When Heidi Jeub entered graduate school for Arts & Cultural Leadership, she was already deeply invested in supporting rural artists. She provided professional development workshops for artists in non-metro locations, gaining firsthand insight into the unique challenges they faced. It was during this time that she realized the invisible barriers between rural artists and urban-based organizations were not rooted in the merit of their work, but in practical obstacles like time, travel, and—more insidiously—generational biases from both rural and urban art communities.

Jeub’s research, driven by a need to understand these divides, uncovered several key issues that shaped the aesthetic conversation between rural and urban spaces. The first was the challenge of proximity—the physical distance between rural communities and urban cultural hubs. Second, there was a pervasive romanticism of rural life, often detached from the realities of rural existence. Lastly, there existed a deep-rooted bias that painted rural people as uneducated or uncultured, an assumption that frequently permeated media narratives and social discourse. As these biases continued to surface in political and social conversations, Jeub felt compelled to address them, untangling a prejudice that affected over 20% of the American population.

In her series Rural Flight, Jeub brings these complex issues to the forefront through abstract oil and acrylic paintings. The work offers a fresh approach to subjects deeply tied to the challenges rural communities face, including education, healthcare, and public policy. Through a combination of gesture, color, shape, and line, Jeub creates compositions that explore how the systematic biases against rural communities have, over decades, shaped larger societal structures. As she explains, "Because the content is complex, I prefer to work out themes in abstract forms. The composition becomes a reflection of relationships—of how one element interacts with another."

Each painting in Rural Flight is designed to evoke a specific type of relationship, whether it be the dance between colors, the tension between light and dark, or the contrast of confusion and calm. In the context of rural life, these relationships reflect the tensions between isolation and connection, tradition and change, and personal identity versus external perception.

Rural Flight itself is an exploration of the phenomenon of rural exodus—the migratory pattern of people leaving rural areas for urban centers. It is urbanization seen from the perspective of those left behind, a reflection on the emotional, cultural, and socioeconomic impact of rural depopulation.

Through this body of work, Jeub not only challenges the biases surrounding rural life, but also invites viewers to reflect on the broader cultural and political implications of the rural-urban divide. The exhibition serves as a powerful reminder of the invisible yet enduring forces that shape our perceptions of place, community, and identity.