Hard Ain't it Hard: A Song to Woody Guthrie

Title: Hard Ain't it Hard: A Song to Woody Guthrie

Artist: Laura Conway

Exhibition Dates: August 2 - August 31. Opening reception August 2 5-8pm.

Hard Ain’t it Hard: A Song to Woody Guthrie puts artist Laura Conway in conversation with folk legend Woody Guthrie. While best known as a traveling songwriter behind classics like This Land Is Your Land, Guthrie was also a prolific visual artist, poet, and political thinker—an expansive creative force whose work extended far beyond music. In preparation for this show, Conway conducted research at the Woody Guthrie Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she encountered his drawings, journals, doodles, lyrics, and lesser-known collaborations—like Folksay, a 1942 dance work choreographed by Sophie Maslow and performed by the Martha Graham Dance Company, featuring Guthrie’s words and songs.

Later in life, Guthrie was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease—a rare, hereditary condition that causes involuntary body movements. This condition has also impacted Conway’s life. Given her ongoing exploration of movement and dance, the disorder becomes a point of departure for rhizomatic research—sprawling, associative, and embodied.

Hard Ain’t it Hard is a love letter to Guthrie: a reimagining of his songs, writings, and visual works, and a meditation on movement—of bodies, of people, of politics. Conway mines his language to speak with him across time, digging into all the things that are hard. Ain’t it hard.

The opening of Hard Ain’t it Hard will feature a live staging of Folksay, with Houston’s folk trio The Working Girls performing arrangements of Guthrie’s songs alongside contemporary dance.