Exploring the complexities of space and place are the foundations of my Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio Fellowship project The Midwest is Easy to See. This digital exhibition features a series of artworks from the University of Iowa’s Stanley Museum of Art amid, and in dialogue with, the spaces of Iowa – a US-American, settler-colonial state. These spaces are not defined by their physical topography, but by the physical convergence of people, objects, and ideas. How can these artworks revise, and subsequently create, new spaces for communities and ideas to exist? How can these spaces revise, and subsequently create, new understandings of the art objects that have come to reside in the state’s collection of art?

Imaging or Imagining? Encountering Space in the Midwest

A potential Iowa transplant once asked me if careers in “international relations” or “global migration” existed in Iowa. Were they asking if trans-national webs of contemporary life were truly absent in Iowa? Or if “the people” (a moniker technically ambiguous but dripping with unnamed assumptions of socioeconomic and racial identities) did nothing to acknowledge its presence?

I responded with a disjointed “something” about industrial agriculture, the meatpacking industry and the varied histories of immigration in the Midwest – but I was stuck on the question. What proof were they looking for in my answer? As vagaries, they knew about international agricultural markets and its pervasive migrant labor abuse. However, that “knowing” was seemingly inadequate in its ability to craft further understanding. What did they need to expand their understanding of material realities within the spaces of “Iowa?”

Grounding Thoughts & Placing Ideas

Agricultural production and processing are defined by an ongoing history of human rights, labor and environmental abuse. Midwestern agriculture has long buttressed cultural visions of “wholesome” European immigrant family farms, which further comprise the “heartland” or “breadbasket” that sustains the United States of America. However, the large-scale industrial plants, confined operations and ever faster processing lines are indicative of something that cannot be explained by small-scale, (white and European) family operations. The conflict between the material reality, and ideologies of work and ethnic identity converge within the architectural junctures of industrial agricultural spaces. While contemporary agriculture is sustained by the earth, it modifies its surface towards deleterious ends. How do these agricultural constructions mark the fraught and changing relationships between human and environment? Industrial process and human experience?

Beverly Pepper’s sculpture Omega (1974) was built during an era when the artist was exploring the inventive possibilities of the earth as a creator. What if monumental sculpture was understood as the earth’s assemblage rather than an object that merely sat upon its surface? Pepper’s choice in medium – cor-ten steel  – is indicative of this interest. Originally an industrial material, Pepper pursued its artistic use because it oxidizes in response to the natural environment. The sculpture is constructed according to Pepper’s design, but further created by the natural environment as it develops variable patterns and shades of rust-like patina. The sculpture is continually produced; always exceeding a single attribution of “industrial” or “natural” or “artistic” fabrication. Its process of creation cannot be divorced from the details of its site-specific history, and yet it seems to transcend the bounds of any one human category. Rather than viewing Omega within the grassy knolls of a sculpture park or university courtyard, how would it engage the architecture of industrial agriculture?

(Repeat) Agricultural production and processing are defined by an ongoing history of human rights, labor and environmental abuse. Midwestern agriculture has long buttressed cultural visions of “wholesome” European immigrant family farms, which further comprise the “heartland” or “breadbasket” that sustains the United States of America. However, the large-scale industrial plants, confined operations and ever faster processing lines are indicative of something that cannot be explained by small-scale, (white and European) family operations. The conflict between the material reality, and ideologies of work and ethnic identity converge within the architectural junctures of industrial agricultural spaces. While contemporary agriculture is sustained by the earth, it modifies its surface towards deleterious ends. How do these agricultural constructions mark the fraught and changing relationships between human and environment? Industrial process and human experience?

-Dominic Dongilli