Matt Fluharty’s childhood experience of being raised on a farm in Appalachia led him to create a blog call “Art of the Rural.” KSMQ Public TV’s program Off 90 featured the work of Art of the Rural. As a writer, Fluharty wanted to “tell stories from rural places.” Art of the Rural eventually became a nonprofit and Fluharty serves as the Executive Director. After attending a conference in Minneapolis, he was looking for a change and discovered Winona when he stopped for a coffee break on his way back to St. Louis. He and his family moved to Winona in 2014. Art of the Rural’s work along the upper Mississippi River corridor expresses itself in building community among people of urban and rural communities. At a conference of cohorts that took place in the last year, a “state wide community across urban and rural space began to come together.
Fluharty is also an artist and his project “Local Archive,” documents the way rural and urban communities are documented in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal in comparison to rural newspapers. Too often, the media portrays rural places as “static” but Fluharty believes both rural and urban places are changing. He wants to “honor that change and make it visible.”