Organizers of the art show titled "The Appalachian Landscape: Bob Ross Don’t Live Here No More" felt compelled to use their art to speak out against mountaintop removal – and to support OVEC by hosting the show as a fund-raiser, with 30 percent of art sales going to OVEC.

On November 11, the show opened with a crowded reception featuring excellent bluegrass by Higher Ground and fabulous catering by Tony Mancini. Katherine Mohn, a senior Marshall University theatre major, presented a play about mountaintop removal based on the collective writing of part time MU English professor Dr. Victor Depta. The MU English Department sold The Coal Anthology.

The show ran for a week in a building in downtown Huntington, in a space donated by Dr. Joseph Touma. The wildly successful event would not have been possible without dozens of volunteers who put in hundreds of hours. See our Thank Yous for a list of some of the volunteers involved.

In their Call for Artists to join the show, the organizers asked for works of art that addressed the political, social, psychological and spiritual issues affecting the Appalachian landscape in our day.

Here are some excerpts from their Call to Artists:

• We challenge you to become informed, to create with purpose and to join with us in using our art and our talent to resist those powers that today destroy life in our community.

• We believe that the coal industry in rapacious greed has probed the belly of this land and run off with the wealth thus generated.

• We believe that mountaintop removal is the most blatant,

• extreme abuse of our people and our land, both of which have suffered a long history of abuse.

• We believe that extractive corporations have both purposely and negligently created a toxic environment, which forces out-migration and depopulation.

• We believe that knowledge of our history, a history of resistance, of organizing, of active spiritual and cultural renewal, is the necessary foundation for the future well-being of all.

• We believe that the artist, especially the singer of songs and maker of music and the story teller, have led us to seek new ways to express the frustration inherent in living in what amounts to a colony dominated by extractive industries.

Some would have us see the land we call home as merely land, like an object, something that can be divorced from who we are. But land is never merely land. It is always shaped and formed by humans even as we are shaped and formed by it. This is what is meant by landscape: we coexist in an integrative intimacy and our very identity is to be found in this coexistence. If the landscape is raped and wasted, we as a people are also laid waste. It is also true that when adults are abused, just like abused children, they sometimes become numbed, defensive, confused and closed. They become dependent upon the abuse, protective of the abuser and unable to recognize their own path toward wellness. This narrowing and numbing of the individual is the most demonic of the many evil consequences of colonial exploitation.

We stand on the shoulders of numberless, mostly anonymous, individuals, but we do not stand alone. To Joe Hill and other labor organizers of the past, to Mother Jones and the women of Appalachia that have given both heart and backbone to our culture, we owe a debt and from them we derive inspiration.

The current movement that most successfully gathers our debts and aspirations into a collective whole is OVEC. This organization has captured the attention of politicians. It has developed a strong and informed leadership in local communities. It is often responsible for the attention the mass media pays to our exploitation.

Most importantly, it has created renewed awareness that it is only through organizing that we can have power equal to that of the corporations.

We are near powerless as individuals, but through the creation of a common will and focused action we need not remain powerless, passive, observers of our own destruction.