Community-Based Art and Rural Placemaking at Appalshop

This paper focuses on Appalshop, a rural media, arts and education center located in Letcher County, Kentucky. The region was targeted by Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, and numerous artists traveled there to make work that would raise awareness and support revitalization efforts. Yet many rural dwellers experienced this as an appropriation of their stories by cultural elites. Appalshop was founded in 1969 as something of an antidote. Its goal has been to encourage community participation and offer economic alternatives within a region that has traditionally depended on coal for jobs. Its members have produced hundreds of films about the everyday lives of residents in the area, focusing on a wide range of subjects, including coal mining, farming, craft work, labor strikes, musicians, and environmental activism. Along with support for filmmaking and media production, it has organized music and storytelling festivals, theatre performances, and a rural-urban exchange program. This paper examines a number of these practices as forms of creative placemaking, and looks at them in the context of stark social divides between urban and rural places. Letcher County exemplifies many aspects of white rural poverty in the US: hit by the decline of coal, and the opioid crisis, the majority of residents voted to elect Trump. This paper asks: how do rural placemaking projects approach economic development in post-industrial settings? And in the face of ideological division and distrust of so-called ‘cultural elites,’ what opportunities can such projects offer to rural communities?