Tanya Berry's Work and Wisdom

My 2025 Agrarian Voices Lecture for The Berry Center

Courtesy of the Ann and Dick O’Hanlon Slide Collection, Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library

Dear Readers,

I finished a lengthy tech fast last week—which means I just saw that the Berry Center posted my 2025 Agrarian Voices lecture on their Youtube page. I am posting both the text and video below.

Cheers, and thank you for reading / watching,
Gracy Olmstead

Attention, Affection, and a “Decent Language”: Lessons Learned from an Artist At Home

I must start with two wildflowers: one from the fields Tanya knows here in Kentucky, and one from her native California. Both help reveal Tanya’s own character and beauty. The first is Dodacatheon Meadia, or “Shooting Star.” The shooting star is a perennial wildflower that grows here in Kentucky, in meadows, prairies, or woodlands. Its flowers generally open in late spring. In an article written for The Berry Center by Mary’s daughter Tanya Smith (named after her grandmother), Tanya the younger wrote that her Granny “loves the shooting stars because they’re ‘startling’ and ‘just so complicated.’ They are the type of wildflowers,” she explains, “that leave you in awe and beg you to ask the question, ‘How did that even happen?’.”

The second wildflower is the Calypso Bulbosa, or the Calypso Orchid, otherwise known as “Western Fairy Slipper.” This delicate flower grows along Mount Tamalpais’s Cataract Trail in California. It generally blooms from March to June. Its name refers to the idea of concealment: it often hugs the forest floor tightly and is not always easy to spot. But the orchid’s brilliant pink stuns the viewer who is paying attention.

Tanya Berry loves the complication of the Shooting Star for a reason. When we look at the world around us and expect pat answers or easy solutions, we’ve often gone astray. Complication implies complexity, beauty, and health. The Shooting Star wildflower is a reminder that there is wonder and loveliness in even the everyday. Each life is an invitation to curiosity and awe: to consider what exists, and how it came to be. The Calypso Orchid, meanwhile, is a reminder that it is good to live in one place, and to love it well: to hug the earth tight, and to shine brightly in one’s soil.

Tanya’s life has been an adventure. She was raised by artists and academics in both California and Kentucky. She moved constantly back and forth between these two locations as a child and teenager. As a young woman, she studied art, French, flute, cello, oboe, piano, dance, and literature, among other things. She married Wendell and traveled the world for a while. But after Wendell had started working at New York University, Tanya helped him make the decision to move back here to Kentucky. The couple decided to make a home together in this place.

For someone so young, someone who had lived a life characterized by big cities and university circles, to leave these things behind and to move to a rural place—is remarkable. The Calypso Orchid reminds me of Tanya because, in her own beautiful and brilliant way, she has made this place home, and she has held it tight. She has tried to foster peace and loveliness in her place. But Tanya also reminds me of the Shooting Star, because her life, and the decisions she has made, are “an invitation to both joy and awe—to ask the question, ‘How did that even happen?’”

To ask that question is to desire to learn more about Tanya: her life, insights, and character. From Tanya, I am learning many things. Today, I intend to focus on the way she has cultivated a home here in Kentucky through artistry, affection, and a decent language.

Ann O’Hanlon wrote these words about her niece, Tanya, after her birth on April 30, 1936:

“Dear Grandpa, Grandma, and Uncles,

You truly should be proud of the new member of the family — she is a really good looking baby, looking—even in this indeterminate stage—surprisingly like M.D. … 7 pounds 1 ounce and beautifully formed. … Our only regret is that she is not a radical baby as she would have been had she come on May 1^st — Mayday.”

Tanya was born just one day shy of radicalism, it seems. But her milieu was revolutionary, nonetheless; Tanya’s father, Clifford Amyx, was a self-professed Communist at the time, and a local supervisor for the WPA’s Art Project. During his time in San Francisco, prior to Tanya’s birth, he worked for his wife’s uncle in a local coal yard. He later recalled that he “got shot at in one of those strikes out there and had a wonderful time.” Tanya’s aunt and uncle, Ann and Dick O’Hanlon, were also artists; for a while, they were members of a group called Mankind United that sprung up in San Francisco during the 1930s, seeking to fight the oppressive nature of the capitalist status quo and to replace it with the “establishment of a world brotherhood.”

I share these stories to emphasize just how “radical” life could have been during Tanya’s early years. She was born to poor artists living in Mill Valley, California, amid a time of great socioeconomic upheaval. Much was in flux. World War II was only three years away. And yet, despite Ann’s declared preference for the radical, Tanya’s early life in Mill Valley was full of many constants and traditions that she held dear. The Amyxes and O’Hanlons (along with other local relatives) loved to hike, walk, and camp. They spent many days exploring the glories of Yosemite, the coastal redwoods, local beaches, and Mount Tamalpais. Tanya has recalled that “Mill Valley in the ‘40s and ‘50s was a quiet, beautiful, [and cheap place. It was a safe place to live, full of artists] … and a wonderland of places to walk and play. So close to the big city, and yet so calm. Full of wild animals and redwood trees. And fog.” Ann and Dee both enjoyed cooking. The families would eat casseroles, steamed crabs, salads, breads, and pies, and one of Tanya’s uncles often made German crepes on Sunday mornings. While Cliff Amyx helped supervise artistic exhibits at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, Dee played with Tanya, gave her baths, and worked in the garden. In her letters, Dee recollects time spent pruning and tending her ferns, mock oranges, and roses.

It seems (if it is all right for me to comment at this juncture, with much still to learn) that Tanya’s early life was divided between these interesting dynamics: on the one hand characterized by the upheaval of the 20th century artistic world, and on the other hand cultivated within the constants and traditions of the domestic arts. Both forms of art were gifts, given and received, between Tanya’s family members. But the artistic careers of Tanya’s loved ones required many people in her life to move constantly, herself included. Her father became an art professor so that he could make a regular salary, and along with Dee and Tanya, he moved back and forth between California and Lexington, Kentucky multiple times during Tanya’s childhood. In a letter, Tanya once recollected that she attended 22 schools, some of them repeats, during her childhood.

Nevertheless, both the visual and the domestic arts were a source of joy for Tanya throughout these years. She has described the O’Hanlon’s home as “a miraculous place, all a work of art.” The gardens were full of her Uncle Dick’s sculptures. Ann placed new, lovely paintings on the walls on a regular basis. Dick’s fruit trees were carefully pruned sculptures themselves. Even the bulletin board in the O’Hanlon’s home was beautiful: the items her aunt and uncle pinned on it demonstrated careful attention to color, pattern, and margin. Cliff’s watercolors hang on the walls of Tanya and Wendell’s home, and Tanya fondly remembers his singing, as well as her mother’s dancing. Dee, she told me, was the best folk dancer in the state of Kentucky. Life was a sensory feast.

Amid all these delights, Tanya developed her own eye for beauty: for the ways things ought to look. Tanya’s parents, as well as her aunt and uncle, increasingly celebrated and practiced abstract art. There was a deep and earnest desire on the part of California artists at the time to create something new, disruptive, and contemporary. In interviews with the Archives of American Art, Cliff Amyx critiqued realism and representational paintings, noting the importance of modernist artists in the Northern California art scene. Their groundbreaking efforts at surrealism, cubism, and abstraction were meant to capture not just a message, it seems, but a moment. There was a sense that, after the turn of the century, things could not stay the same. In a letter to her mother, Ann O’Hanlon once argued that artworks focused on material forms lost the soul of things they conveyed. She said, they “forget or crowd out the important part.”

For his part, Cliff said he was not necessarily against more classical modes of painting. But he strongly believed art ought to say something, and to say something that mattered. Many people enjoyed representational art without ever having to confront its underlying meaning or purpose. Art could not truly be art and be so simple, he explained. In a time as turbulent as the early 20^th century, it also could not be silent. “If you have any sense of what’s going on in the world,” Cliff explained, “you don’t want to do retrograde. You want to do whatever the time dictates that you need to do.”

As a child, Tanya was immersed in these messages and critiques. She once recalled in a letter, “I was lectured to, especially by my Aunt Ann, while visiting museums and studios. I frequently disagreed with her,” she added, “but did so silently.” Tanya was “drawn” to representational art, she says, even amid California’s heyday of modernist art.

Representational art can contain many styles, but regardless of style, it attends carefully to the form of the thing presented. It finds its meaning in—not despite of—that physical form. Representational art reminds us that the “thingness of things” matters. We learn to respect the way things are in the world, apart from our own needs or wants. The artist’s unique vision, style, and medium all impact the artwork; it is not empty of personalization or uniqueness. But representational art calls the painter to attend to that which exists beyond themselves, and to draw the viewer to that form of attention, as well. There is something of reverence in the representational arts, including the landscapes that Tanya grew to love as a child. She came to love this form of art long before meeting Wendell, and long before she herself joined in the work and life of a farm. Yet her love of representational art (particularly landscapes) is connected to her love of farming and to her belief that farming itself is an art. As she put it in a letter, “these things are related.” I would love to pause and think about that statement. How could a love of representational art and “farming thought of as an art” be connected?

Farming, too, must attend carefully to the form of the thing presented. The farmers (the good farmers, at least) are artists who learn the patterns and rhythms of their ecosystems, and then submit their desires to those patterns and rhythms. Tanya once recalled to Wendell that she loved the fact that they planted their garden not according to “convention, custom, or law,” but simply when it was “time.” Farmers must attend to the slope of their land, the needs of their animals, the timing of the seasons, and the relations between soil and crop. For farmers, as for painters, the thingness of things matters. Each landscape is endlessly unique. It is tempered and shaped by history, farming methods, crops, and tools, as well as by its soil, climate, watersheds, and local flora and fauna. Prior to any effort at shaping or cultivating, the subject is complicated. But then we begin to add method, industry, and care—and these, too, require knowledge of endless variables and needs. The entire world of farming is deeply complex, Tanya has noted, requiring a great deal of intellectual knowledge. She did not grow up in this world, and the learning curve required to become a farmer was significant. Nevertheless, she describes herself as someone who has always been able to adapt—as someone who has had to adapt to changing circumstances. And adapt she did.

Both Wendell and Tanya have worked on Lanes Landing Farm as partners for nearly their whole lives. With the help and support of countless rural women, including but not limited to her mother-in-law, Virginia Berry, Loyce Flood, Polly Perry, Jane Perry, Nancy Young, and Sis Poe, Tanya learned the arts of the rural farm woman. She recalls calling and asking these women for advice on things, or going to visit one of them so that she could observe their labor and learn from it. They taught her how to can, what to freeze, and what varieties she should choose for her garden. They helped with sewing skills. They helped with community skills. With their advice and assistance, Tanya learned to care for a milk cow, sheep, pigs, and chickens. She learned how to pull lambs and how to drive a tractor. She helped with hog killings and tobacco harvesting. One time, she remembers, a very pregnant cow on the farm stayed down and wouldn’t get up; Wendell was away from home, and so she called Uncle Morgan Perry to make sure nothing was wrong. When he arrived, he laughed. “She’s just taking a nap,” he told Tanya. But, Tanya noted, “he didn’t make me feel like a fool.” One of the most important aspects of this place to Tanya was its charity and praise: people worked together, and as they worked together, they both noticed and commended each other’s talents. “There’s a sort of kindness, observation, and admiration,” Tanya said, that she stepped into when she moved to rural Kentucky; and it was all possible because folks worked together.

In addition to her animal husbandry, Tanya and Wendell tended a sizable garden, one that produced reliably in dry and wet years, due to careful soil maintenance. Tanya pickled, canned, and froze this produce. She learned the craft of rural cooking, making fresh whole grain bread, yogurt, cottage cheese, butter, granola, biscuits, and pies, to name just a few of her culinary concoctions. Mary has said that her mother helped grow and cook perhaps 85 percent of the food she ate growing up. Wendell and Tanya raised their own meat, too. Tanya even made head cheese. Through her careful attention to and affection for the rural men and women surrounding her, Tanya learned a new way of being and working. She once told journalist Robert Jensen that these experiences offered her “a whole other picture of ‘women’s work.’” Through them, she “changed a lot and got more pleased with the idea of women’s work being good.”

We live in a time and place that often disdains or derides the work of the home. Tanya has noted that the sort of work she herself began doing once she moved to Kentucky was generally looked down upon in the artistic circles she had inhabited for much of her early life. “Being a housewife wasn’t seen as merit,” she told me.

Not much has changed. The work of homemaking and housekeeping is often unseen. And the fruit of its labors often disappears quickly—especially with young children. Floors do not stay swept. Dishes do not stay clean. Meals are eaten and must be made again. The work can be thankless at times, as well. Undoubtedly, throughout history, women have done most of this work, and many have done it in unjust situations. When we confront the inequalities inherent in so much of our world’s rhythms of housework, we are tempted to disdain the work itself. As Wendell has pointed out in his own work, however, this is the wrong reaction. The work of tending the earth and its creatures has a dignity and beauty that we disdain to our own peril. It is vital to our humanity, to our life on this earth, and to both ecological sustainability and communal wholeness. The problem is not the work. The problem is that, due to our own hubris, and often due to the realities of racism, classism, and sexism, we have disdained manual work and those who do it. But as Tanya told me last summer, “when a place and its households are connected,” it offers “a wholesome way of life, rooted on the land it’s on. It becomes a space in which needs are honorably addressed.”

Tanya has embraced both housework, farm work, and community work as necessary and beautiful arts. In doing so, she united the lessons of her adult life with the principles and ideas of her childhood. She was raised in an art world in which people thought “highly of themselves,” as she told me. She had to grow to see farming as a “respectable art.” But in a phone conversation, Tanya once noted that her aunt and uncle’s approach to hospitality and home-crafting taught her that the artistic principles of proportion, spacing, and margin could—indeed, must—be writ large and applied to home and farm, as well as to painting and sculpture. Careful attention to design and perspective are in fact everyday principles of good living. The home is meant to be a space of freedom and rest. Tanya describes it as a “center of beauty”—not something that ought to exist on the periphery of one’s life, but rather as the focal point of life. Home is meant to cultivate in us a surety of wholeness and beauty in a broken world. A space in which we can be. A space that both reflects and praises the thingness of things.

For Tanya’s family, Lanes Landing Farm has been this quiet center. Tanya has decorated her home with family artworks, poems, plants, and flowers—always flowers, for as long as they are blooming. Mary describes her parents’ home as a place of peace, for both her and her children. Her children and grandchildren loved to stay with Wendell and Tanya. Mary recalls that her daughter Katie once commented at Wendell and Tanya’s house, “I am always good here!” But Mary has wondered, for her own part, what would have happened if Tanya had not chosen contentedness and artistry in her rural home. What if Tanya had treated other places, such as California or New York City, as “better” than Lanes Landing Farm? Would Mary have stayed? Would her own daughters have stayed in Kentucky? Mary shared these questions with me last summer. And then she noted, “Daddy came home. Mom made home.” It is not just Mary and her children who have stayed, either: Wendell and Tanya’s son Den and his wife are still living and farming here. Den’s two children and grandchild live and work here. Tanya and Wendell’s decision to stay, and to make a home, still inspires their children and grandchildren.

In a 2019 speech she gave at the O’Hanlon Center for the Arts, Tanya described her aunt and uncle’s home as “the made world within the given world.” This expression seems apt to describe Lanes Landing Farm, as well. Throughout her adult life, Tanya has also made a world within her given world. She has crafted a life of artistry in the place that is her subject. In doing so, she has blessed many people. As Wendell himself has put it in his essay “The Long-Legged House,” “she came as a stranger into the country where I had spent my life, and made me feel more free and comfortable in it than I had ever felt before. That seems to me the most graceful generosity that I know.”

Last summer, I had the great privilege and joy of visiting Tanya at her home here in Kentucky. As we ate brownies she had baked, the air full of the scent of summer rain and marigolds, I presented to her the problem of housework (as I understood it). I asked her, “What about the drudgery?” I was thinking of endless diapers, of the floor my dog and children constantly muddy, and of the dishes: the constant dishes.

I remember her wise smile. “Having to commute to work sounds like it could be ‘drudgery,’” Tanya said. “Practicing scales on the piano—that could be seen as drudgery, too.” But then she observed, “The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is.” It is worth repeating. The use of a decent language can change your whole idea of what something is. That transformative sentence has not left me since. Tanya suggested that the right words could change one’s mind. No, more than that—that the right words could change one’s entire perception and experience of a thing. The right language reanimates our work. But to reanimate our work, we must apply a new habit of naming to the things we do.

Our habits of naming, Tanya explained, are often rooted in our contempt for things we do not want to do. Many individuals do very good work every day without realizing it. They have gotten used to naming necessary forms of work in a way that conveys boredom or disdain. But what happens when that which has been named “drudgery” is instead named “art”? When the work that some see as “beneath” them is instead seen for what it is: dignified and dignifying work that serves a human community? Tanya also told me, in that conversation, that no good work should truly be seen as beneath us. We have so stratified and distanced ourselves from manual labor that we have in fact lost a true sense of our own humanity. There is dignity and goodness in the work of tending soil and scrubbing floors. Tanya has recalled that “Seeing people do real, hard work was instructive around here.” People regularly “worked past their comfort level”—indeed, she added, “comfort level often didn’t exist.” As a parent, too, she noted, you often have to “wipe blood and snot when you don’t want to.” Yet when we use a pointed and careful language, naming things rightly, we begin to see that what is necessary is also good. To work hard, to use your hands, to clean a child’s bloody knee: these things tie us to the earth we live in, on, and from. While others endlessly seek to climb a corporate ladder, to push down or demean others in their efforts at economic and financial gain, the humble and meek will “inherit the earth.” Perhaps quite literally.

For decades, Tanya has managed and cultivated a flourishing farm (often by herself, while Wendell was traveling to earn a living). She helped grow, can, freeze, and preserve food for her family. She has served as a conversationalist, typist, editor, and advisor to her husband in his writing work. She has been attentive to the needs of her children, supporting them throughout their lives and into their adulthood. Amid all these immediate responsibilities, she has also served on the local library board, tutored children in the local public school, helped found a local group called the Foundation for Excellence in Education which provided local lectures and concerts, and helped organize a hospital transportation system that went on for 26 years until the county took charge of it. She played piano regularly at church, taught Sunday school, sang in a women’s local choral group, hosted meals for folks after Sunday service, worked at the local bloodmobile, opened her home to the countless guests who would stop by on Sunday afternoons, and even helped found a new Baptist seminary. That is a lot.

Perhaps Tanya is “radical”—more radical than her Aunt Ann ever realized. After all, as Wendell himself has pointed out, “radical” comes from the Latin word radix, for root. To be radical is simply to want to get at the root of the problems we face. And we have a problem with our homes in the United States today. Our world has somehow gotten away from any idea of a household economy, or of a living and healthy home. We are barely home at all, between our commutes, long hours at work, kids’ school, extracurriculars, weekend engagements, and the like. Home has dwindled in importance. But neglecting our homes has not been good for us. Constantly rising rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and stress, the solace we take in our virtual worlds and smartphones, and the discontent we express in our work and school, all suggest that something is “off.” And Tanya is right. We will begin addressing the root of these issues when we restore the centrality of home, and of the home economy, and when we eat three meals together a day at our kitchen tables. Her life teaches me that this is not just good, it is empowering. It is a great artistic opportunity. It makes life beautiful. A loving home that is well-tended gives vibrancy, health, and wholeness to our days. It is good work—work that will last.

Tanya chose this life. In doing so, she has stoked a flame of life and love that has been dying out in American life. She has pointed out a path for other humans who crave a sense of home. While others tell us to “lean in” and to climb the corporate ladder, to chase an American dream of wealth and acclaim—one that can easily turn into a nightmare—Tanya offers us a radically different vision of health and wholeness. One that is rooted and grounded in place and love, freeing in its simplicity and beauty. Like the Calypso Orchid, she teaches us, all of us, to find a spot, beautify it, and love it deeply. Like the Shooting Star, she reminds us to embrace the complexity and mystery of our lives. She teaches us to attend lovingly to the little things, and to use a “decent language” to describe this work.

Tanya once told Robert Jensen that when women have “worked hard, they deserved to be noticed for working hard and for doing good work.”

Tanya deserves to be noticed and praised for doing good work. She has embraced farm and home, church and school, kith and kin, tending them all with love and careful attention. By doing this, she has created a living artwork—of home, farm, family, and community—that has lasting, tangible value. It is our job now to recognize and praise that effort—and, with God’s help, to go and do likewise.