Rural Settings have not always been recognized for their contributions to the development of contemporary artistic practices. This meticulously researched and comprehensive anthology provides a detailed overview that rural artists have made to the arts in Canada and especially on the West Coast.. 

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For much of modern art history, the rural has existed as a kind of aesthetic periphery—a space of retreat, nostalgia, or thematic raw material for urban-based movements. In canonical narratives, it has served primarily as the backdrop against which the drama of modernity unfolds: the provincial foil to the cosmopolitan innovations of the academy, the studio, and the metropolis. A History of Contemporary Artistic Practices in Rural Settings, in seven volumes, challenges this long-standing marginalization by tracing the emergence and evolution of rural art not as a derivative appendix to urban production, but as a historically situated, conceptually robust, and increasingly urgent field of contemporary artistic practice.

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From the late Romantic fascination with the “folk soul” and the sublime natural order, to the Impressionists’ plein air meditations on rural light, to the Expressionists’ violent projections onto the peasantry and landscape, the countryside has functioned as both motif and method in the development of European modernism. Yet these gestures—however radical in formal terms—rarely ceded authorship or agency to rural practitioners themselves. Instead, rurality was aestheticized and instrumentalized, often reduced to a symbolic economy of “authenticity” or “primitivism” in service of avant-garde innovation centered elsewhere.

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This series seeks to invert that relation. Beginning with the overlooked continuities between agrarian craft traditions and early 20th-century artistic experimentation, and culminating in a sustained analysis of rural avant-gardes emerging in diverse global contexts, these volumes document the many ways in which rural artists have both absorbed and redefined the techniques, technologies, and conceptual frameworks of contemporary art.

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Crucially, the project contends with the structural conditions that have rendered rural art “inferior” in the eyes of institutional critique: the uneven distribution of cultural capital, the urban bias of curatorial infrastructure, and the aesthetic hierarchies embedded in critical discourse. By recovering archival materials, interviewing intergenerational artist communities, and examining the geopolitical entanglements of land, labour, and landscape, A History of Contemporary Artistic Practices in Rural Settings reconstructs a fragmented but compelling narrative of persistence, innovation, and resistance.

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Volume I: Romantic and proto-modernist origins of rural aesthetic thought

Volume II:  Rural engagements with early modernism. Group of Five 

Volume III: Effects of Migration, industrialization, and ecological rupture.

Volumes IV and V : Rise of explicitly rural avant-gardes in the postwar and postcolonial periods.

Volume VI : Emergence of eco-art, rural performance, and socially engaged practices

Volume VII: Contemporary studies: transdisciplinary, indigenous, and decolonial methodologies.

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Taken together, these volumes propose a reconfiguration of the art-historical field—one in which rural practices are not defined by belatedness or lack, but by their own strategies of aesthetic urgency, cultural critique, and spatial imagination. They remind us that contemporary art does not only arrive by train, radio signal, or digital feed from the metropolis. Sometimes it walks, sometimes it grows, sometimes it lingers in the field long after the city has gone to sleep.