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The folk art of Northside resident LaVon Williams will be honored at Lexington Art League’s new NorthSide Festival, taking place April 27 at Castlewood Park. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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The folk art of Northside resident LaVon Williams will be honored at Lexington Art League’s new NorthSide Festival, taking place April 27 at Castlewood Park. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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The folk art of Northside resident LaVon Williams will be honored at Lexington Art League’s new NorthSide Festival, taking place April 27 at Castlewood Park. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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The folk art of Northside resident LaVon Williams will be honored at Lexington Art League’s new NorthSide Festival, taking place April 27 at Castlewood Park. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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The folk art of Northside resident LaVon Williams will be honored at Lexington Art League’s new NorthSide Festival, taking place April 27 at Castlewood Park. Photo by Mick Jeffries
Long known as the producers of Lexington’s premier summer art festival, the Woodland Art Fair, the Lexington Art League (LAL) will this month introduce a new celebration to its roster of events. The NorthSide Festival will focus not only on local artists, as much of the art league’s projects do, but more specifically on promoting and developing artists residing in the organization’s own backyard. The event will take place April 27 on the Loudoun House lawn in Castlewood Park, LAL’s home since 1984 and an anchor for the visual arts on the north side of the city.
In keeping with the first-year festival’s goal of building up local talent, this event will honor folk artist and Northside resident LaVon Williams, a woodcarver of renown in the contemporary art world. Williams, who grew up in Florida and Colorado, came to Lexington to play for legendary University of Kentucky basketball coach Joe B. Hall and was a member of the 1978 NCAA championship team. After college, Williams spent some time playing professional basketball in Italy and Japan before eventually returning to Lexington to make it his permanent home.
Hailing from a family of woodcarvers, Williams was first exposed to the medium as a child by his half brother, David Wright, who in turn learned from his great-uncle Luke. Not satisfied with either the pastoral or traditional folk scenes Williams was taught, the artist eventually branched out to focus on a style he calls “urban folk art.”
Many of his carvings portray musicians drawn from the worlds of jazz and the blues, parties and dancing. Brightly painted and often incorporating found objects as accents, Williams’ work has been shown at the Kentucky Folk Art Center, The Arts Company in Nashville and North Carolina’s Hickory Museum of Art, and can also be found at various art festivals, which he attends with his wife, Debra.
According to LAL exhibitions director Logan Dennison, Williams and his art served as a major inspiration for the new festival.
“We wanted to bring visibility to the fact that we have such a prominent folk artist in the neighborhood, as well as have the guidance and collaboration of a skilled local artist when planning this new community event,” Dennison said.
To that end, Williams was also deeply involved in the festival’s planning. He worked with the Lexington Art League staff to jury artist applications and has a show running concurrently inside the Loudoun House. Williams will be exhibiting at the NorthSide Festival and has planned a live carving demonstration. He also took on the design work for the festival marketing.
The festival comes during a transition for the Lexington Art League. Former executive director Stephanie Harris, who had been at the helm since 2010, left the organization in 2018 and was replaced by interim director Matt Collinsworth, who recently left to assume a prestigious position leading a museum in the Midwest. During Collinsworth’s interim tenure, he guided the staff and board through a strategic refocusing that turned the organization’s spotlight back to its original mission: developing, promoting and supporting local artistic talent.
“The Lexington Art League was started in 1957 as a grassroots organization of artists supporting artists,” Dennison explained. “Sometime in the ’90s, the organization radically shifted to become more of a contemporary art space.”
At that time, there weren’t many places locally where one could see contemporary visual art, he added, but that has since changed.
“Lexington now has several local galleries dedicated to contemporary art, such as Institute 193, the Parachute Factory and the gallery at 21C; and the University of Kentucky Art Museum has added many contemporary exhibitions to its roster,” Dennison said. “There is now a need to return to that original purpose and be an organization by artists for artists.”
One of the changes visitors might notice at the Lexington Art League is the way exhibitions are curated. In the past, the entire building was dedicated to a single exhibition, often bringing in both national and international artists to hang alongside regional and local pieces. Going forward, separate gallery spaces will be curated individually, with three to seven shows housed simultaneously inside the Loudoun House walls. This change will grow the annual exhibition schedule to nearly 25 exhibitions, up from the three to five shows allowed by the past model.
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Colombia-born artist Victor Palomino is among the four Lexington artists who currently have solo exhibits at the Lexington Art League galleries. A new approach to organizing exhibitions will increase the annual exhibitions presented by the organization from three to five a year to nearly 25. Photo by Mick Jeffries
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Colombia-born artist Victor Palomino is among the four Lexington artists who currently have solo exhibits at the Lexington Art League galleries. A new approach to organizing exhibitions will increase the annual exhibitions presented by the organization from three to five a year to nearly 25. Photo by Mick Jeffries
With each gallery treated as an individual space, shows differ dramatically from gallery to gallery, enabling visitors to have completely new conversations in each space. The new model will also allow for more frequent turnover.
“We’re excited to not have gaps between shows,” events and membership director Adrienne Dixon said. “With a turnaround of about one week, there’s always something to see, always a new reason to visit.”
“The new format creates space for solo shows, tandem exhibitions and major group exhibitions. We’ll be keeping some of the classics, including The Nude and PRHBTN, and will be bringing back [some] others, such as the LAL Member Show,” said Dennison.
“It’s also important to us to create space for emerging local curators to try their hand at it,” he added.
With an open call for exhibits, artists and curators can submit proposals for exhibitions at any time, and the staff considers every one.
“If something is submitted that isn’t quite ready for exhibition, we [can] work with the artist or curator to get them ready,” says Dennison.
Another addition to the LAL offerings is a dedicated community space for artists in the community to host critique events, offering them a space to discuss their work with other artists and receive peer feedback. The space is also available for artists to conduct workshops or performances, with pricing based on income from the event.
This month’s NorthSide Festival will provide an opportunity to introduce and celebrate these organizational changes to an already loyal LAL audience as well as welcome neighbors who may not have visited before. The event will feature more than 25 artists displaying their work; performances by local musicians Devine Carama, DJ Rice and Small Batch; and a variety of food and drink vendors.
“It’s our hope that the community comes out, has a good time and engages with us, and celebrates the neighborhood,” said Dixon, the LAL staff member who has helped organize the event.
“This is an experimental year for us,” Dennison added. “We’re playing with different formats to see what works for our audience.”
Lexington Art League events and membership director Adrienne Dixon, exhibitions director Logan Dennison and interim operations manager Lori Houlihan (pictured above, l-r) are working to bring the organization’s focus back to promoting local artists. Photo by Mick Jeffries