Front cover of A Decade of Country Hits: Art on the Rural Frontier

A Decade of Country Hits: Art on the Rural Frontier. Last Chance Press and Jap Sam Books. 560-page book and performance tour. 2014.

Edited by Margo Handwerker | Foreword by Richard Saxton

Art has its Billboard charts. They focus mostly on artists and exhibitions in urban centers. A Decade of Country Hits is devoted to uncharted hits thriving instead on rural aesthetics and rural knowledge. This richly illustrated volume documents ten years of collective works initiated by artist Richard Saxton in rural communities around the world, from the American Midwest and Southwest to parts of Europe, Australia, and South America. Impossible to attribute to any one artistic genre, the works archived here explore a growing community of artists and researchers drawn to the rural experience in all its complexity. The volume resembles a sketchbook: with drawings, photographs, and from the hip snapshots from in the field. This book is full of contributions from like-minded artists, musicians, poets, and writers.

Available for purchase in mercantile

M12 at the Alan Lomax collection office prior to a Decade of Country Hits performance, 2014.