Jon Kay
Connecting Community, Culture, and Arts
~ by Bob Gustin
Jon Kay with Bill Root’ s model of his boyhood home. photo by Bob Gustin
Jon Kay thinks a lot about community, culture, aging, arts, and the inevitable connections between them.
As director of Traditional Arts Indiana, the Nashville resident has interviewed African drum makers, woodworkers, hoop net makers, blacksmiths, weavers, musicians, and dancers, among countless others. For his latest project, he is focused on artists in an 11-county region, including Brown County.
“ The arts are the soul of a community or group,” he said, affecting the quality of place, quality of life, quality of a community.
But the modern world has sold our soul in so many ways, he said, and TAI is working to identify people who are striving to be“ cultural hubs” and supporting them to make it easier for folk arts to survive and spread. Folk artists are“ hidden in plain sight” in many communities.
“ It’ s about the past,” he said,“ but it’ s just as much about our investment in the future and on whether we want a world based on capitalism or one based on community, family, and cultural practices that connect people to the past and the future. It’ s about a continuity of self.”
Traditional folk arts, he said, have two realms. One axis comes from the past and goes to the future. The other is about what communities and groups do in social situations, using art to connect with others and support them emotionally, communally, and physically.
A recent national study ranked Indiana near the bottom— 46 th out of the 50 states— for quality of life among older adults.
Brown County is distinctive because it has the oldest average age in the state. The county is what social scientists call a“ naturally occurring retirement community,” with resources such as the public library and the YMCA and its“ Silver Sneakers” exercise program to support it.
But three plagues of aging are isolation, boredom, and feelings of hopelessness, he said.
“ Folk arts are an antidote to all three,” Kay said.“ People want to share.”
The survey of aging folk artists, now in a factfinding phase, is scheduled to begin this fall, and is designed to find elders skilled in traditional crafts, music, or other areas and pair them with other older adults to improve the quality of life for all involved. Counties included in the survey are Brown, Orange, Greene, Martin, Daviess, Crawford, Washington, Dubois, Monroe, Owen, and Lawrence, an area Kay calls the“ uplands.” Folklorists will be assigned to survey each county.
20 Our Brown County • July / August 2018