalamazoo Lively Arts, the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant, creative community and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

- On this episode of Kalamazoo Lively Arts, we visit the Mill at Vicksburg and meet some of the amazing Prairie Ronde artist residents who use the 100 year old mill as their muse.

But first, John Kern and Jackie Koney detail the Prairie Ronde Artist Residency Program and how it impacts their community.

Well, today I'm talking with John Kern and Jackie Koney from the Paper City Development and the Mill at Vicksburg, where something big is coming.

Thank you so much for talking with me here today.

- Thank you.

Thanks for having us.

- Yeah, it's a pleasure.

- And you mentioned the Prairie Ronde Artist Residency.

I'd love to hear what some of the artists are saying about that, because that's kind of your baby, right, John?

- It is, yeah.

We are in the middle of our sixth season now, and we have hosted over 80 artists from around the world in Vicksburg.

We've got a new batch of artists on site right now.

The premise of the artist residency is the fact that really, so much of the mill and all of the activities around the mill are in a way a celebration of people who make and do things.

And it's been a really interesting situation to get these artists from all over North America and, you know, globally as well, into contact with the tradespeople who are working on refurbishing the mill and getting them into dialogue with each other where they recognize really soon, really early in the conversation that they have shared skillsets, and they're just applying them in different ways.

And it's really created a great opportunity to make dialogue for people who would not necessarily always talk together.

One of the unique things about the Prairie Ronde Artist Residency is that we make a high recommendation to the artists who are participating, that they use the paper mill and Vicksburg as their muse.

And so while there are people, while there are tradespeople over at the mill, there are also artists that are there, and they're in a controlled environment, and they're working within that space.

We're running three sessions a season between March 15th and December 15th.

And for each of those three sessions, we get in the neighborhood of 70 applicants all vying for four slots basically per session.

So it's a very, very competitive space.

We recognized early on, and we committed early on that it's impossible to say that you support the arts without actually paying artists.

So it's a stipended position.

Participants come to Vicksburg for six weeks at a time, and they are given a tremendous amount of independence.

And we have kind of stacked the deck in a way that forces visiting artists into the arms of the community.

It's a lot of work, but that work is paying off.

We're gaining a national and international reputation as service providers to the arts community, and that is really, really satisfying.

- Why do you think the arts are so important to a community?

Because they are, and especially to Vicksburg, - It's just a way for people to connect and have something to talk about.

So the diverse groups of people we get to come to some of these Prairie Ronde art gallery events is incredible.

And just whether you love the art or you don't love the art, it's something to talk about, and it's a place to meet your neighbor and just hang out.

Or if it's, you know, sculpture on the street or a mural on the wall outside, it's just something to talk about, and it can be unique to each community and special based on, you know, the makeup of their community.

So I think it's just a community builder, and it's just one of those base things that every community should have.

It's like, if you don't have it, you're just not going to succeed at building a really strong downtown.

- For me, it goes back into that celebration of different modes of thought, and the people who have capacity to do things.

Dialogue is everything.

I study a little bit body language, and we recognize that one of the easiest ways to take on a thorny problem is to do it while you're in a car because you're shoulder to shoulder, and it's non-confrontational.

And we can do similar things where we're kind of contemplating a piece of art where it's just kind of like, what do you think of this?

And it's just that opportunity to create dialogue and to look at things in a different way.

And everybody can celebrate divergent thought and beauty.

And I have to say, so many of our trades friends initially when we started moving people through that space at the mill, were like, I don't know art.

I don't really get what's going on with art.

And to watch that evolution over time, where it goes from that into them kind of in the doorway watching the person work, which then evolved into, man, I really like what you did with color here.

- [Jackie] Yeah.

- It's just, it's just so fun and so interesting to see that evolution of thought - And vice versa.

Yeah, it goes definitely both ways.

- And it's a two-way channel.

- Yeah, totally.

- You're absolutely right.

- Two way channel, yep.

- It's always fun to open somebody's mind like that.

You know, people don't know that they have feelings about something until you're exposed to art or music or theater.

But as we get a little closer, we'll check in with you again, but thank you so much for talking with me here today.

- Oh, thank you.

That was really fun to have this nice chat with you.

We appreciate it.

- What a pleasure.

Thank you so much.

(upbeat music) - I'm Megan Diana, I'm a current Prairie Ronde resident artist.

(upbeat music) So I have done a few of these before, and I have a few pieces that I've already, you know, I'm coming here with, but I have a couple songs where I'm like, oh, I just need to put some french horn on these songs.

You know, that's gonna kind of, that's easing me into this other space of, okay, the big scary idea of there's nothing started on a song, what's gonna come?

I've had a couple residencies where, you know, the express goal was to like, I wanna go to your beautiful spot in Michigan, or I was in Italy or Arizona, all these different places.

And I wanna learn about that environment, and I want to see who I am there, and I wanna see what I feel like or see what I feel I, you know, and try and put those, that information into a song.

So I don't, I don't know what I'm gonna write about, but I'm due diligence of this week of just walking around and reading and listening and seeing things that I like and respond to.

And in May is when I'll start to dig in and start to write some songs about Vicksburg and the mill.

(dramatic music) For me, it's very invigorating, and I want to learn.

I wanna learn what is life like in a town I don't usually live in that's very different from Portland.

I actually, I was an army brat.

So I think it makes a lot of sense when you think about it 'cause I did move around a lot as a kid, and being in new places even for, you know, a week or a weekend or there's also something different about the pace of being in a new place for five weeks, and I kind of have this home, and I have to settle in and really kind of for a moment feel what it's like to live here and try and soak up, you know, what the flavor is here.

Or you know, what's the pace?

What do people like and I wanna learn.

I wanna meet them.

My eternal journey through songwriting has always been like, what am, is discovering more with every song who I am, which is a very multilayered person as every human is, but especially as a woman in this world, as an artist who's been independent and solo in many parts of her life for a long time.

What does that mean?

I'm just always unpacking the layers as they also, you know, over time just, they keep building through, you know, the living life.

The longer I go on.

You also start to think about how can I tell more of the story of what my music sounds like visually?

What do I look like on stage?

What are my visuals and how do I make every part of telling the story, of my sound and my songs artful?

You know, this is the part of the evolution of the longer I have been a songwriter, I feel like after a solid decade of truly writing my songs, arranging them, all that stuff and evolving as a person who has learned how to, you know, really be in a recording studio and get what I want out of it.

I feel like I finally am hitting my stride on what my sound is and what, again, all those other elements that I was talking about.

Like, you learn, oh, what does Megan Diana really sound like if she's not in the choir or she's not singing with this jazz group, and she's not doing that other gig where you're supposed to kind of sound like somebody else.

You know, my music is where I'm discovering myself and my voice literally, figuratively all the time.

♪ And now I'm writing a song ♪ (upbeat music) I feel like the arts are like the heartbeat of a community because, again, yes, it does bring everybody together, but it makes them feel things.

It can be kind of like, sometimes it's weird.

I think anything that takes you out of your everyday little routine of I'm going to work, I'm doing my, doing the things that just, you know, I'm on the program.

I think the arts make us stop and take a moment to appreciate beauty, to connect with somebody else, to make us think for a second about something in their life.

It just, it makes them be human.

We came here last night and there was a music show, and I could see that the musician on stage was just kind of blown away with how many people came to support her.

And I love watching an audience witness something.

As a performer too, when I see people look at each other, you know, the performer, the musician is saying something about like, oh, this is a love song, or this is a song about a breakup, or this is a song about being a bad mother.

You know, when she said that, like the three ladies next to me were like, yeah, that's.

You know, like when I see people's reacting and connecting with somebody making art in front of them, it's like this reflection back for people that don't know how to get up on stage and sing a song about a tough part of their life.

It makes everybody feel more seen to know that everybody else is going through tough times and good times and makes people feel alive.

That's why.

(upbeat music) - My name is Melissa Webb, and I am the current Prairie Ronde artist resident in the big Vicksburg mill.

(upbeat music) I work in textile.

My schooling is in fiber, fiber art, and I do large scale installations that respond to specific spaces that their history and the architecture in it with a fondness for decaying properties.

And I integrate textile and video and projection in these spaces.

I'm really interested in juxtaposing textile and its softness with industrial, you know, brick, steel, large space versus the intimate space of the domestic space.

Very sort of masculine, hard, cold versus like a soft, feminine feel to it.

And I work with imagery around nature and nature taking back a space and growing over a space.

And so I imitate, and I mimic that feeling and that aesthetic through my textile work.

My way of working does lend itself to being able to make smaller objects that I situate in the space.

You know, I'll be also doing a lot of filming in the mill, around the mill, in the area and making layered video that I'll then project.

So projection takes up a lot of space.

It engages a lot of space.

The person who is doing this whole project is very connected to that space specifically, historically through his family, and this town, and wants to make it so that it does not fall into the earth and wants to celebrate it.

And it's very similar to how I think about my work where I'm using things that were abandoned, neglected, given very little value and discarded and sort of revivifying them and using them in the work.

So specifically textiles that are from the 30s through the 50s or 60s generally that were crocheted for domestic spaces like doilies and tablecloths and bedspreads and things like that.

So usually cotton, which is another through line 'cause we're talking about cotton rag paper that was made in the mill.

So I document those things and try to figure out who made them.

And sometimes you can't figure out who made them because they're just being sold by a reseller.

But other times you get them from a family, say at an estate sale where someone has passed, and then you actually have a idea about the maker, usually a woman, who I would like to celebrate all of these makers in the same kind of way that they're celebrating this building and the history, and the people that worked in it.

So I do take donations of textiles that were made in the past and that I'm sort of revivifying, and those textiles often resemble, I like to point out how they really do resemble patterns in nature.

So that's the connection there between the domestic and the natural and the industrial is that these, like if you look at a doily, you know, a lot of these patterns are natural like flowers or leaves and things like that were crocheted into these objects and, you know, passed down and passed down.

So I am putting them back in a situation where they, really together they reflect the natural world as far as like a feeling of overgrowth.

When I was in grade school, I knew that I wanted to be an artist, and I was very creative, but everything was very focused on drawing and painting.

And it's funny 'cause I knew that what I wanted to do.

I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I actually hated drawing and painting.

But then I went to Maryland Institute College of Art to study and then got immediately into sculpture, immediately into found objects, then just gravitated right to fiber because the professors in that major were amazing women.

You know, fiber art really lends itself to existing materials.

Like, whereas maybe with clay you would be taking something that has no definition and no identity except, well, clay has a wonderful history, and there's a lot there, but like, you're taking something and making something from scratch.

But you know, with textile a lot of times, you know, there is a lot of, you know, thinking about where something has been and what it means in society.

And so I really gravitated right to that.

I see my way of working as a way of connecting to people.

I like to really engage people for as long as I can.

And that's part of the sort of delivery of the work that I do is that the people will stay for a long time and really engage in the space, and there's a lot to look at.

So I just love seeing people see my work, and then I love when they talk to me about it and tell me what they see.

And that always just feeds into the next thing and just sort of adds to what I feel about the work too.

So it's the interaction with people, but it's also the making, and just the therapeutic nature of just like crocheting or I'm actually learning macrame right now.

And then also just engaging with the space.

There's not really any part of it that I don't like.

I love every part of it, and I kind of feel like it's never done, you know?

It just keeps going.

The ideas keep going.

(upbeat music) - I'm from England, London originally, but I lived most of my adult life in Venezuela, South America.

Basically I'm a painter.

Oil on canvas.

It's just, it's a very ancient medium.

It's a very rich medium.

There's so much to explore with it.

I learned over time that if I got stuck on a painting, it was sometimes useful to sort of go to sleep on it and often kind of ideas would occur, you know, let your unconscious mind do a bit of the work rather than trying to force it so much.

Artists get asked a lot what the message is.

But I would say that there was, there's an English curator, art historian who just made this really useful observation about that is that artists don't necessarily kind of identify this is what I want to say.

You're moved more by a compulsion.

So there's something about this image here, there was something about that figure and that color that it's repeated in quite a lot of paintings or at least they start out that way just because I, you get sort of fixated on that figure and that color, and something about me keeps making me want to come back, and that's my starting point.

But it's not because I want to say blah, blah blah blah, blah.

Just this thing is keeps bugging me.

And so it's a way of working through that for sure.

Yeah, it's kind of more obsessive than that.

And I always had this idea that the sort of painting that I was interested in, Matisse, the Fauvists, that you couldn't really paint like that in England because it's very gray.

It's very sort of rainy.

And also there's a sort of tradition of painters or the ones that I was looking at of going south and how that sort of really was a kind of key moment in their development as painters.

So I had this idea that I was looking for light.

When I ended up going to Venezuela, we ended up living in the southeast of the country in an industrial city.

I don't think you could get any more light than that 'cause it's quite near the equator.

And at the same time I was reading a lot of feminist art history, which was quite important at the end of the 70s with the feminist movement.

And I did have a sort of conflict with that, with the representation of the female figure, but identifying with it at the same time as identifying with the painter.

So there was definitely that kind of conflict inherent in the sort of things that I felt that I could work with.

And so my way of dealing with that was actually to leave the human figure out for a long, long time, which was why I was looking at landscapes and the built environment, which is a manifestation of people, but in a different way.

Most of the paintings that are here is that they were about the Venezuelan migration, which has just been quite dramatic over the last few years.

It's now around 7 million people out of a population that was maybe maximum 30 million.

So it's a lot of people, and I suppose it does kind of hit you harder when you see people and places that are familiar to you.

So the Venezuela migration has been going on since the year 2000 with these political changes that have been going on.

So a lot of young people went abroad 'cause there were some protests that were getting kind of really cracked down upon, putting, I mean, young people were getting killed, put in prison, so anybody who could get their kids out of the country did.

And then we left in 2016.

But then after that, the migration has been increasingly more desperate.

I mean, people leave on foot, you know, these incredibly, sorry, I can only think of the word in Spanish, but you know, really difficult journeys just with what you've got on your back, carrying kids, just whatever, just because you can't get enough to eat.

And so a lot of those people cross over the border to Columbia.

A lot of the people that cross over have to wade over these rivers.

But it's also what you see in, I don't, there was a documentary the other day about the Darién Gap, which is between Columbia and Panama, and it's a very sort of daunting place to have to walk through.

So a lot of those images come from these river crossings where people are just, you know, carrying everything on their heads.

It's something that I've always done.

We always did art workshops in the industries that I worked in, in Venezuela.

And over time through community work, we developed this kind of mapping project.

And a lot of it is motivated by ecological concerns and wanting to kind of get that conversation started with kids.

Basically what we do is sort of do a walkabout of an area.

Usually I try and make it the people's neighborhoods so that we're looking at the place that we actually live in.

And then we come back and make these big collective paintings.

As you can see, they're enormous.

So it's kind of a size that most people won't have worked on.

For them it will just be about, you know, splashing some paint around and trying that out, you know, in a medium that they probably wouldn't have used before.

But they're just learning about not, you know, boundaries, working with somebody else next to me and not spilling on their work.

The great thing at the end is that we lift up this collective painting, and they can see how everything actually comes together in a whole map.

And that's like I say, like the beginning of a conversation so that our environment isn't just a given.

It's not just like it was always like this, and it's always going to be like this.

We can actually participate and decide to, you know, how we want things to be, which I think is really, really important with the ecological crisis that we have.

We came here from Venezuela about seven years ago, and I discovered the Prairie Ronde Residency in an online news item and sort of, wow, that's near.

I gotta go and find out about this.

And did the residency at the end of 2018, when they hadn't even really started any work on the building.

But since I live locally, it's been a sort of ongoing relationship, and I sort of make this joke that I just declared myself a permanent resident.

So yeah, been very grateful to have the space and to be able to carry on like this.

Just for me, art has been so important in my life.

It's sort of, you know, here's this cool thing that's just been really important.

It's been kind of the backbone of my life, so have a try.

(soothing music) - [Kim] Be sure to tune in next week when we learn even more about the history and renovation efforts at the Mill at Vicksburg.

(soothing music) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(upbeat music)