Making in the Ozarks has often taken place in, and been about, the home. Ozark Home posits that makers draw upon fine craft, ingenuity, and ancestral traditions to create art contemporary to their time and place, with imbued meaning around family, community, memory, and everyday life. False assumptions still persist, though, about a lack of a serious and impactful aesthetic culture that, instead, must be imported into the region by the worldly elite. 
 
This exhibition—occurring both here through the works of contemporary artists and in its archival form at Shiloh Museum of Ozark History—argues that this region’s makers have always infused beauty, critical dialog, and skill into objects and domestic spaces. At the Medium, artists’ topics include life in rural communities, isolation, gender norms, racism, gentrification, family ties, objects of cultural importance, transnationalism, and LGBTQAI+ identity, just to name a few issues that affect our daily lives in the Ozarks and beyond. 
 
Ozark Home celebrates art for and about the domestic and social spheres, but also interrogates gaps and erasures in our histories while exposing persisting inequities. For instance, African Americans were also enslaved here, but after the Civil War they created vibrant communities that went on to be featured in The Motorist Green Book around the 1940’s. As additional cultures moved into the area, especially the Latiné and Asian American and Pacific Islander populations in the mid-late twentieth century, diverse practices and histories carved out deeper and broader aspects of what the Ozarks are. When back-to-the-landers flocked from urban centers starting in the 1960s, this new generation helped preserve methods from old timers while modeling intentional community care. Some cities began fostering burgeoning LGBTQAI+ communities. While material cultures from marginalized groups are still mostly kept within homes, contemporary artists living here reflect the realities of layered identities in a geographically overlooked but rapidly changing region. While this exhibition will not be able to do these stories justice, it presents a broad look at the Ozark home through lenses of memories, communities, domestic making, material objects, and embodied presence.

Rated one of the top three biggest exhibition of the year in Northwest Arkansas:
https://www.nwaonline.com/news/2023/dec/31/2023-in-review-april-wallace-looks-back-at/