Some years ago, at a diversity and inclusivity meeting I was attending, an Asian American woman confessed that as far back as she could remember, her fellow Asian American family and friends strived to appear as “anything but Asian.” Their identity rested largely on assimilating American mores, behaviors and speech while denying their natural-born heritage.

I thought of this while viewing the works of Taiwanese American painter Yowshien Kuo at Bates College Museum of Art’s current show, “Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center” (through March 15). They are deceptively sweet — flatly painted, almost anime-like, colorful — and depict mostly smiling, pudgy-faced Asian people enacting Western scenes of rural life: resting against hay bales, riding horses, hanging laundry in a flowery meadow.

Except for the characters themselves, these paintings are devoid of any cultural signifiers that would identify them as Asian. Yet if we look more closely, we see that there is something ominous here, often in the intimation of a wind that is kicking up and ruffling the serenity of these bucolic scenes. Kuo is intentionally luring us with aesthetics that are, at least superficially, pleasantly innocuous. Once in, however, it’s obvious he is admonishing us to consider the American societal imperatives that require the refusal of the uniqueness of our cultural backgrounds so that we might fit into a more homogeneous Americanness.

These works perfectly embody the concept behind “Across Common Grounds” in that they tackle a very of-the-moment issue with the same vitality, political confrontation and immediacy as artists working in urban art centers (I recall Alabama-born but Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall, for instance, when looking at Kuo’s paintings), but they do it from rural locales normally not considered especially “important” to the development of contemporary American art today. Kuo lives and paints in St. Louis, not in New York, Paris or London.

A theme like the art of rural America necessarily involves casting a very wide net. Samantha Sigmon, in her first major outing as assistant curator at Bates, focuses this potentially rambling concept by organizing the art into categories that are not hard and fast (migration and belonging; extraction [of natural resources] versus placekeeping practices; landscape and the body; class, labor, and making, etc.), but occasionally bleed into one another. It’s an intriguing concept to take form here in Maine, for though we like to consider cities like Rockland and Portland vital art centers within our state, we would most definitely be deemed “outside the center” by artworld elites in metropolitan artistic locations like New York or L.A.

Several overarching realizations begin to dawn as we circulate through the galleries — first and foremost, perhaps, how incredibly diverse rural America has become. Aside from Kuo, we have work by Sarah Ahmad (Pakistani living in Tulsa), Gohar Dashti and Hamed Noori (Iranians working in Cambridge), Eyakem Guililat (Ethiopian living in Tulsa), Delvin Lugo (Dominican living in New York), Suchitra Mattai (Guyanese American of Indian heritage working in Denver) and others. Their presence here feels especially topical and poignant against the backdrop of the current Administration’s “birthright citizenship” efforts to purify the nation of what it portrays as freeloading immigrants. This polarizing characterization becomes even more ironic with the presence in the show of Indigenous artists like Penobscot multidisciplinary artist Lokotah Sanborn, which begs a basic question: Who is really an immigrant here?

Sanborn offers three photo montages that take as their cue the romanticized portraits of Native Americans — most notably those of Edward Curtis, who often disregarded authenticity of garments and paraphernalia when shooting his subjects to fit his white notion of a “disappearing civilization” — and the logging industry, which Sanborn says “has been central to Wabanaki dispossession and erosion of sovereignty and Indigenous rights” in what we now call Maine. “Mary,” which blends an image of his fourth great-grandmother with the bark of a tree, feels particularly defiant because her skin is literally the bark. This irrevocably connects her physically and spiritually to the land itself. Colonizers may have robbed it from her people, but her union with her native land can never be fundamentally severed.

Ahmad’s “Quilting Patterns of Identity III” references the multiple identities donned by immigrant women within their own cultures, but also in their engagement with their new émigré culture. She was inspired by quilt designs from her native Pakistan, as well as Native American quilts from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, where she lives. But she interprets them through laser-cut paper hangings that serve as metaphors for the porosity of these identities. We can see through each identity to other identities and feel the way immigrants must perpetually shift amongst them to navigate life in a non-native place. Of course, they also honor the makers and the history of warmth and protection the quilters brought to their families through their labors.

Some of the categories can feel a bit unwieldy or even a arbitrary. To be sure, there are those that are clear. I can see, for example, how Delvin Lugo’s beautiful “Sunday Afternoon” — relegated to the “Migration and Belonging” section — presents queer community and the concept of “chosen family” as a way of creating belonging post-migration. But is there any real difference in the way this phenomenon occurs in rural and urban landscapes? That is not my experience. And though we are clearly in a tropical locale, is it actually rural? It looks like they are outside an apartment house rather than a country home, and as though it could be San Juan, Santo Domingo or Miami.

“Bodies in Landscape” is meant to “touch on gender identity and queer communities as connected with our earth in various ways.” How are gender identity and queer communities anymore connected to the land than, say, Native Americans? And does the manifestation of those identities look different in a rural environment?

There is the fact, too, that Lugo and Xaviera Simmons are based in New York City (though Lugo travels between that metropolis, Maine and his native Dominican Republic). Other artists in the show also work from cities that are anything but “outside the center”: Julian Chams and Rachelle Dang are in Brooklyn, Korean American artist Jin Lee is in Chicago.

Do these gaps in the conceptual framework matter? Are the questions I pose the right ones to be asking? I don’t presume to claim either. On its own, the show is rich with wonderful work. We will invariably view it through our own lenses. For example, Gohar Dashti places billboard-size images of American landscapes within “similar-looking terrain in Iran” as a way of enacting how “immigrants search for familiarity in foreign lands and reconstruct new hybrid topographies to arrive at a sense of belonging.” True enough. At another level, though, I could feel the impulse to counter the painful homesickness that comes with displacement and migration.

Louisiana-born Jacob Mitchell represents a kind of opposite impulse: to make the mundane rural landscape around him fantastical in some way. Imbuing his photographs of trailer homes with odd, magical light effects seems to transport them into another weirdly enchanted dimension of reality.

It is a moving show whether you approach it from its intellectual underpinnings or simply absorb it on a visceral basis… or anywhere in between.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: “Across Common Grounds: Contemporary Art Outside the Center”

WHERE: Museum of Art, Bates College, 75 Russell St., Lewiston

WHEN: Through March 15

HOURS: 10 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday and Wednesday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday through Saturday

ADMISSION: Free

INFO: 207-786-6158, bates.edu