The Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Project is Marion County, Ohio’s inaugural countwide folklife + oral history program — rooted in a commitment to deep conversation and celebration of Marion County’s underheard histories, cultural traditions, and heritages.

Supported by Ohio Arts Council and Ohio Humanities, Marion Voices, in its 2019-2021 phase, will combine a countywide folk/traditional arts survey, county folklife program planning process, and folklife event series (focused on diverse and underserved cultural and geographic groups and tradition-bearers), with a dynamic oral history project focused on Black life, history, and culture in Marion County, 1960s-Now.

All told, the by 2021, the project’s work will produce a countywide folklife survey, an online roster of Marion County culture-bearers, a countywide folklife program plan and cultural heritage tourism plan, a folklife event series/festival for Marion County, an archive of Black oral histories of life and experience in Marion since the 1960s, two community co-curation cycles culminating in two in-the-community pop-up exhibits on Black life, history, and culture in Marion (each with their own community conversations and events), and, coming in Summer 2021, a culminating community co-curation cycle to design and build a permanent exhibit on Black life in Marion for the Marion County Historical Society’s Heritage Hall.

The Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History Project was developed by Jess Lamar Reece Holler at Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, in collaboration with Marion County educator, activist, and cultural organizer Johnnie Jackson, for the Marion County Historical Society. We work directly with a wide and growing network of community partner organizations, including Marion County’s Black Heritage Council, Logos Christian Ministries, WDIF “TruBlues975” LP-FM, OSU Extension Marion’s Vibrant Communities program, Terradise Nature Center, Marion Public Library, and Marion City Schools.

Our project has a long history — project work will began with a countywide folklife survey across Marion County’s seven villages (Waldo, Prospect, Green Camp, New Bloomington, La Rue, Morral and Caledonia) in Summer 2017; and was nurtured through a planning grant from Ohio Humanities, which allowed us to conduct a year-long community planning process for Marion Voices, with four community meetings in Fall 2018, and a pilot countywide folklife survey and grant-writing and strategic planning in Spring and Summer 2019.

We were delighted to formally launch our Marion Voices work with a community kick-off open house in December 2019.

Our project fieldwork and folk/traditional/cultural arts survey will commence from January-March 2020; with public events, oral history work, and community co-curated exhibit planning to follow in Spring and Summer 2020.

For more, see our project website: marionvoices.org

Please contact us to recommend a tradition-bearer or interviewee; and to collaborate or get involved!

marionvoicesoralhistory@gmail.com

~*~ THE OHIO HERBAL ELDERS PROJECT ~*~
Celebrating Ohio's Diverse Plant Medicine Traditions

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project -- founded in 2018 by herbalist Lily Kunning (Haven Herbs), & directed by documentary artist Jess Lamar Reece Holler (Caledonia Northern Folk Studios) -- is a unique oral history & photography project, devoted to documenting & amplifying both the diverse legacies & vibrant futures of plant medicine practice across Ohio's many regions &
cultural communities.

Originally funded, in 2019, with an ArtSTART grant from the Ohio Arts Council, the Ohio Herbal Elders Project's original incarnation collaborated with Paul Strauss of Equinox Botanicals (Meigs County) to produce a full-length oral history interview, suite of project photography, & a multi-media suite combining photographs with edited audio from Paul's incredible life story.

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project was overjoyed to receive a second lease on life for a comeback as the Ohio Herbal Elders Project 2.0 in 2022: generously funded by an Arts Resilience Initiative Community Project Grant from ArtsMidwest & the Ohio Arts Council, supported, in turn, by American Rescue Plan funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. this funding allowed for an extensive project planning process with the United Plant Savers herbal community, which ultimately resulted in a shortlist of names of Ohio Herbal Elders to interview.

Of that list, five Ohio herbal elders were selected: each representing regions, cultural communities, & modes of medicinal plant stewardship as unique as their stories. The featured "Ohio Herbal Elders" include:

Annie Hsu Griffin -- HSU & Co. (Franklin County)
Rebecca Wood -- Hopewood Holistic Health (Athens County) Peter Borchard -- Companion Plants (Athens County)
Diana Sette -- University Hospitals (Cuyahoga County) Christian Totty -- LOAM Acupuncture (Allen County)

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project 2.0 is installed as a physical print exhibit at United Plant Savers’ Goldenseal Sanctuary (Center for Medicinal Plant Education) from December 2022 thru April 15th, 2022. The Meigs County exhibit — curated & designed by Jess Lamar Reece Holler — showcases the lasting legacy of the Ohio Herbal Elders Project: showing off the incredible work of our five herbal elders & their traditions through interpretive panels, which weave together each practice with an understanding of the importance of understanding Ohio plant medicine practice within a wider framework of decolonization.

The exhibit honors indigenous plant medicine traditions from around the world, along with those stewarded by the indigenous people who hold ancestral relations with the lands now called Ohio. In the spirit of landback, it speculates on a materially healed future: in which traditional plant medicine practitioners can be restored as stewards of their rightful lands & plant allies. may we move towards justice & repair.

For more, or to access the web exhibit: unitedplantsavers.org/ohio-herbal-elders-project

Rights & Crediting:
The Ohio Herbal Elders Project 2.0 & the OHEP exhibit was directed & curated by documentary artist Jess Lamar Reece Holler of Caledonia Northern Folk Studios. All images (c) Jess Lamar Reece Holler, 2022+. All rights reserved.

For more: caledonianorthern.org

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project was made possible thanks to the generous support of a Community Project Grant from the Arts Resiliency Initiative of ArtsMidwest & the Ohio Arts Council, generously funded through a National Endowment for the Arts American Rescue Plan grant.

Originally imagined as an extension of 2021’s MARION COUNTY AMBIENT soundscape library project, CALEDONIA AMBIENT: A Sonic Portrait of a Village Landscape is a soundscape ode to the complex natural, built, historic, & cultural landscape of the Village of Caledonia, Ohio.

Located in the far Eastern corner of Marion County, just under the Tully Township “Panhandle,” on the county line with Morrow County, the region now known as Caledonia was the historic home of the Hopewell people; & became an important hunting ground to Myaamia & Shawnee peoples. In the age of white settler-colonialism, the region also became an important refugee grounds for indigenous communities fleeing land seizures & attempted genocides in points East & along the Great Lakes. The Lenape, Seneca-Cayuga, & Wyandot peoples settled in this region, & helped tend the Sandusky Plains: an ecologically-significant & regionally rare oak savannah prairie formation that covered portions of today’s southern Wyandot, southern Crawford, & much of northern & north-central Marion County.

CALEDONIA AMBIENT combines soundscape recordings from downtown Caledonia’s historic — & revitalizing — Public Square (including from Caledonia’s 1897 Temple & Masonic Block Buildings, listed to the National Register of Historic Places in 2021) with recordings from public & community events on the Public Square, & along the Whetstone River: including at Terradise Nature Center, the historic home of significant Caledonia artists, historians, & conservationists Trella & Ray Romine.

CALEDONIA AMBIENT is a project of immense personal signficance to the artist, whose family maintained a grocery store — Reece’s Market — on Caledonia’s historic Public Square from the 1930s through 2010; & who is now working to restore & rehabilitate the Temple & Masonic Block for new public uses.

CALEDONIA AMBIENT premiered on YouTube in December 2022; & will be available on tape cassette in late 2022. CALEDONIA AMBIENT was made possible, in part, by the generous support of an individual artist grant from Puffin West Foundation of North Carolina.

Caledonia Northern Folk Studio’s Jess Lamar Reece Holler helped design & serves as inaugural coordinator of the Caledonia Farmers’ Market Summer Music Series: one of the region’s only paid farmers’ market performance series.

Hosted on Saturdays from June thru October, the Caledonia Farmers’ Market was founded in Summer 2021 by Caledonia Mayor April Morrison, as a way to help revitalize Caledonia’s historic Public Square. Hosted on the 1890s Public Square amongst historic buildings, the farmers’ market features a mix of local farmers, artisans, & value-added producers: including Marion County’s only active coffee roaster.

Launched in 2022, the Caledonia Farmers’ Market Summer Music Series was made possible by a transformative ArtSTART grant from the Ohio Arts Council, matched by local support from Ohio Health, Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History, Rinehart, Walter, & Danners Insurance, the American Legion Post #401 & Womens’ Auxiliary, the I.O.O.F. Lodge #229, Mennel Bakery & Foodservice, & the Bowstring Bar & Grille, alongside many generous individual donations.

The inaugural program hosted Marion County & regional musicians on six Saturdays throughout the market season, with two performances in July, two in August, & two in September. Featured musicians included LaCosta Mayes (with Michael Scott & Martin Harrris), KeeTai Harris, Brianna O’Dell (with LaCosta Mayes), Blue Diggity, Full Moon (Steve & Kristi Moore), & Marion’s 14-year-old wunderkind, Quenten Veach. On five of six Saturdays, musical performances were augmented by the presence of a local Marion County food truck. Overall, more than 80% of market vendors liked or loved the series; & we are excited to potentially bring back the series for Market Season 2023!

Caledonia Northern Folk Studio’s Jess Lamar Reece Holler provided all coordination services for the series: including scouting & booking artists, artist communications, graphic design & event marketing/promotions, set-up & sound tech for day-of-event, documentation of the series, & performer & vendor evaluations.

Thank you to Ohio Arts Council, Ohio Health, Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History, & our other generous local sponsors, for making this series possible!

The Caledonia Public Square Memories & Futures Project is a new oral history & arts activation project designed & carried out by oral historian, sound recordist, & community arts organizer Jess Lamar Reece Holler (Caledonia Northern Folk Studios) for the Village of Caledonia (Marion County, Ohio), supported through an Ohio Arts Council Arts Resiliency Initiative Community Project Grant for COVID-19 economic recovery.

The project focuses on the unique history of Caledonia, Ohio’s Public Square — a monumental open square comprised of Village Hall, the Union Block Building, the Underwood Building, the “Class of ‘55” Building, & the Temple & Masonic Blocks. Built as a boosterist project by Mayor J. Blanchard & a coalition of downtown merchants, business-owners, professionals, & their fraternal organizations, Caledonia’s Public Square rose to prominence during the height of the railroad era (1890s), when Caledonia became a major railway hub & stop-over location between Marion & Galion. The Square was also conveniently located along the route of Highway 30: then known as the “Lincoln Highway.”

Caledonia became a frequent stop for travelers — both by train & by automobile — who stayed over at the three-story Hanley House on Water Street, dined in Caledonia restaurants & pubs, & worshipped in Caledonia’s network of churches. And, at home, the Square became a regional destination for farmers & others from the network of smaller rural villages & unincorporated communities surrounding Caledonia: along the borders of Marion, Morrow, & Crawford Counties. Additionally, its reputation as an “organization town” — a hotbed of fraternal organization activity, with the Oliver Lodge #447 of the F&A Masons, Knights of Pythias Order of Calanthe #116, International Order of Oddfellows, & Women’s Auxiliaries of all three (Eastern Star; Lady Pythians; Sisters of Rebekah). Caledonia’s American Legion Post #401 provided a similar mutual aid service for area veterans & their descendents or family.

By the 20th century, the Public Square had become the site of many time-honored community traditions: from “medicine shows” & vaudeville acts above Village Hall in the 1920s to the American Legion Post #401’s Decoration Day procession to “Movies on the Square” (projected onto Garber Sisters’ groceries by a traveling projectionist) in the 1940s-1950s to the hustle & bustle of activities surrounding Caledonia’s centennial (1974) & America’s Bicentennial (1976), which lit a new craze for local history, downtown revitalization, & placekeeping in our small community. These spirits eventually led to a height of festival activity on the Square: the Firemans’ Festival of the 1960s, & the Farmers’ Festival that brought an entire carnival, bier garten, & midway experience right to the Public Square from the 1970s thru early 1990s.

Fates changed for the Public Square by the late 1990s, when competition from monopoly big-box stores, increased mobility, & a newly atomized culture threatened collective life, commerce, & leisure on the Square. The 1990s-2010s saw the shuttering of many long-time Caledonia businesses — including Sickel’s IGA, May’s Hardware, Reece’s Market, Carol Ault’s Dance Factory, the Caledonia Branch library, & the bank — & a rise in majority vacancy for Public Square storefronts & buildings.

The 2020’s, however, are showing stirrings of investment in downtown revitalization — including through connecting with & resurfacing our community’s rich history, multi-ethnic heritages, & traditions. In 2021, the Temple & Masonic Block Buildings became the first downtown commercial storefront buildings in any Marion County Village to be listed to the National Register of Historic Places. Moreover, in Summer 2021, Mayor April Morrison founded the Caledonia Farmers’ Market — a weekly strategy to get people out on the Public Square — which became its own 501(c)(3) in 2022. Following on the heels of the market, another non-profit — Friends of Caledonia — was also established in 2020 (incorporated in 2022) to help bring back community festivals on the Square: including through a downtown Hallowe’en celebration for young people (& the young-at-heart), “Christmas on the Square,” & plans to bring back the Farmers’ Festival. Moreover, in 2022, the Masonic Block Building was selected for a $58,000 rehabilitation investment by the Marion County Commisioners’ FY2023 Community Development Block Grant; & the Village of Caledonia put forward a Pipeline Grant to prepare a National Register of Historic Places historic district nomination for the related Public Square & Water Street commercial corridors.

Both historic preservation & cultural heritage organizing are a key part of these efforts to re-connect community life on the Square, as a way to dream forward more abundant futures. The Caledonia Public Square Memories & Futures Project joins these efforts here as an arts-& oral history-based activation tool: mobilizing memories of the Square to gather diverse community member dreams forward for adaptive reuse of the Square, & with it, civic & community life in Caledonia.

The project commenced in January & February 2022 with a series of four community planning meetings: spaces for Caledonia residents to share memories of the Public Square & hopes for its future, & to recommend a long-list (& vote on a shortlist) of potential narrators (interviewees) for the project; & then conducted ten full-length oral history interviews with Caledonia residents (past & present) with significant residential, commercial, cultural, organizational, or leadership roles on the Public Square. Those interviews were each extensively edited into “first person” audio documentaries — in the voice of each narrator, with the oral history dialogue removed; & five aggregate media documentaries were created to highlight overarching themes in the history, traditions, & significance of the Public Square.

LISTEN HERE: caledonianorthern.org/oral-history

Please enjoy the project — & may these memories help spur you to imagine your role in a revitalized Public Square!

Thank you to all community co-curators, project planners, & narrators: for your time, your insights, & your trust. The Caledonia Public Square Memories & Futures Project was made possible in part thanks to an Arts Resiliency Initiative Community Project Grant from the Ohio Arts Council. We are grateful to OAC for this transformative support, which has made this project possible.

Caledonia Northern Folk Studios worked with Black Heritage Council of Marion County in 2022 to conceive, design, & produce the Umoja: Blight to Beauty Storywork Project: an oral history, documentary arts, community conversation & book project documenting & amplifying the history of housing injustice in historically-Black neighborhoods in Marion County, & proposing pathways to reparations & repair towards housing justice.

The project accompanies Black Heritage Council’s new Umoja: Blight to Beauty Project, which is actively rehabilitating a historic Marion County Land Bank house on Creston Avenue on the West Side provide affordable, sweat-equity housing for a Black community member recovering from addiction disorders.

Supported by a Community Project Grant from the Arts Resiliency Initiative of the Ohio Arts Council, the Umoja: Blight to Beauty Storywork Project supported four new full-length interviews with community members who have lived through the loss of a home, an hour-long community conversation which launched at Marion Voices’ Marion Black Joy Summerfest 2022 at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Park on Marion’s West Side in June 2022, & the publication of a 58-page artists’ book sharing histories of housing injustice in Marion County, amplifying the project’s oral history interviews in the words of our narrators, & proposing a real, material course of action towards housing justice for the future.

Umoja: Blight to Beauty Storywork Project books are available for sale through Black Heritage Council of Marion County, with all proceeds benefitting the Creston House rehabilitation project.

Terradise Ambient: Environmental Soundscapes Along the Whetstone River — a program of Terradise Nature Center, Inc. of Caledonia, Ohio, developed & run by documentary artist Jess Lamar Reece Holler — is catalytic environmental arts program designed to make good on Terradise Nature Center’s storied history as a haven for both Marion County naturalism and as an inspiration for arts production through a critical arts practice that has developed alongside & in conversation with outdoor spaces: environmental soundscape composition.

Rooted in the 1970s "acoustic ecology" movement & popularized by American experimental soundscape composer Irv Teibel's best-selling ENVIRONMENTS LP series in the late 1970s, & subsequently shaped by experimental composers & activists like Pauline Oliveros & Hildegard Westerkamp, environmental soundscape composition combines ambient & experimental composition with documentary arts to both capture, augment, and amplify the soundmarks & rhythms of a landscape. Given the important role Terradise played in founder Trella & Ray Romine's own poetry, photography, painting & 8mm film production, Terradise Ambient invites our K-12 & even remote digital audiences to conceive of & experience our nature preserve sonically -- & to aurally experience the biodiversity of our bend of the River across all four Ohio seasons.

Terradise Ambient will consist of five interrelated core program components: • Collaborative soundmark mapping at ten key points along the Terradise Trail, following the soundmarking system of pioneering acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer, across all four Ohio seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) to build a modular Terradise Environmental Soundscape Library • Design & commission of physical signage to mark key soundmark points along the trail, with contextual information about key environmental/natural features • Artist-led experimental soundscape composition of ten composite pieces marking each soundmark across the four seasons • Collaborative design of a Terradise Ambient "Sound Trail" Website & Digital Map to map & display our soundscapes, combined with professional photography & video, to bring the sounds of Terradise home to audiences across Ohio • Development of a suite of five lesson plans // five different youth outdoor education experiences accompanying the project, to teach Marion County young people & visitors about connecting to place & cultivating mindfulness, peace, mental health, & connection to nature through sound & soundscapesTerradise Ambient: Environmental Soundscapes Along the Whetstone River uniquely seeks to mobilize the power of soundscape documentation & sound walk pedagogy to bring sensory-rich, immersive mindfulness experiences to Terradise visitors in-person & online.

Terradise Ambient: Environmental Soundscapes Along the Whetstone River is made possible, in part, through the generous support of the Ohio Arts Council, United Way of North-Central Ohio, and the Board of Directors of Terradise Nature Center, Inc.

Marion County Ambient​ ​is a locally-specific, North-Central Ohio environmental soundscape // sound art project, seeking to mobilize the healing potential of deep listening to diverse landscapes to draw connections across lines of difference and as embodied practice in Marion County, Ohio.

Funded by Puffin Foundation West, Marion County Ambient’s 2021 work resulted in the recording, editing, compilation/curation, and distribution of a unique “Marion County soundscape library” documenting the everyday soundscapes of Marion County’s seven rural villages (Prospect, New Bloomington, Green Camp, La Rue, Morral, Caledonia, and Waldo) & unincorporated Census-designated places (Martel, Decliff, Meeker, & Kirkpatrick); and the composition of a 1-hour soundscape composition, entitled Marion County Ambient​: Early Winter, which will debut on WCRS LP-FM on December 1st, 2021.

The project also supported a community workshop on Environmental Soundscapes hosted thru the Marion Voices Summer Institute in Cultural Documentation in July 2021, supporting audiences in mobilizing their listening experiences to connect to Marion County neighbors they might not have considered before, & to devise soundscape projects of their own.

Marion County​ ​Ambient​ is a project in the long and complicated tradition of “acoustic ecology” and critical soundscape studies — modes of environmental sound documentation and composition that seek to mobilize the intimate experience of listening to catalyze important conversations about community values, memories, and collective futures. Because environmental soundscape recordings capture a wide, multi-species “ecology” — beyond just the human — soundscape recordings & soundscape composition is a uniquely powerful tool for facilitating connection, compassion, solidarity, and action, across perceived lines of difference. In fact, one of the recognized pioneers of the genre — sound artist Irv Teibel, whose Environments​ LP series (1969-1979) ushered in a wave of “New Age” deep listening for healing — explicitly promoted the power of soundscape recordings to cultivate new, more compassionate, enlightened states of awareness and solidarity, helping to build a more peaceful, just, and equitable world. In our current moment of racial injustice and climate disaster — which threatens species (like the puffin!) far beyond the human — there has never been a time of greater need for such aesthetic-embodied experiments.

Marion County Ambient​ grows out of two intersecting threads of community-based cultural worker and documentary artist ​Jess Lamar Reece Holler’s​ practice: their dedication to community cultural documentation and oral history as spurs to transformative “deep listening” (which she practices as Project Director of the ​Marion Voices​ Folklife + Oral History Program); and their decade-plus of artistic experimentation with the genre of environmental, ambient, & incidental sound recording — including through the hosting of their weekly “environmental & background sounds” radio show, ​NIGHT PLANT RADIO​, on Columbus’ WCRS LP-FM. In 2019, Jess was granted a residency at EPICENTER in Green River, Utah to develop the ​GREEN RIVER AMBIENT​ soundscape cassette-tape library & performance for the small community of Green River; and she is excited to collaborate with a range of Marion County organizations & spaces to put transformative ambient sound recording & composition to work in Marion County.

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project is a dynamic collaborative oral history & folklife project developed with Lily Kunning of Central Ohio worker-owned herbalist co-operative Haven Herbs (originally as a part of her Sassafras Ohio statewide herbal gathering organizing efforts) and Susan Leopold, Executive Director of United Plant Savers in Meigs County, Ohio.

The Ohio Herbal Elders Project seeks to document & amplify the rich & diverse cultural traditions, influences, educational systems, & methods of transmission of Ohio’s founding generation of 20th century herbalists, and to document the rich flourishing of traditional plant medicine practices in our state — including through formal & informal herbalist apprenticeship programs. Ohio Herbal Elders Project interviews, folklife documentation, & media-rich pieces will be jointly displayed on the websites of Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, United Plant Savers, and Lily Kunning, Community Herbalist; and will be featured in on-site kiosks at the new United Plant Savers education center at the UpS’s Goldenseal Sanctuary in Rutland, Ohio.

OHEP commenced its inaugural interview — with renowned Appalachian Ohio herbal teacher & medicine-maker Paul Strauss, of Equinox Botancials in June 2020 under rigid COVID-19-safe distanced-outdoor interviewing protocols — with the support of an ArtSTART grant from the Ohio Arts Council. We hope to grow the program with additional interviews, herb farm & sanctuary visits, and herbalist-led documentary herb walks, in 2021 + 2022.

Check back in early 2021 for documentation — including our finished short video piece — from our visit with Paul & Equinox Botanicals!

Year-long twenty-county folk/traditional arts survey, needs assessment, and program planning process in Eastern Ohio, for the larger 112-county regional Central Appalachian Folk & Traditional Arts Survey + Planning Project for the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, in cooperation with the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network. After extensive research and planning — including pulling together the 10+ person field team & spearheading/lead writing the winning RFP response to the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation’s August 2019 RFP for a 110-county Central Appalachian Folk + Traditional Arts Survey; and serving as Field Coordinator for the resulting team — II spent almost forty days on the road in Eastern Ohio’s Appalachian Regional Commission-designated counties (from Ashtabula to Monroe, and from Holmes to Meigs) and met with cultural artists, tradition-bearers, arts entrepreneurs, tourism leaders, and arts, culture, history, and heritage organizations, to better understand arts/culture infrastructure, economy, and ecology needs in each county and in the region, and to design a responsive set of program suggestions for MAAF’s new CAFTA program for a wider 112-county region of Ohio, West Virginia, and Virginia, as well as specific Ohio recommendations for Ohio-based arts, humanities and public history funders.

My 870-page single-authored subregional report on findings in my 20 counties and recommendations to build capacity for arts, culture, and heritage organizations and practitioners in the region is available upon request, via oldelectricity at gmail dot com.

Special thanks to the hundreds of artists, organizations, and businesses who shared their thoughts, visions and likelinesses, with me for this survey; provided warm meals and much-needed shelter from the rain during a long, hot, underfunded fieldwork summer, and entrusted me to collaborate in this co-visioning.

All images here are copyright Jess Lamar Reece Holler // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, produced for the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation’s Central Appalachian Folk & Traditional Arts Survey, in May, July, and August 2019. Images may not be used or circulated without the photographer’s explicit permission.

GREEN RIVER AMBIENT was Caledonia Northern Folk Studios’ first town soundscape library project, comprising 60+ long-form 30 minute digital soundscape recordings of 60 distinct locations across the community of Green River, Utah; four participatory public tapedeck performances; & four compilation soundscape composition 2-hour radio show programs, produced for Columbus’s WCRS LP-FM community radio station.

GREEN RIVER AMBIENT was produced from May thru July 2019, when Caledonia Northern Folk Studios Principal Jess Lamar Reece Holler was Artist-In-Residence with EPICENTER: a visionary rural housing justice, community-based participatory development & community-collaborative rural arts studio & non-profit based in the heart of Green River, Utah. The project arose out of both Jess’s & EPICENTER’s frustrations with the drop-in, extractive dimensions of community-based cultural work & documentary arts (oral history, folklife documentation, portrait & even landscape photography); & sought to interrogate the tradition of environmental soundscape recording to test the ethical limits of long-form residential soundscape recording as a way to listen as a stranger in a new place.

GREEN RIVER AMBIENT’s recording log spans popular vernacular Green River soundmark & landmark locations, ranging from the spectacular (the Green River itself; the animatronic figures at the Green River Museum) to the mundane (the “canned thunderstorm” sounds at Green River’s Melon Patch grocery store; sounds of the nighttime pool at an RV park; the ambience of the gas stations that dot Green River’s entrance & exit to I-70). GREEN RIVER AMBIENT is preserved on-site as a complete tapedeck library, & is accessible & available to be checked out by community members by inquiry at EPICENTER.

Plans are afoot to build out a web presence for the full GREEN RIVER AMBIENT soundscape library; & we’d love to do a return trip to build out short 16mm Kodachrome film loops for each of GREEN RIVER AMBIENT’s soundmark locations when it is COVID-safe to do so.

With special thanks to EPICENTER’s Frontier Fellowship for funding the GREEN RIVER AMBIENT residency project, & to Maria Skyes, for the long talks about documentary ethics, community-based practice, dreams, visions, heartbreak, & the power of shutting up & listening.

In an era of celebrity chefs and "farm to table," our fervor for building sustainable local foods systems can often overlook and invisibilize the kitchen workers who bridge the gap -- and who often labor without a living wage, benefits or collective bargaining power.

Back of House: Kitchen Workers in Central Ohio (2016-2017) was a multi-media folklife documentation project amplifying the voices, experiences and occupational cultures of back-of-house kitchen workers in Columbus, Ohio, with the stated aim of changing local culture to include fair pay and fair opportunity for kitchen workers in our conception of "sustainable" Central Ohio foodshed. The project seeks to pop the bubble of Columbus’ darling “good food” movement — which often fetishizes food and a romanticized image of the farmer, while continuing to perpetuate abuses in behind-the-scenes restaurant labor.

Back of House: Kitchen Workers in Central Ohio is a fleeting, behind-the-scenes snapshot of labor, small-business-ownership, and the contested, difficult, creative art of running & managing kitchens from the contested heyday of “Flavortown’s” rise to foodie glory. This glory, Back of House insists, cannot come at the expense of living wages for kitchen workers.

Back of House interviewed workers, managers, owners, line cooks, sous chefs, food truck impressionarios, and other laborers connected to the following Columbus establishments: City Barbeque, Banana Leaf Indian Cuisine, Himalayan Grille, Watershed Distillery Kitchen, Indochine Café, Dough Mama Café, the Table, Buckeye Donuts, Little Eater, Rubino’s Pizza, Paulie Gee’s Pizza, Natalie’s Coal-Fired Pizza, Adriatico’s Pizza, Pattycake Vegan Bakery, Fox in the Snow Coffeeshop & Bakery, and back-of-house workers at the former Alana’s Fine Dining, Challah! Food Truck, Companion Bagel scratch bakery, Commonwealth Sandwich Shop, & Clintonville Sandwich Shop; and with restaurants further afield — like Athens’ worker-run co-operatives Casa Nueva and the Village Bakery — that play an outsized role in imaginations of ethical restaurant-work alternatives. Together, the project presents a complex profile of the fleeting, overlapping, & emotionally-and-socially intense world of Columbus’ back-of-house-kitchen workers; and also sheds light on the affordances that make restaurant work a perennial choice for those moonlighting in creative fields.

Supported by an Archie Green Fellowship from the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Back of House: Kitchen Workers in Central Ohio is a part of the AFC’s Occupational Folklife Project; and will eventually be made available online via the Library of Congress’s digital collections. The collection should be of interest to labor historians, restaurant labor activists, and Central Ohioans interested in opening the back door on the vital underbelly of the Columbus food scene.

Note: Anonymity or pseudonymity has been provided to all food workers who have requested it. Core project themes & ethics developed with & alongside then-Columbus food industry veterans Jacob Warren Reece Holler and Jeremy Purser, pictured. Guys, this one’s for you <3

Family & community oral history, ethnographic and documentary project on rumor, vernacular risk perception and the environmental justice history of Caledonia, Ohio's River Valley High School -- built on land used as a toxic waste dump during World War Two; and relocated, due to popular pressure and movement building of parents of former students who contracted cancer, in the early 2000's. 

The Ohio Soft-Serv Trail is an ongoing Caledonia Northern Folk Studios-spearheaded cultural documentation & cultural heritage tourism project/campaign, mapping & amplifying the stories of freestanding mom-and-pop soft-serv stands in Ohio, for development into a series of modular audio driving tours, a print/web "trail," an interactive digital map, and a suite of on-ground heritage tourism programs. Rooted in CNFS’s experiences in North-Central Ohio, the Ohio Soft-Serv Trail Project explores the vital but undersung role that community dairy bars play as often the few available restaurants in depopulating small rural villages and rustbelt county seats alike.

In Summer 2017 and Summer 2018, the Ohio Soft-Serv Trail project surveyed & photographs all the dairy bars in Marion County, including the Jer-Zee Dairy Bar (Marion, Ohio), Green Camp Dairy Bar (Green Camp, Ohio), Waldo Dairy Bar (Waldo, Ohio), Past-Times (Prospect, Ohio), and the now-defunct (RIP!) New Bloomington Dairy Bar (New Bloomington). A freestanding project website is forthcoming.

Feel free to reach out to recommend a North-Central dairy bar for us to visit!

The Ohio Soft-Serv Trail project is currently seeking funding to develop single-county prototypes across the twelve-county region of North-Central Ohio, or at the state level. The Ohio Soft-Serv Trail is especially excited to partner with local and/or country tourism boards & convention + visitors’ associations to document, promote, & program cultural heritage tourism activities for the unique dairy bars in your region! We’d love to hear from you!

Caledonia Northern Folk Studios is poised to develop freestanding county soft-serv trail programs for CVB’s across North-Central Ohio and/or the state; contact us for package options + our custom list of Ohio Soft-Serv Trail cultural heritage tourism outputs! We’d be so excited to help put your unique county mom & pop dairy bars on the map — & help to generate cultural heritage & foodways tourism and income for your county & for these incredible cultural purveyors!

The Ohio Soft-Serv Trail concept & all images (c) Caledonia Northern Folk Studios // Jess Lamar Reece Holler, 2016-2023.

The Growing Right Oral History Project: Ecological Farming in Ohio, 1970s-Now (2016-2020) was a dynamic hybrid oral history & public folklife project created by Jess Lamar Reece Holler // Caledonia Northern Folk Studios for the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Association, with support from Ohio Humanities & the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Growing Right ran from May 2016 thru May 2020; sadly, no further funding was available to sustain project activities or maintain the existing project infrastructure and archive; the project is currently on indefinite hiatus unless more funding or investments can be secured to continue project activities. (See: the importance of equity budgeting & sustainability for transformative community projects; also see, the dangers & precariousness of contract-based project visioning!)

The Growing Right project (2016-2020) mobilized experimental site-based and arts-based praxes in oral history, environmental folklife, acoustic ecology/critical soundscape studies, and pop-up exhibition and history-from-below praxes to chart the rise of the ecological food and farm movement in Ohio as an intersectional social movement. The project was developed in collaboration with the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) working with the farmers and organizers who helped to found OEFFA in 1979; Growing Right was generously funded by Ohio Humanities and the Greater Columbus Arts Council. 

The project, across its four-year span, conducted upwards of fifty-four interviews in over thirty-eight Ohio counties, produced hundreds of thousands of documentary and portrait photographs and short videos, and resulted in a dynamic media-rich project website, digital archive of organic farming print ephemera in Ohio, a novel mobile pop-up exhibit on organic farming in Ohio which conducted a seventeen-stop “pop-up exhibit tour” to farmers’ markets across Central Ohio, and conducted and hosted numerous workshops, talks, special sessions, and presentations at the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Conference from 2017-2019. The project also produced a collection of edited multi-media oral history videos with select interviewees; and a set of short slide-show mini-documentaries combining oral history audio excerpts with documentary field photography.

The project lived, from 2016-2020, at growingrightproject.com. As of January 2020, the website is no longer being maintained. Unfortunately, as with many project-funded digital humanities projects, funding for the project dried up, and the host non-profit was unable to continue to support our work on the project beyond the tenure of our short-term grants. Caledonia Northern Folk Studios will continue to host & make available a portion of the Growing Right project’s incredible archive of documentary media on the history of the organic food & farm movement in Ohio.

Growing Right involved close collaboration with community archivist Scott Williams — a founding member of the Ohio Ecological Food & Farm Associations, and long-time activist with the Federation of Ohio River Co-Ops — and graphic designer & sound artist Jeremy Purser of SLOWPOACH Design. Jeremy worked with CNFS documentary field photography to produce a pretty darn stunning set of project posters, post-cards, and exhibit materials for Growing Right — many of which can be seen on display in the photographs here.

Farming in the Age of Fracking (2017-2018) was an emergent experimental arts documentation, advocacy and local history exhibition project focusing on the fate of ecology-dependent land-based occupational cultures in Eastern Ohio landscapes dominated by a resurgent and fracking-based oil & gas industry -- with an especial focus on ecologies of labor and fracking's impacts on traditionally land-based occupational cultures along Eastern Ohio's Highway 9. The project, supported by individual and organizational grants from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, with additional support from Puffin West, combined ethnographic fieldwork, audio recording, oral history interviews and ethnographic 16mm film work with drive-by participant observation witnessing of the visual and material markers of fracking activity on the Eastern Ohio landscape. 

Grant funding supported the production of 10 rolls of 16mm film across two extended Eastern Ohio field trips in July & August of 2017, with additional audio soundscape recording trips conducted in September & October of 2018.

The project traced three strands of registering the impact of fracking in Eastern Ohio Counties:

➳ fracking as it constraints and makes impossible traditional land-based occupations and stewardship practices -- such as organic farming

➳ fracking as it is handled, exposed or invisibilized by the recreation industry in Eastern Ohio

➳ visual rhetorics of fracking on the landscape, including "vernacular public fracking history": monuments, memorials and markers of extractive history

Project fieldwork and documentation occurred in twelve Eastern & Southeastern Ohio counties — the heart of Ohio’s Utica Shale fracking belt: Ashtabula, Columbiana, Carroll, Harrison, Belmont, Morgan, Guernsey, Muskingum, Stark, Tuscarawas, Monroe, and Noble. Project documentation featured Mud Run Farm (Navarre, Ohio), Bluebird Farm (Cadiz, Ohio), and the Raven Rocks community (Beallsville, Ohio); as well as Senecaville Lake and AEP's ReCreationLand/Miners' Memorial Monument (Guernsey/Morgan Counties).

All stills, here, from an exploratory experimental 16mm series of film dailies produced as a part of the Growing Right Project in Summer 2017, with generous funding from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. A first iteration of an expanded cinema piece, Soundtrack(s) for Forced Pooling — a participatory three-channel video x five-channel tapedeck installation — was produced from this project archive in 2018.

CNFS is currently seeking funding for future project fieldwork, extended documentary production & construction of a multi-media web archive and digital multimedia map of the cultural frackscapes, visual fields, and acoustic ecologies of Eastern Ohio’s “fracklands.”

The VeggieSNAPS // Wholesome Wave // Produce Perks Storywork Project (2015-2017) was an ongoing documentation, program support and oral history-based needs assessment project for Columbus’ Produce Perks (then called VeggieSNAPs) farmers’ market nutrition incentive program.

Organized by nationwide non-profit Wholesome Wave, founded by celebrity chef Michael Nischan, VeggieSNAPs Columbus (now Produce Perks Midwest) provides matching EBT/SNAP benefits dollar-for-dollar (from 2015-2017, up to $10 total) at a network of what, by 2017, was 14 participating Central Ohio farmers' markets. 

Caledonia Northern Folk Studios worked for two summers for the program — in 2015, as a Storywork Intern for VeggieSNAPs parent organization Wholesome Wave, documenting hundreds of narratives from EBT users, farmers, and managers at farmers’ markets across Columbus, producing weekly media-rich blogposts & profiles of market-goers and VeggieSNAPs experiences in the Columbus community, and helping recommend changes to the VeggieSNAPs program and markets to local & national program leaders to make fresh farmers’ market produce more accessible to EBT users. In the Summer of 2017, CNFS was contracted as program assistant for the Central Ohio VeggieSNAPs program, and helped to document, support, and promote the program for a network of 14 partner farmers’ markets in Columbus, Newark, and Washington Courthouse.

The VeggieSNAPs Columbus Project resulted in thousands of portrait and market photographs documenting Central Ohio farmers’ markets, shoppers, farmers, and special income-accessible farmers’ market events like the Columbus Public Health summer WIC markets; and also produced almost a hundred vox-pop-style audio interviews with EBT users, market farmers, and farmers’ market managers and volunteers. The project also serves as an unintentional snapshot of a particular moment at the height of Columbus’ local food movement — including rare & fairly-comprehensive season-long documentation of farmers & their produce at fourteen market sites, across two full summer seasons (2015 & 2017).

The VeggieSNAPs Columbus Project is a fine example of Caledonia Northern Folk Studios’ applied & activist folklife, oral history & cultural organizing mission: to mobilize storywork, ethically, to help build more community-responsive and appropriate programming, to help get more affordable food on more tables.

A formal project archive does not exist for the VeggieSNAPs Columbus Project; CNFS will work to host appropriate project media on our website, while respecting the rights and private of vulnerable EBT users who generously shared their images and story with us in the Summers of 2015 and 2017.

For more, see: www.veggieSNAPs.org

The Eastwick Oral History Project (2016) was a revolutionary multimodal public environmental humanities x environmental justice project, which mobilized, oral history and community-collaborative documentary practices to document & explore attachments to place and organizing against site-based toxicity in Southwest Philadelphia's Eastwick neighborhood, in collaboration with the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition (EFNC) and urban & environmental historian Jeffrey Nagle, with support from Patricia Kim and Paul Mitchell.

The project conducted 10 oral histories with Eastwick residents living with and organizing against site-based toxicity, illegal dumping, & the horrific aftermath of a decade-long, never-materialized “urban renewal” (removal) project that raised the once-vibrant, multi-ethnic neighborhood alongside the Tinicum Marsh that the community remembers as “Elmwood.” Elmwood/Eastwick is home to two Superfund sites, hidden in plain sight in the middle of residential park areas, a branch off the Lower Schuylkill River.

Note: The Eastwick Oral History Project is at the center of an ongoing plagiarism scandal perpetrated by a tenured university professor & associates, who had never worked on the project nor trained in oral history or community-collaborative environmental justice work; all original EOHP project activities have been halted in response to this concerning situation; a shadow project using the same name, produced with CNFS project materials, consent forms, and language, and reportedly paying undergraduate students to plagiarize this project, has been reported as active since May 2016.

Please be wary of these other materials & understand their origins. Public-sector cultural workers & community-based cultural organizers who work hard with community organizations to create dynamic, activist public humanities work are often especially vulnerable to these sorts of unwanted and reprehensible acts of plagiarism, absorption, and co-optation by universities and other powerful neoliberal institutions who want to cash in on the “street cred” of 1st-person, community-collaborative documentary work. Don’t, for a second, buy it.

When you see a powerful organization or institution claiming this sort of work, do your due diligence and ask: is this really their work? Who did the labor to design this project, build these relationships?

It is worth considering why, in our current era, community-based activist documentary projects — especially those partnering and collaborating directly with marginalized communities and communities of color — are vulnerable to these modes of theft & absorption.

Being taken into the custody of a university library or archive is not the highest, only, and is certainly not the most ethical mode of making cultural work public or accessible. In fact, such absorption is rarely any of those things.

At Caledonia Northern Folk Studios, we practice a radically community-based, post-custodial model of archives work, whereby community members & interviewees themselves, alongside interviewers, co-own their interview experience and materials; and collectively shepherd documentary materials’ destinies to catalyze transformative conversations in their home communities.

Oral history & folklife project documenting place and community memory of Christian-Trigg Farms -- a New Deal-era Resettlement Administration community of 100+ farmsteads constructed in the late 1930's in Christian County, Kentucky, to "resettle" rural farm families who had been independently farming "sub-marginal" land at the advent of the Dust Bowl. The Christian-Trigg project aimed to educate its farmers in new principles of ecology and "conservation" farming; and, through design determinism and the construction of uniform housing, to "modernize" rural Kentucky life. 

"Farming on the Government Place" tracks the local reception and inter-generational memory of the Christian-Trigg Resettlement project through its impact on the ground; and explores the persistence and resilience of New Deal-era patterns of landholding and land stewardship in a changing agricultural moment. 

The project also synced with historic preservation of the cultural landscape in Christian County, Kentucky; and resulted in the nomination of the C.A. Baldwin Farmstead to the National Register of Historic Places in October 2015.

Generously funded by an Oral History Project Grant from the Kentucky Oral History Commission. Special thanks to community partners Eileen Heflin and Jonathan White; and Mr. William Turner of the Christian County Historical Society. 

Graduate fieldwork project conducted over two semesters at Western Kentucky University, exploring intersections of labor, material culture, activism and belief on fourteen sustainable farms, organic gardens, permaculture education sites and sustainable demonstration centers across "Cave Country" and wider South-Central Kentucky (and a wee bit of Tennessee). Beliefscapes particularly explored dimensions of spiritual belief, embodied knowledge and experience that led these farmers, homesteaders and activists to leave their previous lives in pursuit of sustainable food production; and queried the embodied practice of sustainable agriculture and living and working with plants, animals and the land as a form of spirituality. 

Beliefscapes combined folklife documentation (photo, audio) with sit-down oral history and place-based and working interviews. Produced during Dr. Erica Brady's Fieldwork class (Fall 2014) and Folk Belief Class (Spring 2015). Fieldnotes, transcripts and audio samples for select project interviews available here.

Project Interviewees include:

➳  Jacob Mudd and Faye Adams-Eaton, Muddy Acres -- Caneysville, Kentucky

➳  Debbie Apple, River Cottage Farm -- Bluefields, Kentucky

➳ Brandi Button -- Homesteader, Cave City

➳  Jeff Poppen, the "Barefoot Farmer" -- Red Boiling Springs, Tennessee

➳  Jesse Frost & Hannah Crabtree, Rough Draft Farmstead -- Bugtussel, Kentucky

➳  Sustainable Agriculture Educators, Pleasant Hill Shaker Village -- Harrodsburg, Kentucky

➳  Susanna Lein, Salamander Springs Farm -- Berea, Kentucky

➳  Kaelin & Heather Vernon, Peacefield Farms -- Plano, Kentucky

➳  Allan & Saundra Davis // Joey Tyndall, Sunnypoint Gardens -- Brownsville, Kentucky

Ongoing multi-media documentation and ethnography on a family-run community grocery store at the heart of the small rural community of Caledonia, Ohio.

2008-2010: Photography, video and oral history

Spring 2014: Oral history & ethnographic fieldwork

Spring 2015: Digital storytelling projects

Fall 2016: 16mm Film Demo

Summer 2017: Ongoing oral history & film documentation; and National Register of Historic Places nomination research

My folklife and documentary arts practice combines tradition still photography and audio work with 16mm filmmaking, on occasion. My 16mm work focuses on constellating complex ecologies and sense of place on a single reel.

My work includes NIGHT GRANDMA (Dec. 2016; 16mm), a meditation on my grandparents' homestead and country store in Caledonia, Ohio, and on gender, memory and the monumentalizing of family labor across generations; and in-progress working on a film about organic farmers surrounded by fracking, pipeline construction and the infrastructure of the new oil and gas boom in Eastern Ohio (Summer 2017-current). 

Ongoing personal autoethnography and experimental documentary project on the development of New Albany, Ohio that bridges amateur ethnography, home video, vernacular public history, archives, and explorations of the persistence of memory when sites have been removed, demolished or built over. Launched in 2005 as a part of a high school senior seminar project.