Earth/Work: Artists & Sustainable Living feat. Matthew + Tia Regier

Saturday, March 11, 2023 from 2:00-3:00 PM

Earth/Work is a conversation series featuring individuals creating sustainable lives—radically reimagining our connection and use of our planet. Audiences will hear short, informal presentations about what led each speaker to embark on their creative paths and what keeps them moving forward. Participation, discussion, and questions encouraged.

The first speakers of the series are Matthew and Tia Regier. Both from farming backgrounds, the Regiers live in Matfield Green, Kansas. In 2019, they acquired possession of an old elementary school after a conversation with Wes Jackson of The Land Institute and Robert Jensen of Third Coast Activist Resource Center. Third Coast purchased the building and the Regiers began initial renovations and co-founded a new organization, The School for Rural Culture and Creativity, now a 501(c)(3) organization.

The vision of The School is not to create economic opportunities but to ask what cultural practices are necessary to generate the kinds of rural communities that we think are critical for our future on the land. The School thinks that art has a role to play in this process of regenerative culture-making if it is enfolded into a more expansive vision of communal work, ritual and celebration. In this more integrative vision, the arts have the power to engage the imagination. As Wendell Berry says: “To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. . . As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.”

For more information about the activities and developments of The School, visit schoolforruralculture.org. Matthew is also an artist and printmaker making linocuts and monotypes that respond directly to his impressions and memories of the prairie. His work can be found at the printmaking studio at The School for Rural Culture and Creativity and online at matthewregier.com.

EARTH/WORK SPEAKERS

March 11 – Matthew and Tia Regier of Matfield Green, Kansas

March 25 – Carl Stafford of My Region Wins!

April 8 – Brooke Salvaggio of Urbavore Farm and Compost Collective

April 22 – Ryan Tenney of Sankara Farm

Earth/Work: Artists & Sustainable Living is organized by Elizabeth Stehling Snell in partnership with the Charlotte Street Foundation.