Sharing the Stories Exhibit Artists
The "Kentucky Craft Luminaries: Sharing the Stories" original exhibit presented at LexArts featured 21 craft artists, just a sampling of the many that have been interviewed by KCHEA. It later traveled to the Frazier History Museum, Louisville, Kentucky in 2019.
The 2021 exhibit hosted at the Lexington Central Library featured the 23 artists shown here. Enjoy learning more about this diverse group of talented artists--their inspirations, their craft, and why their contributions to the Kentucky craft movement are significant. They are each unique and have a special story to share. To view a list of of other Craft Luminaries, click here.
“The sharing is the most important thing. An artist does what they do in order to share.”
Dobree Adams
“I love doing my art. I would go on making it even if I couldn’t sell it. I started making art as toys when I was a child. I use to make pop guns, sling shots, bow and arrows and what have you.”
Minnie Adkins
“Weavers are problem solvers. We like to figure out things and work things out. . . . you look at other people’s patterns for ideas but we like to figure out things and put things together in our own way.”
Philis Alvic
“I started developing my own ideas … I knew that if I was going to get into this as an art form, and I wanted to do it right, that I needed to find a way to set myself apart, something that distinguished me as doing something unique with glass.”
Dan Barnes
“I was looking for a common denominator, in essence, that could be communicated in very simple forms, almost like a haiku in three dimensions.”
Dave Caudill
“I think probably the process that I’m most in tune with is the firing with wood and that is like, it’s almost like alchemy, you know. It’s something that you have to develop an eye and then a nose for, and you have to listen to the kilns.”
Wayne Ferguson
“Being captive to the beauty and miracle of nature, it seems fitting that the work I create reflects my love and respect for the Earth.”
Linda Fifield
“Well, I think of myself as a story teller. I mean personally . . . I love relating stories about my life, myself, other people . . . things I've heard. So, I'm trying to tell a story of things I've seen.”
Sarah Frederick
BIO
“The measure of a teacher is to open the doors and set the base for the student and to give them the thirst and the yearning for knowledge so that they choose to go beyond that base.”
Tim Glotzbach
“My work is an escape from the everyday life of cognitive thinking and academic exercise. Starting off with an image of form and color I begin the construction of the artwork. Changes are made as I respond to what is being created.”
Susan Goldstein
“In 1982, I was invited to participate in this new show; Kentucky Crafted…and sold everything I had with me. That’s when I realized there was a market for my work and began my career as a full-time artist.”
Tim Hall
“Many artists, including myself, spend much time solving problems. For the most part they are hypothetical in nature and rarely resolved as solutions. It’s time to realize that artists invent problems for their own sake. Artists are problem makers.”
Walter Hyleck
"My art is self-taught. I am trying to make something that will last a long time, something that will be here a long time from now. I get a lot of pleasure with my work. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Tim Lewis
“I have been heavily influenced by the work of the renowned chairmaker Chester Cornett who used to say, ‘It takes half a fool to make a handmade basket and a pure fool to make a hand carved chair.’ “
Terry Ratliff
“We have worked with natural materials that are available to us in our surroundings, in our environment here in the woods, . . . our inspiration comes from the beauty of the nature around us.”
Mary & Robin Reed
“And so, I don’t give up process or tradition, I incorporate it. And when in incorporating it, it becomes my own type of visual language . . . that hasn’t before been created, and so I sometimes fit between craft shows, art shows.”
Arturo Alonzo Sandoval
“I make art because I have to. That’s why anyone makes art, because you have to. My quilts were never made traditionally for beds. They were artistic expressions. Artists have a freedom to express themselves and the drive to do it.”
Rebekka Seigel
“I’ve been making baskets on and off since I was about nine years old, helping my mom to start out.”
Leona Waddell
“I’m in the business of making an instrument that will actually serve the musician and will emanate and give the best sound that it can.”
George Wakim
“. . . the history lesson here of, of African-Americans in the South… you’ve got the music, you have the coming and going of the people, you have the wisdom of the people, you have these feet which means people are planted, are rooted in this place and can’t be moved.”
Lavon Williams
"I aspire to create simple, elegant woven vessels that possess a richness of spirit and a presence embodying the soul of the tree from which they came.”
Jennifer Zurick