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by Asa Mease

Maureen Hearty is co-founder and co-director of . Currently, she  helps lead community engagement and artist coordination. Maureen's community activist experience, in both urban and rural landscapes, builds connection, compassion, and opportunity for diverse communities. Her work was recognized by the Colorado Governor's Creative Leadership Award in 2016. In addition to Maureen’s community-building experience, she is a sculptress and story collector who has experience archiving narratives with the bARTer Collective, Voices of the Plains and the Long-Term Offender Program.

How did you get your start in community-engaged work and how has your approach differed at different times in your life?

When I was in college, I started on a marketing and advertising degree because I was interested in how to make money as a creative thinker, and then quickly into my freshman year, I was like, “I hate this. This isn't my domain at all.” So I took some time off and I did what's now known as “Van Life” which was just called dropping out and going on a road trip then. I bought a van and drove around. Ultimately, that experience provided a great perspective and was an eye-opener for me to other people in the world besides where I'd grown up in the Front Range. I came back and decided to study sociology. That is what led to the idea of working with people, community, and connections. What are the patterns that make us tick? What creates problems? What creates opportunity and access for people? And it spread from there.

How has that work taken shape in recent years? You’ve previously worked in the Denver metro area, and now your focus is on the Prairie Sea Projects in Joes, Colorado.

Initially when I was working, it was more intense community-based work when it was criminology-focused. I was working with kids in jail and people with addiction on the street and doing public health interventions during the AIDS crisis. It was intense and hard work as far as emotional burnout. I wondered how I could get on the other side. Instead of responding to the failures of our systems, could I get in on prevention? That is what led me to art and gardening. How do we look at intervening with communities, especially youth, through a more creative lens? 

That led to working at Denver Urban Gardens as I wanted to learn more about plants, gardening, food, and nutrition. In working close to poverty, it was clear that the realities of food access and health are issues of equity—being able to be healthy, show up for school, and be attentive. That work got me interested in food

I moved to Joes, Colorado and there were no nonprofits, so I learned how to start one. I met Kirsten Stoltz and didn't know that there was a movement linking the rural with contemporary art. Kirsten brought all this conceptual framework and history of working with and that's right up my alley. I think the strength of what Kirsten and I came together to do as co-directors of Prairie Sea Projects is that Kirsten has a much more theoretical, conceptual idea of it, and I have the “feet on the ground,” “What does it look like to actually connect to the community?” skillset.

As co-directors, it seems like you’ve met in this middle space of community-engaged art, but your entry was community engagement, and then arts was the link that came second, while Kirsten is approaching it from the Arts and finding the community engagement within that. That seems an effective pairing.

Exactly. Before, when I was thinking of arts in my work it was about making things—what you see in a lot of arts nonprofits—we're going to learn how to draw, we're going to paint murals. Kirsten came with the experience and exposure to the idea of contemporary art not needing to be so object-based. That really blew my mind open. I realized the work I'm already doing is art-based whether or not I'm teaching art. It's a way of engaging with people in the landscape and how we connect in our public spaces.

This is something that I'm struggling with—trying to discern what a successful piece or outcome looks like when working in this manner. And perhaps being okay with it looking different than a clear ending and question answered. Through the various projects at Prairie Sea Projects, what has success looked like, and what forms does it take?

Things to think about are: what is good collaboration and how do you prepare for the unknowns. Those two are linked—if you have good collaboration it makes you more agile and adaptable to be able to flow and flux around the things you don't see coming. When we built the Prairie Futures Gardens, our initial vision shifted significantly and what we created was very different from where we started. We wanted to do something with hemp because the farm bill just legalized hemp and people were looking at trying to get more farmers into hemp. Investors and farmers were only interested in CBD versus hemp as the broadly useful crop it can be because that was where the initial profit was. We wanted to grow a giant field with different varieties of hemp and build a hemp-crete structure and the team had lots of different ideas but it came down to the basic question—how can this project plug into the reality of the community? How do we make sure the community stays connected? And we're not just doing some abstract thought experiment that has no local meaning?

So we changed the design and scrapped the idea of only doing hemp because we wanted to have a larger conversation about what agriculture is in the future. We don't know if it's hemp. Let's look at a variety of options in addition to hemp. Let's make it more experimental. One of my fears is outsider artists coming in and telling farmers what to do. It's not going to go over very well. Instead, if we approach it more experimentally, “What can things look like here?” rather than telling them “What things should look like here.” This perspective shift of keeping the community’s engagement in mind as we design a project has ultimately been successful in bringing new ideas and conversations to an area while keeping the people at the table

Asa: Something that stood out in one of the lectures (an event Maureen and I both attended in February 2024 in Burlington, CO) was a question someone asked around similar topics. The speaker was lauding the process of growing very specific high-value crops in a certain way as if it were a silver bullet to Big Ag. A farmer raised their hand and asked if there was room in the market for five to seven more farmers in Eastern Colorado to do what they were telling a room of them to do? Because if not, they can't change their whole way of farming just on what is being proposed.

There does seem to be added layers of complexity in doing creative work in rural environments. Could you speak to some of those challenges and how the work shifts from a metropolitan area where some of these activities are perhaps a bit more recognizable or readily received? 

In an urban environment, coming to any table as an arts and community organizer is an understood component of the work. In the rural, at least out here, if you come to the table saying you are in arts and community engagement, “I want to get involved,” people are less receptive. There's not as much of a shared domain or vocabulary, especially around the formality of running a nonprofit. People in urban areas are more used to forms, getting things filled out, having to sign a contract, and doing an MOU. When I came to the table with that out here, nobody wanted to put their signature on anything.

Is that a function of how the economy and social interactions work in that space more generally?

A good metaphor would be: the urban is like working with extroverts and the rural is working with introverts. And of course, there are exceptions to the rule. I'm not saying that all people in the urban realm are extroverts, but community-wise, people are more accustomed to shared spaces and either connect or perform in these public spaces. In the rural domain, there are not so many public spaces. So there isn't an agreed upon norm. I find people are much more reserved—more shy. It's a place where individualism is celebrated and revered, and extreme individualism is the way to survive. If you pose the question: how do we need each other to a group of extreme individuals, then is it admitting weakness? It’s a challenge to the social mores of the space.

Is Prairie Sea Projects then tugging at the connective tissue between people that is already there— to reveal that there is interconnection, even if the perception is one of rugged individualism?

Exactly. When I was doing drug counseling, there was an intervention style that we did called “Stages of Change.” It's all about meeting the person where they're at, and moving them along through motivational interviewing. How do you ask the right questions to motivate them to make change without them feeling overwhelmed or intimidated? I think that the whole idea of counseling is directly connected to being a change-maker on a community level. Meet people where they're at and push gently based on their interests and comfort to move them along. For instance, when we were first working on the language for Prairie Futures we didn’t want to say climate change because that's a weighted term here, and we don't want people to not engage because they think that we're just environmental liberals from the city. Yes, we are…but I knew it would be something that would close the door to people engaging. What's something we all agree on? We're running out of water. That is something that is a shared concern. It doesn't matter what sort of side of the political spectrum you're on. Let's talk about what running out of water is going to look like.

What are some challenges of getting people to show up to events at your location?

Getting people to participate is a challenge no matter where you are. It’s about getting community buy-in. I always use the schools—whenever I'm writing a budget, I keep in funding to pay interns—to hire students. If you hire the students, you engage the teachers, you engage their parents, and then it’s a way to celebrate the students and their community will come. That also goes to any partner—keep the money as local as possible. We hire local construction companies and work with volunteers from the phone company. I plug into existing business or infrastructure so then people feel what they're already doing is a part of this new project. You can't just drop something in that's separate from everything that already exists.

The work I end up doing can seem indirect. Perhaps the mission is to build a landscape installation, have events there, and have people talk about ecology. This brings me to an event at the Rural Resource Center about a food drive. Is this wasting time? No, because I have to understand who is coming to the event that needs food. Who are the existing providers of food? Who's coming to participate? It creates an understanding of the social infrastructure that exists in the community and who are the players. That work informs the project. 

When creating community-engaged art projects, how can we avoid imposing an overarching narrative that stems from our own biases and viewpoints? (Euro-Western privilege, anthropocentric, etc.) at the expense of honoring the complexity, messiness, and interconnectedness of the subject at hand. How have you navigated that?

In some ways, it's not rocket science after all. Don't show up with your own agenda without knowing where you are and knowing who's there first. It takes time to be a part of a community. For example, I knew a woman who wanted to build a park next to the community center in Joes. I had wanted to build a sculpture park because I'm a sculpture artist and I think that would be awesome because there are no arts out here! I started writing grants to get money and quickly learned that the community didn't care about a sculpture park. I wanted to build a sculpture park because I wanted a sculpture park. The community is more interested in accessible outdoor space for exercising and congregating. What's the goal? Is the goal to create a space for the community to connect, or for me to show off the fact that I had this great idea for a Sculpture Garden? But you do have to keep an element of your own interest, otherwise, you're going to burn out and not want to do it…so there's some sculpture at the park.

There is this question of the future. The word emerges from a lot of things in that space. Rural Futures, Prairie Futures, Future Farmers of America. What are your imaginings of a Rural Future?

Something that's been important to our work is bridge-building. You look at a political map and urban spaces are blue, and rural spaces are red. What is going on? There is a lot of fear. When I moved out here I saw this truth of misunderstanding and fear. The urban and the rural—we're both afraid of each other, and we're both classifying each other into these narrow ideas. If we can't pass that fear to see each other, is the division only going to grow more and more? The opportunity to bring out Front Range community members to engage with the rural in the rural has been a very important part. We hope to make the Front Range folks more compassionate about the reality of rural life and vice versa. Ideally, I would to see our rural spaces less xenophobic, and along with that, more collaborative. The real assets of the rural and with rugged individualism come incredible resourcefulness and an incredible ability to get things done without the infrastructure there guiding them. That kind of resiliency is really powerful. But at the same time, there's a lot of resistance to feedback. “We've been doing this for years and we're going to stick to it.” Well, things aren't working and they're not going to continue to keep working the same way, so we need to be adaptable and flexible. The urban perspective has much more experience with change than the rural does. I'd like to see those assets and skill bases become more shared.

Asa: Again, back to the No-Till Conference, I sat in on a lecture with Clinton Wilson on mental health for farmers, and he talked about the importance of “Third Spaces” which are not home, not work, but some other community place. He emphasized being a regular—just being there and seeing what happens. We are seeing how people living in rural environments and farmers in particular are simultaneously at the forefront of issues around mental health, and they're at the forefront of the environmental catastrophe that we're living through. They are some of the most tenuous and sensitive groups because their work is so tied to a landscape that's changing.

When you do read some of the environmental rights articles, there's a lot of indirect blaming of the farmers. So how do we expect the farmers to not respond defensively? We should be looking at our larger food systems, capitalism, and corporations that are manipulating the farmers. It's not necessarily the farmer's fault. The farmers have been corralled into an idea of how to make a living. We need to find ways to give them leverage and options to make changes.

Do you find your work personally restorative or are there other things in your life that you find to fill your proverbial cup? Especially earlier in your career when there was burnout and the intensity of your work was high. Where did you look for emotional sustenance?

It's balance. It's balance. It's, you know, finding those moments. Even when I was working on the streets, there could be some great humor in that—people telling funny stories— finding the humor in the everyday. It's also about the support systems around you. If you have a really tough time with the client or with a project, who do you have to process that with later? Is it calling a friend? 

Is it a good collaboration? The great part of collaboration is having that team to balance out and share the load. But then there's also good old-fashioned fun, for instance, I’m going to go play rock and roll music tonight. There are these questions: “What am I doing? Where am I going?” Well, play some drums and you don't even have to think about that.