David Mitzel believes people have stereotypes about Appalachia– about Appalachian attitudes, Appalachia culture, and even Appalachian art.

Mitzel organizes the annual Zanesville, Ohio, exhibit “Foot by Foot,” which celebrates art depicting Appalachian Ohio communities.

“These [sterotypes] are all wrong,” Mitzel said. “It’s a much broader and deeper type of response to the world.”

Mitzel distributes 12 inch by 12 inch canvas or gesso boards to artists in Ohio counties as far south as Athens, and as far north as Coshocton. Completed artworks are then delivered to an opening event and the exhibit forms a patchwork vision of the region.

In the accompanying mini-doc, I selected five participating artists to film in-process as they prepared their piece for the 2018 “Foot by Foot” exhibit. My objective was to illustrate the diversity of Ohio’s Appalachian region.  

A screenshot from the documentary “Foot by Foot” by Doug Swift.

Jane Evans is a sheep farmer who works in fiber arts and plays saxophone in her spare time; Paul Emory restores buildings in downtown Zanesville, Ohio, and sometimes paints the ones which are about to be demolished; Michael J. Rosen works in ceramics and has created a kind of nature reserve in Perry County where he meditates on ecological dilemmas and has begun to etch haiku into his plates.

The documentary short also contextualizes the “Foot by Foot” project within The Winding Road initiative, which, in addition to the arts, seeks to highlight other aspects of Appalachian Ohio, such as heritage, recreation, local foods and more.

“The region has experienced major extraction of its resources,” Mitzel said, but through The Winding Roads initiatives, including such arts programs as “Foot by Foot,” Mitzel and others are working to “make the region [one] of attraction rather than extraction.”

https://vimeo.com/299065404
Watch Doug Swift’s short documentary “Foot by Foot.”