The Wadena Alley Arts project displays 34 murals, in 18 locations throughout downtown Wadena, which the creators say depict 1,000 years of Minnesota history. There are loggers, Native Americans, pre-history Minnesota, famous films, important Minnesotans, steamboats, miners and, of course, farmers.
The history of farming mural, on the side of the Wadena Eye Clinic, is four panels painted by different artists. The well-thought-out work is colorful, detailed and provocative. Emily Ament, a Wadena-Deer Creek High School senior, painted the modern day farming panel.
A farm girl who had never painted anything, Ament worked six months under the tutelage of her school’s art teacher, Jim Formanek. The result is an 8- by 12-foot collage from photos of her family on their farm. The colorful collage looks somewhat fractured. That, the local newspaper wrote shortly after Ament’s mural was installed last May, is meant to show the “coming apart” of family farming.
Ament’s mural is the only panel in the farming group giving a prominent place to a man. This, the newspaper said, is an affirmative art action to demonstrate the “equal partnership” women had in Minnesota agriculture.
You don’t need someone else’s opinion to enjoy these paintings, however. The panel depicting the first clearing and plowing of the land is ingeniously presented as two unified paintings so filled with energy you can hear the oxen panting and the crack of the woman’s whip as she urges the team on for the man behind the plow.
This painting is sliced diagonally by a stump-pulling rope pulled by a horse driven by two men. The rope allows two paintings on one panel. A woman, energetically levering a stump from the ground, is in a separate painting from the woman driving the oxen.
In the next panel, by Madeline Powers of Verndale, two women rest on their pitchforks under a blazing blue sky. In the middle ground are chickens, a child milking a cow and a man behind horse and plow. In the background is an outhouse with a Stanley Steamer car parked by it. Perhaps, an adventurous city fellow with an urgent need drove it?
The third panel shows the coming of electricity, tractors and that strange invention, the silo.
Now that you’ve spent half an hour studying these murals there are only 28 more to visit. Perhaps you should spend the day?
