Created in 2012, this image became part of Missoula Art Museum’s large traveling show of 34 images of my work, Hidden In Plain Sight, about Hutterite colonies, taken over 6 years. The entire show is now in the collection of the museum.

Hidden in Plain Sight

by Jill Brody

I am a storyteller. And I bring you this story from the vast windswept Great Plains, from the little-known world of the Hutterites. Reclusive, primitive, communistic Christians, they first organized in Moravia in 1562, around the radical teachings of Jacob Hutter.

Everything that they do is in the service of the colony, the meaning of life contained in the songs as well. But in the last decade, so many young men have left the colonies, and in such numbers, that there are many young women who will never marry.

I am not the only one who has heard them when they start to sing and put much faith in those voices. Because when those harmonics start to swirl in the spaces between them, there is definitely some rarified kind of grace hanging in the air.

So, I am hopeful that as they spend their adulthood attempting to shed the last vestiges of ego so that they might die well, that they will be able to resist the treacherous terrain of beckoning acquisitiveness that threatens us all, and that their music will be what grounds them.