Making art on lockdown? These regional arts centers found ways to inspire others

When the coronavirus lockdown took hold in mid-March, arts centers in Lexington’s surrounding counties scrambled to figure out ways to do what they’d always done — inspire, engage, uplift and challenge through the arts — while their doors were shut.

As the uncertainty of the pandemic continues throughout Central Kentucky, so does the search for alternative arts programming. In the process, the leaders of organizations whose mission is to inspire creativity have been forced to be more creative themselves.

At the Gateway Regional Arts Center in downtown Mount Sterling, for example, Jeanette “Nettie” Tesmer, the center’s executive director, swung into creative overdrive with a weekly series of DIY art projects broadcast live on Facebook.

“The immediate thought was: How can we still engage with our audience and provide our mission — to create exciting art experiences for our community — and to do it in a way that’s consistent,” Tesmer says in a recent interview at her brightly decorated apartment in Lexington. (She normally commutes to Mount Sterling but has been working mostly from home during the pandemic.) “The question was, could we continue that process, just on a different platform?”

The answer came in the Facebook broadcasts, in which Tesmer — a Kansas City native who earned a degree in art history from the University of Kentucky in 2011 — has been putting on a virtual clinic in the art of making and teaching art, on the fly and on the cheap.

“When the lockdown first started, you couldn’t really go to stores to buy art supplies,” she says. “And you may be interested in art but you may not have a set of oil pastels or a set of acrylic paint or a set of brushes or whatever. So I tasked myself to find household items that you could use to create all those things.”

And so Tesmer had the make-it-work moment of her career. She created paint by mixing flour and food coloring. (In one broadcast she made her own egg tempera, the ancient paint medium that inspired artists from the Old Masters to Andrew Wyeth.) You may not have stretched canvas or drawing paper in the house, Tesmer allowed, but you probably have aluminum foil. She cut up potatoes from the kitchen and used them as print-making stamps.

She balanced her laptop over stacks of art books. She tore pages out of old magazines and encrusted them with glue and glitter and string. She worked on her porch and in every room of her apartment.

“It was a relief for me to take a break from the the-world-is-ending talk to create a project from things I had in the house that other people may have in their house,” she says, “and be creative out of it.”

Along the way, the trained art historian slipped in lessons on topics such as Art Nouveau, with its organic shapes and female muses, and Abstract Expressionism as personified by Jackson Pollock, whose famous drip paintings she paid homage to one rainy, messy afternoon in her living room.

Other regional arts centers have responded to the pandemic with similar ingenuity. The Art Center of the Bluegrass in Danville, for example, has produced a flurry of virtual, take-home and outdoor art projects, including a May Day Chalk Challenge, in which participants made chalk drawings of flowers on their neighbors’ sidewalks — a pandemic-proof version of the May Day tradition of giving flower baskets.

“On May 1st, you’d place a basket of flowers on a neighbor’s front stoop … ring the doorbell … and run away,” the center explained on its Facebook page. “Unfortunately, physical flowers probably don’t meet social distancing requirements (gotta touch the baskets and all) so we think chalk is the perfect quarantine replacement.”

The Danville center reopened June 2, but continues to offer programming online through the summer including arts camps themed art crates and classes.

And back in Mount Sterling, Gateway plans to reopen July 10 with the art exhibit “Native Reflections: Visual Art by American Indians of Kentucky”. Until then they kept in touch with its audience through a book-loan program and weekly arts activity plans for home learning on a variety of subjects including art, architecture, theater, writing and music.

“We produce an arts activity packet every Friday people can pick up, take home and do, which has been a hit,” says Allen Blair, Gateway’s volunteer board president. “And we started a ‘reading present’ activity where people pick up a wrapped book from our free little library, take it home, and unwrap a surprise read. We’ll probably keep it up even after the pandemic.”

In the meantime, Tesmer and her team are ramping up programming with an art-camp-in-a-box package; restarting a live music broadcast (in partnership with the Lexington-based Woodsongs and the Estill County-based Pickup Country radio broadcast), most recently featuring singer-songwriter Aaron Boyd; and a wedding micro-package complete with a choice of flower arrangements.

“All you have to do,” Tesmer says, “is walk in and get married.”#