Welcome to the Public Image! My name is Kerry, and I interview artists all across the Rust Belt -- from major cities like Chicago and Detroit, to smaller focal points like Fort Wayne and South Bend.
When I first became involved in the art scenes spanning from Chicago to Fort Wayne, I was very surprised by how deeply interconnected it all was. Everybody knows everyone, in some form or another. I always assumed that musicians, writers, painters, and so forth stuck to their respective divisions and didn’t overlap too often. While this is true some of the time, there is always a great amount of intermixing and cross-contamination.
With this blog, I aim to give artists a platform to tell their own stories with as much freedom and leniency as they want or need. The perennial issue for every artist is gaining recognition and finding the right connections to put their ideas into effect. Maintaining these connections is also a completely separate endeavor, too. The number of connections that an artist is able to make, and the quality of these connections, can make or break a new project. An absence of these things can halt it in its tracks before it comes to fruition at all. The Public Image will be a place where, at the very least, there is permanent and documented proof of the existence of these projects.
There is something special, and very rare, about finding a true artist. There is some kind of recipe -- including social influences, environment, culture, innate tendency, and internal discipline -- that join together to create them. Not everybody is born to be one. I am particularly fascinated with the art that this area of the country has produced. How it has impacted the congenital artist, and how its history still manifests itself in younger minds.
If you are also a Rust Belt artist either hoping to connect or commiserate, or just a curious dabbler, stay tuned for future posts.
