Today we have the opportunity to speak with Xavier Tavera, a photographer who builds deep, longterm relationships with communities and creates work that expresses the humanity, and the historical currents, within the complexities of contemporary Latinx culture.

Please find show notes and a transcript on this conversation's page on High Visibility.

After moving from Mexico City to the United States, Xavier learned what it felt like to be part of a subculture -- the immigrant community. Being subjected to alienation has transformed the focus of his photographs to share the lives of those who are marginalized. Images have offered insight into the diversity of numerous communities and given a voice to those who are often invisible.

Xavier has shown his work extensively in the Twin Cities, and nationally and internationally including Germany, Scotland, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay and China. His work is part of the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Plains Art Museum, Minnesota Museum of American Art, Minnesota History Center, and the Weisman Art Museum. He is a recipient of the McKnight fellowship, Jerome Travel award, Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and a Bronica scholarship.

Along the way in this conversation, we learn more about how Xavier came to photography, and his sense of the philosophical questions within the act of taking a picture – and we get to learn more about the town of Crookston, Minnesota, with which he’s had a decades long relationship. We also discuss his evolving Latinx in the Rural Midwest project, in particular his time with charro community and migrant dairy workers across this region.

In this wide-ranging conversation, Xavier also shares the work of Grupo Soap del Corazón, a dynamic, ever-evolving Latinx art collective he co-founded with Dougie Padilla. The exhibition La Línea: 22 Years of Grupo Soap del Corazón is currently on view at the Plains Art Museum through August 13, 2022.

High Visibility is an initiative of Art of the Rural and Plains Art Museum. Gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of this work.

We are grateful to share Dyani White Hawk and Jovan C. Speller taking part in a podcast format we are calling The Long Conversation -- one that offers folks the chance to cultivate a thread of ideas and relationships without the presence of an interviewer

Please find extensive show notes, transcripts, and links on the episode site.

Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a visual artist and independent curator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Most recently, her work was included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, and also presented as a major solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Dyani also previously served as Gallery Director and Curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis.

Jovan C. Speller is a multidisciplinary artist based in Minnesota. She has received a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship and the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Minnesota Art Prize. Her installation In Lottie’s Living Room was featured in the High Visibility Exhibtion at the Plains Art Museum, and her exhibition Nurturing, and Other Rituals of Protection was recently presented by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

This Long Conversation was an experiment, one born from a desire to share with a wider audience what might happen when these two friends and collaborators had the space to relax into a conversation about life, art, family, land, and whichever topics and contexts emerged through that flow.

In the time that transpires here, we hear both artists at a point of transition between exhibitions -- with major projects ahead -- reflecting on how the central presence of Black and Native women help us understand the dimensions of the cultural moment we all are walking through.

Their time together opens with the power of intergenerational knowledge in their collaborative work Choosing Home, and expands to consider Jovan’s time spent with relatives in rural North Carolina learning family history, and Dyani’s time with Native women across the continent who speak the languages of their people. Rooted in these experiences, the conversation asks how artists, institutions, and communities can better honor and more deeply support the cultural histories and lived experiences that animate these connections.

Land is a constant presence and relational force throughout, ground on which we’re left with a deeper understanding of these artists’ creative practice but also with a sense of the kind of futures we could all inhabit.

High Visibility is an initiative of Art of the Rural and Plains Art Museum. Gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for their support of this work.

High Visibility is a podcast on arts, culture, and ideas in rural America and Indian Country produced by Art of the Rural and Plains Art Museum, a part of a longterm collaboration of exhibitions, publications, and events that share the richly divergent stories, experiences, and visions of folks across the continent. This episode is hosted by Matthew Fluharty, organizing curator of High Visibility.

Today’s guest is Erika Nelson, an independent artist and educator whose work asks provocative questions on the place of contemporary art in the public realm, particularly in rural spaces. Erika's work can be followed on Facebook and Instagram.

While living in a vehicle for two years, she traveled the nooks and crannies of the United States seeking out the odd and unusual, and gathering stories of people who built Outsider Art Environments and Roadside Vernacular Architecture

Erika developed her own traveling roadside attraction and museum -- The World's Largest Collection of the World's Smallest Versions of the World's Largest Things, and she settled in Lucas, Kansas in a house adjacent to S.P. Dinsmoor's visionary folk art site The Garden of Eden.

Her work manifests itself in a series of interesting, innovative, engaging public art projects that incorporate art into everyday experience.

Through her travels, she has written a Graduate thesis titled Driving Around Looking at Big Things While Thinking About Spam, prepared a full meal utilizing foil and her automobile's radiator and heat manifold, stood on a sideshow performer lying on a bed of nails with a genuine Kansas Cowboy at the last functioning 10-in-1 sideshow in Coney Island, found out whatThe Thing is in southern Arizona, drunk free ice water at Wall Drug, eaten Rocky Mountain Oysters, bought a Genuine Walnut Bowl from somewhere along I-70, seen Rock City, and been stuck in a traffic jam in Branson in front of Yakov Smirnof.

Erika's piece Gremlin Cache was featured in the recent High Visibility exhibition at Plains Art Museum.

Our conversation dwells on the communities, places, and artworks that tell the story of this journey. Along the way, Erika shares a ton of wisdom on what life in a small town in Kansas can teach us about how we live, work, and create across difference.

This conversation was recorded in late summer, in that beautiful time of year, as Erika describes, when a harvest of ripe tomatoes leaves everyone ready to share the abundance with their neighbors.

Artist photograph above by John Noltner for A Peace of My Mind: American Stories.