Background Report - Arizona Town Hall

Matthew Moore is a fourth generation farmer whose land and life is quickly being overcome
by suburban sprawl. He creates large site-specific earthworks on and around his family’s
land, which highlight the grounds on which the urban and rural collide and compete. Moore
also works with video and installation art, addressing issues of ecological, cultural, and
economical sustainability revealed through his artistic narrative regarding the potential loss
of the romanticized American farm. Moore’s work is a part of a traveling show about the
contemporary American suburb for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is being
curated with the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Artist Statement: I am the last of four generations to farm my family’s land. Within five
years, my home (this land) will transform into suburbia. As a farmer and an artist, I display
the realities of this transition in order to rationalize and document my displacement from the
land on which I was raised. The trials and tribulations of American agriculture, its roles in
contemporary globalization, and its questionable ecological practices create a foundation for
my explorations. By displaying the past and future of the farm, I have used our land to
explore similarities between commercial agriculture and suburbia, which reveal their social,
cultural, and economic impacts locally, nationally, and internationally. Documenting the
reality of land and appetite from agriculture to suburbia, the decisions of our society reveal
consumer models that make us disobedient to our relationship with land and time. By
exhibiting this theater of evolution and loss, I have entered a historical dialogue of
displacement that reveals my part (in agriculture) in the transformation of my family’s land
and identity. Through my artwork, I look at these dilemmas that reveal the impact of the
American dream on our society and the land as we transition towards a post agrarian nation.
Alberto Rios is a Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, and Katherine C. Turner
Endowed Chair in English. He is the author of ten books and chapbooks of poetry,
three collections of short stories, and a memoir. His books of poems include, most recently,
The Dangerous Shirt, along with The Theater of Night, winner of the 2007 PEN/Beyond
Margins Award, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, finalist for the National Book
Award, Teodoro Luna’s Two Kisses, The Lime Orchard Woman, The Warrington Poems, Five
Indiscretions, and Whispering to Fool the Wind, which won the Walt Whitman Award. His
three collections of short stories are, most recently, The Curtain of Trees, along with Pig
Cookies and The Iguana Killer, which won the first Western States Book Award for Fiction,
judged by Robert Penn Warren. His memoir about growing up on the Mexico-Arizona
border, called Capirotada, won the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award and was designated
the OneBookArizona choice for 2009. Rios is the recipient of the Western Literature
Association Distinguished Achievement Award, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award,
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, six Pushcart Prizes in
both poetry and fiction, and inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, as well as
over 250 other national and international literary anthologies. His work is regularly taught
and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music.
Byron Wolfe is the David W. and Helen E.F. Lantis University Professor of Communication
Design at California State University, Chico. Through photography and digital imagery,
he reflects his deep and abiding interest in ideas about place, history, time, perception,
representation, and personal experience. His work is the permanent collection of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Center for
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