Meet Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas, co-Founders of Wormfarm Institute, a cross-sector arts and culture organization rooted in Sauk County, Wisconsin, in the heart of the Driftless region of the Upper Midwest.

Over thirty years ago, Jay and Donna made a leap of faith, leaving behind Chicago, and the city’s vibrant arts scene, for a forty-acre dairy farm in Wisconsin. Out of this experiment grew one of the most inventive and influential models for artistic, cultural, and agricultural stewardship in rural communities, a way of seeing connections embodied in Wormfarm’s notion of the cultureshed.

From this foundation, Jay and Donna built a residency program rooted in the simple, generative idea of invitation – welcoming artists to visit, stay, and pitch in with the labor of a working farm. As we learn in this conversation, all of the work that has garnered Wormfarm such attention and respect continues to be rooted in those relationships and conversations that can be exchanged across a bean row.

As we learn, this ethos led to some of the Institute’s most well-known work: the Farm/Art DTour, a ten-day, fifty-mile, self-guided drive across Sauk County, punctuated by temporary art installations, pasture performances, and roadside poetry; and Fermentation Fest, a celebration of the deep connections between food, land, and culture.

Across all these efforts, Wormfarm has cultivated a web of cross-sector partnerships that weave together farmers, ecologists, choreographers, sculptors, and community members across the Midwest.

This conversation scans from Wormfarm’s history forward into their visions for the future, and what can emerge out of deep attention to place, culture, and ecology – and where those soundings might take all of us.

Learn more and support Wormfarm Institute at wormfarminstitute.org.

Episode Resources

• Episode transcript
• Wormfarm Institute website
  • The notion of ”cultureshed”
  • Artist Residency Program
  • Farm/Art DTour
  • Fermentation Fest
  • Hay Rake Ballet
  • Decomposium
• Aldo Leopold archives
• Dr. Evermor

We are grateful to folks across the country who have made tax-deductible contributions to Art of the Rural to make this conversation possible, and to the Ford Foundation and Good Chaos Foundation for their support of Art of the Rural’s media programs.