Weaving Identity in the Arkansas Ozarks

It’s impossible to truly write an essay about identity without indulging in the first person. Yet, I’ve found it insanely difficult and almost sickening. Confronting myself in this way feels too narcissistic and when I begin really thinking about a core part of my identity – being from the Arkansas Ozarks – I get very defensive and unsure. My relationship with my hometown is weird and when I start talking about it too much, I begin thinking in circles over a fear of over-romanticizing a very complicated place. The main issue is that identity – personal identity, that is, the way we understand ourselves within the context of others – is in constant flux. I haven’t lived in Arkansas in eight years, though I try to go back at least twice a year. Some days I feel like the Ozarks are wearing off of me. 

I think the Ozarks are wearing off of Arkansas too. Writer and Ozarks historian Olivia Paschal refers to Northwest Arkansas as a contemporary “company town” thanks to Walmart and the Walton Family. It’s hard to avoid how rapidly the area is growing – the region is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was when I was a kid, before the Walton family’s philanthropic project, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, opened. Crystal Bridges is what brought me to New York in the first place – it gave me my first job in the arts when I was seventeen. It opened the art world up to me as a young girl obsessed with art history who had felt that she had been culturally land-locked. Yet Crystal Bridges and many other Walton projects in the area also bring about what Paschal calls a disingenuous form of “cultural kitchiness” that pushes a hollow brand of “corporate multiculturalism” that rarely engages with the art forms already present in the region. Through dated cultural imports from the coasts, Northwest Arkansas is increasingly becoming more like every other mid-sized metropolitan area in the country, desperately trying to appeal to the young urban professionals from the coasts with their craft breweries, award-winning coffee shops, bike trails, and world-class art museums.

The longer I’ve been away from home, the more I’ve started reading about the cultural origins of the place I grew up in – particularly in the accounts of folklorist Vance Randolph who documented the Ozark region from the 1920s until his death in 1980. Some of the things he writes about are deeply familiar to me (my great-uncle was a water-witcher) – while others, such as the Elizabethan accents and courting ceremonies, are completely alien. In Randolph’s 1931 book, The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, he describes the region as such:

One has to only leave the broad roads and go back a few miles into the hills to find himself in a different environment, among people who have until very recently been curiously isolated from the outside world, and whose way of living has changed very little since their sturdy forehearers wandered west from the southern Appalachians more than a century ago. There are men in the Ozarks today who sleep in cord beds and hunt with muzzle-loading rifles; there are women who still use spinning-wheels and weave cloth on home-made looms; there are minstrels who sing old English ballads brought over by the seventeenth-century colonists; there are old settlers who believe firmly in witchcraft and all sorts of medieval superstitions; there are people who speak with an Elizabethan dialect so outlandish that it is well-nigh unintelligible to the ordinary tourist from Chicago and points east. The typical Ozark native differs so widely from the average urban American that when the latter visits the hill country he feels himself among an alien people.

People I meet in New York often try to guess where I’m from. Not one person has guessed Arkansas. Accents are increasingly fading in the young people in my area and the only folk song I know is the Arkansas Traveller because we had to learn it in our 8th grade Arkansas history class. Though I’ve been fascinated by visual art since I was nine, I know nothing about the renowned textile practices of the region I grew up in.

There are artists and thinkers in Northwest Arkansas trying desperately to revive local traditions in the midst of globalisation and Walton hegemony. One of which is my friend – the designer, fiber artist, and local activist Abby Hollis. I knew I wanted to interview her regarding our shared Ozark heritage because she is the one person I know who actively practices her Arkansas identity. As an outdoor apparel designer, a sheep-shearer, co-founder of the Ozark chapter of Fibershed, and board member of Ozark Folkways, Abby is deeply entwined with the many generations of people in the region who are hoping to reinvigorate older, local, and more organic ways of being.

Last summer, I found myself stuck on a gravel road in the middle of 95-degree Arkansas heat waiting for a furious three-legged beagle to help scare a herd of confused lambs towards me. I had never imagined—nor wanted—to find myself in such a situation. I have two degrees in Art History, a shoe-box apartment in Brooklyn, and a job at a blue chip gallery in Chelsea. Despite being a third-generation Arkansan, I had never wrangled sheep before (much to the incredulity of people I meet in New York). Yet I was stuck, sunburnt and sweating, waiting for this stupid dog to bark so I could push these lambs up the road and to the fence where Abby was waiting in the farmer’s truck.

Abby was the reason I had ended up here as she was farm sitting the week I was visiting my parents. We’ve known each other since elementary school and are best friends in the most classic sense. She had returned to our hometown after college and has since decided to stay there – something that has become increasingly rare for people in our graduating class (every year I learn of someone else I know from Fayetteville High School moving into an apartment a few streets away from me in Brooklyn). Abby harvests her own wool on the same farm in Prairie Grove we were desperately trying to wrangle sheep back into. She travels the region shearing sheep and teaches kids in the community about wool and traditional textile making. She even works with old-fashioned spinning wheels, mirroring the prevalent practices Randolph described in 1931:

…most of the Ozark spinners use large wheels of a different type. In spinning with the big wheel the woman stands up and turns it with her finger or with a short stick held against a spoke, and as the thread runs out she steps back just far enough to give it the proper twist!

Abby is a fiber artist who is hoping to teach people to “have a more meaningful relationship with the objects around them.” As I see it, her entire life is an art practice. Since getting her BFA in Fibers and Design for Sustainability from the Savannah College of Art in Design, she has worked to build a more local, environmentally-friendly mode of engaging with craft in the Ozarks. While studying at SCAD, Abby had the opportunity to intern abroad in Peru and India and learned directly from indigenous communities about their own hyper-local textile practices that had little environmental impact. She told me that upon coming back to Georgia she began focusing on how specific “textiles exist because the climate makes sense, and the local agriculture makes sense, and design is so rooted in cultural ties. Coming back to school I started thinking about how to apply this concept to the places I live in.” She began working with cotton farmers in Georgia, coming up with textile patterns based on Georgian folk songs, and weaving new grass fibers from parks in Savannah. Ultimately, this project shaped the way she viewed the place she had been living in for three years:

It was a way for me to feel connected to that place, whereas most of my college career I didn't really feel connected to Savannah. It was a place I was visiting. Out of this lived exploration I inadvertently felt like that place meant something to me.  I think that helped me when I came back [to Arkansas] as well. Obviously, I've always had a connection here and I've loved it, but I've also felt that in some ways I don't really know who I am or where I'm from. It’s complicated.

This sentiment of trying to understand herself and where she’s from is what really drew me to Abby for this essay. She’s in many ways the opposite of me; she’s one of the few people actively engaged in her Ozark identity as a physical and communal practice.

While Abby’s day job is as an apparel designer at local outdoor company LIVSN, she spends the majority of her freetime on the board of Ozark Folkways, an organization founded in the 1970s with the purpose of uplifting the arts and craft culture of the region. There, Abby teaches spinning and weaving courses to kids and adults and helps to organize their annual Fiber Fest. After becoming active in Folkways, she gained a new incentive for her practice beyond mere sustainability:

Pretty quickly you look around the room and you're like, I might be the only one who's going to be here in 30 years. And it would take me more than 30 years to know what [the older spinners and artisans] know. Not to be super morbid, but that is a big motivator for me. The practices I see at Folkways are really special. They give me the same feeling that I had sitting in that village in Peru watching women dye yarn. I found places at home that give me that same feeling and that same sense of place and they're barely hanging on. I’m scared.

I feel that in a lot of ways I have a responsibility and (this is probably unhealthy) I have a responsibility to be the person that makes sure that this stuff doesn't go away. The young person who learns to spin; the person that weaves; the person who gets another generation bought into this culture; the person who makes the Excel spreadsheets with everyone's contact information; or the person who can use social media to attract young people who aren't willing or able to just meet someone by word of mouth.

In many ways, teaching young people the local modes of creating also attempts to solve a crucial issue that organizations like Crystal Bridges leave open: that the only way of finding success and meaning in art is by adopting an internationally accepted practice. It must follow the trends of the cosmopolitan centers of the art world. For example, while textile practices are extremely popular right now in the realm of contemporary art, what is being displayed in renowned institutions is the work that has been processed through the system of art schools, galleries, and collectors. Rarely are these institutions going to purchase the intricate lace work of some Ozark lacemaker who never went to SCAD or the Art Institute of Chicago. Value in art, of course, is not dependent on these institutional metrics of success. Yet the presence of Crystal Bridges has put pressure on artisans in the area to begin thinking of their work in this dialectic, whether for better or worse. Galleries are popping up around Northwest Arkansas, which is great for the economic success of artists in the area, but is also shifting the look of local textile practices (to mimic famous international textile artists such as Cecilia Vicuña or El Anatsui) and the fundamental reasons why people in the area create to begin with.

The goal for artists like Abby is not so much to have their work end up on the white walls of a museum, but rather to seek a sense of self within their particular place and community. Hyper-localism can be crucial in places like the Ozarks that are increasingly losing a sense of place. This is critical both on an environmental level – as a gallery employee I am deeply familiar with the climate costs of constantly shipping art internationally, even domestically – as well as on a spiritual level. Working directly with the land and the community around you can tie you to your sense of self better than anything else. Spending time on the farm as a means of developing her textile practice had a major philosophical impact on Abby:

I think I've learned a lot about how humans are supposed to live life from being even barely involved in agriculture. I've learned about this place and its perks and its limitations. I recognize when it hasn't rained in a long time now. I didn't used to do that. But also I feel more like I give myself permission to fluctuate my lifestyle with the seasons more, which definitely wasn’t a thing that I used to think was okay. Now I'm like, yeah, when the days are short, I'm not biologically supposed to do a lot of things. And when the days are long, I'm going to do all the things. I don't need to feel bad about it in the winter when I don't do anything – that is not how I'm made.

Farmers and artisans like Abby that are committed to sustainable, local practices—whether they were born and raised in the Ozarks or not—have more of a right to claim an Ozark identity than I do. They’re entrenched in the pure practice of being. Yet through her and the many other people in my hometown who are committed to building a stronger community, I hope to re-root myself into my Arkansas identity when I can. Even if that means waiting on a gravel road for hours in the middle of July for a herd of frightened sheep to follow me. Saying I’m from Arkansas is easy, but a commitment to staying in touch with the people and the place that made me who I am is what makes the Ozarks a part of me. It is corny, I can’t lie, but practicing identity takes almost as much humility as writing in the first person does.

This article was originally published in Auskeliden Mag in April 2025.