The virus arrives, the world shutters, and in Washington, DC, the homesick journalist Christopher Vondracek—recently relocated from South Dakota—starts scrolling through digitized oil paintings by the Midwestern nostalgia artist Terry Redlin. Vondracek traces Redlin’s coming-of-age during the Farm Crisis as well as his own fleeting memories of a small-town wracked with upheaval from farm foreclosures and a shifting political perspective on the prairie. The author takes an inside-out look at the entrenched cultural tropes and portraits of rural, rustic nostalgia in an age of global grain markets, collapsing rural communities, and changing heartland values.
Vondracek often asks of this land, “Is it a Redlin?” seeking to reconcile the idyllic portrayal of his American heartland with the reality unfolding on TV and social media channels. In Redlin or Rodin he looks to understand how the romantic palette of a farm country pastoral scene can obscure the industrialization of the very same land.