Find me forever at:
📬 Mary Welcome
PO Box 364
Palouse, Wash.
99161-0364

No promises:
💾 moreparades [at] gmail.com

The role of the cultural worker is to discern, nurture, cultivate, and encourage the existing culture of place.

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Mary Welcome is a multidisciplinary cultural worker and rural avant-garde artist based in Palouse, Washington. Born into a military family, her upbringing across the American landscape shaped her as a keen observer of people and place—how communities are built and broken, made and unmade. For over two decades, Mary has developed art projects that nurture local culture, reflect a sense of place, and deepen community relationships.

Her work expands upon the rural condition, exploring both issues and assets of place, and advocating for diverse, resilient, culturally-rich shared realities across the rural-urban divide. As an artist-organizer, her projects are rooted in community engagement and the development of intersectional programming to address equity, cultural advocacy, visibility, queerness, and imagination. She brings a nuanced perspective to the contemporary field, as an organizer working in service to small towns, as a cultural producer across American geographies, and as a facilitator of place-based arts programming.

Generationally and economically, she considers herself a Recessionist, never having known a stable US economy nor a secure arts industry. Mary has shown work both nationally and internationally, has covered every state in the contiguous USA via place-based research, and teaches community and academic workshops on civic-based relational aesthetics. She served as the first ever as the artist-in-residence at a statewide government agency with the Washington State Department of Transportation, maintains tenure as a post office portrait photographer for the USPS, and is the founder of arts non-profit More Parades.

WHY HERE, WHY NOW ꩜ When I am asked the tricky question, I say that I'm from the Great Palouse Prairie, an endangered bioregion straddling the Idaho/Washington geographical, social, and political border. The town I live in is also called Palouse, a place of around 900 people from varying social, economic, and political identities. This landscape was formed by the wind, with moonlike dunes of peculiar loess hills that are planted with garbanzo beans, wheat, barley, and most of the nation's lentils. People that live here work as farmers, loggers, miners, junkers, educators, care workers, computer chip fabricators, mechanics, contractors, poets, punks, artists, and organizers.

I moved to Palouse in my early 20s because I wanted to build a life of interdependence, civic service, and belonging. Since then, we have tended to one other. I care deeply about the possibilities that rural communities engender: the resourcefulness that comes from scarcity, the solidarity that comes from isolation, and the futures that come from the hard work of being in it together.

Palouse is a place of soft power and long promise. The skills I use in my creative practice are modeled by my rural neighbors: how to show up and pitch in across differences, how shared resource creates shared abundance, how revision results in transformation. We all have a responsibility to engage in a reciprocal relationship with place—as a community, or even as a nation, how are we facilitating sites of exchange rather than extraction? What can we revise so that the people and place will better tend to one another?

When we hold space for change in our community relationships, we are also making space for repair and reconciliation. I am humbled by my rural community and our capacity for change-making by nurturing relationships over time. A commitment to conscientious neighboring means we are embedded in a daily process of discourse, accountability, action, and equity.

Possibilities are most infinite at a local level because the local is both personal and profound, capable of the most immediate and lasting consequence. Our country has a lot to learn from the yonder, because out here in the country—as the weather does change, so must our way forward.

I am a rural cultural worker, a civic designer, and an artist-activist, but the community role that is most important to me is neighbor. My relationship with Palouse is one of devotion.

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