When the Biennale enters a small town: between the locality and globality of art

In the window of a café in Medina, New York, a brass easel holds a painting: two hummingbirds kissing a bouquet of flowers. Next to it are dragons drawn with colored gel pens entwined with a yin-yang symbol, and a hand-painted Christmas ornament. This is a temporary exhibition curated by artist Amy Mayne to accompany the first Medina Triennial. Funded by the New York Power Authority and the New York State Canal Corporation, the triennial invited 39 artists and groups from five continents to this post-industrial canal town of just 5,800 residents, to mix and coexist with the local population.

While waiting in line for coffee, I saw a political cartoon by Arthur Barnes, titled "Stop STAMP," depicting a data center as a Trojan horse labeled with "low taxes," "clean energy," "economic growth," and "jobs." On the drive from Buffalo Airport, I had seen lawn signs opposing STAMP (Science and Technology Advanced Manufacturing Park)—a development being built on nearby Indigenous land. Later, I discovered that Barnes is also a landscape painter, considered a pillar of the local art community. After meeting him, I began to see his idyllic historical paintings of Medina on the town's building facades.

Barnes did not participate in the triennial. In fact, no artist born or living in Medina was exhibited. "I'm glad art is being brought in, but there's not much support for local artists," he told me. "We welcome visitors," said producer Rhonda Parker, who has lived in Medina intermittently throughout her life. But regarding the triennial's theme of "care"—"Everything That Sustains Us"—she felt: "The art offered might not be very accessible to ordinary townspeople." As she spoke, the party I had just left—across the street in the former auto repair shop, now the triennial center, with its guest list, cocktails, and international flair—felt like it was from another planet.

To be fair, the exhibition itself was exquisite. Besides the two gallery spaces in the center, works were scattered across the four-kilometer-wide town, including in churches, parks, the YMCA, a hospital, and an abandoned high school. Many pieces used locally gathered plants, stones, and scrap metal, forming a constellation of anti-monuments. But some works, such as those by Lina Lapelytė, Harun Farocki, and Alice Bucknell, seemed to anchor the triennial more to other international exhibitions and cultural power centers than to the town's material conditions. The conceptual foundation of the exhibition—Mierle Laderman Ukeles' "Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!"—is so closely tied to New York City (Ukeles remains the artist-in-residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation) that it felt incongruous playing on the wall of a rural high school.Coincidentally, on the same weekend in Ridgefield, Connecticut, another periodic exhibition of similar scale opened: the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum’s decennial exhibition. Titled I Am Everything Around Me, it explores, like the Medellín Triennial, the relationship between the individual and society, citizens, and the natural environment. Ridgefield is a commuter town with a population of 25,000, wealthier than Medellín; it has its own art museum, the Aldrich, and the exhibition draws funding from more typical art-world sources (foundations, patrons). The curators at the museum took the opposite approach: artists must reside within the state to be included.

This criterion naturally does not exclude artists who live in Connecticut but maintain ties to major art hubs, such as Dominic Chambers, Julia Wachtel, Tammy Nguyen, and Aki Sasamoto, who bring internationally exhibited paintings, artists’ books, and kinetic sculpture. But the criterion also ensures that hyperlocal histories are highlighted—for example, the zines and prints of Storr’s artist Emily Larned, a "lifetime resident" of Connecticut, about K.D. Codish, a feminist theater director who became the training education supervisor of the New Haven Police Department in the 1990s and introduced progressive teaching techniques to the new recruit academy.

Still, I missed the feeling of browsing paintings and drawings in that rough, temporary exhibition in Medellín—the kind of "strangeness… which, on closer examination, may turn out to be unexpectedly familiar" that Lucy Lippard describes in The Lure of the Local (1997), making so-called regional art especially "interesting and energetic." What the decennial did not convey to me was a sense of local identity. "The biggest problem in Connecticut is being too close to New York City," Larned said on the phone. "When you're in the shadow of a big city, there's an understanding that if you're serious about art, you have to go to the big city. With that mindset, it's hard to invest locally." She and another Storr's exhibitor, Enrique Figueredo, both used "anti-big-city" to describe their locality. "I rarely have studio visits here, compared to when I was in New York," Figueredo said. He moved to Connecticut only two years ago.

So, what does "local" really mean? Lippard mentions in passing in her book that it is partly about class. She compares someone who has just moved to Maine to work in a shipyard (who will soon be considered a local) with someone who has summered in Maine for a lifetime (who will always be seen as "from away"). Thus, the ambiguous nature of cultural labor also enters the equation.As anthropologist Arjun Appadurai writes in Modernity at Large (1996), locality—"as a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community"—is fragile and ephemeral, requiring maintenance through rituals, especially in a world of "deterritorialization, diaspora, and transnationalism" that we now take for granted. The acts of maintenance, or what Appadurai calls "rites of passage," can include rituals such as "naming and shaving, scarring and segregation, circumcision and deprivation," aimed at inscribing locality onto individuals. We rarely talk about artistic labor as a rite of passage into a community (perhaps because it is less extreme and less bodily). What if we did? Perhaps we would then rely less on artists' biographies, the genealogies of their materials, or the affect that curators and stakeholders claim for a certain location, and instead rely on something else—perhaps the integrity of the art, or its intensity—to decide who is qualified to earn a place in this small town.