>> All of us who come here to read, you know, we have such deep respect for Wendell Berry that we just want to be in his orbit.

>> Readers and writers gather at the center of the Wendell Berry universe.

>> I tell people to think of us more like a bakery, like a really good French bakery.

Except what we're making in this case is usually brooms.

>> And we take you to the Berea business that's really cleaning up.

>> The art is just as much intentional as it is the functionality.

So my wife is an actress.

>> Plus, meet a Lexington artist who is stirring creativity with some very special spoons.

>> Production of Kentucky edition is made possible in part by the KET Millennium Fund.

>> Good evening and welcome to a special Kentucky edition.

I'm Kelsey Starks in for Renee Shaw.

Thanks so much for joining us.

Tonight.

We are highlighting some of the artists and craftspeople around Kentucky.

We featured in our Arts and culture segment we call tapestry.

Since 2020, a special relief fund has provided crucial support to Kentucky artists and craftspeople impacted by natural disasters in the state.

Like the 2022 floods, the Craft Emergency Relief Fund has kept over a dozen artisans afloat, including Hinman's, Troublesome Creek Stringed Instrument Company.

We hear what having this safety net now has meant for them.

>> The Craft Emergency Relief Fund was established in 1985 by a group of craft artists who had been colleagues for a number of years.

They would meet other artists who were experiencing different hardships, and so they would pass the hat to support the artist.

So they established the Craft Emergency Relief Fund as a way to provide a means for craft artists to support one another.

And over the years, that's been primarily our work is providing relief grants for individual emergencies.

So things like injury caregiving, you know, think of the typical, you know, fire theft, things like that.

And then we've expanded, obviously, towards disaster relief.

>> We're a nonprofit and we build guitars, mandolins, banjos and dulcimers.

And we are in fact, the only nonprofit stringed instrument manufacturing company in the entire world.

At first, we were just trying to.

Grow some skill among people that wanted something interesting to do.

Then we started working with people in recovery, and now we have a major program where we bring people in who are in recovery from addiction, and we put them to work.

The surf grants were actually they they came to us at a time when we were literally swamped.

We were we were destroyed as an organization, as a group.

All of our buildings were wrecked.

It would have been much more grim of a struggle than it was.

I think the surf money being their first, really.

Encouraged the guys a lot and helped us to get through some brutal work.

>> Because we're small, we're nimble.

We can get funds moving pretty quickly.

So I would say in the past it would be, you know, a month or two before folks would start submitting applications and we would start seeing activity in the programs.

Now it's, you know, 2 or 3 days after an event happens that we start seeing applications and then they'll trickle in for however long it takes for the community to to stabilize.

>> Surf plus was very streamlined, and it was the first aid that we received just by virtue of the fact that it wasn't months or years out in the future.

It was critically important because you have a need that day when the disaster hits.

>> We've had a long relationship with the folks in Kentucky in particular, over the last five years, we've provided $75,000 in emergency relief grants to craft artists in Kentucky.

I think for communities, a lot of times they don't have the resources that are required to stabilize every individual.

And then when you think about an artist and the extra things that they have, their equipment, sometimes the tools that they have are generational, they've been passed down or they've been, you know, custom made.

You can't replace those things.

>> Well, earlier this month, a handful of Kentucky's top writers read to a sold out crowd in New Castle, Kentucky.

So what's the cultural significance of this small town in Henry County?

Well, it happens to be the home of Kentucky's literary living legend, Wendell Berry.

Our June Leffler takes us there.

>> I founded the Berry Center in 2011 to continue my family's advocacy for small farmers in their communities.

I knew from my father when I started the Berry Center that we didn't just have an agricultural problem, we had a cultural problem.

So that brings me really to the Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, when we bring together the finest writers, maybe anywhere.

But a lot of fine writers live in Kentucky.

>> I'm reading two poems about real people.

So the first poem is about a woman who survived the 2022 floods in eastern Kentucky, and another one is about the first federally prosecuted hate crime in the nation, which happened in Kentucky when a young gay man was almost killed.

And so they they used the new hate crime to prosecute the people who did it.

My poetry collection is a lot about grief and not only personal grief, but sort of witnessing collective grief.

Our effort as writers has always been or long been a way to honor the communities.

>> We're from.

Not to sugarcoat any of it at all, but to to realize that people we've known all of our lives have lived with dignity and purpose.

My father lived from pillar to post.

Well, he had his and I've had mine.

His life was not a trumpet vine.

There was something in him that never bloomed most of his life.

He didn't have teeth and didn't know what to do with himself.

I don't know if ever he felt doomed or if he ever learned to feel.

>> New.

Castle is the home of the Berry Center.

It is the county seat of Henry County, Kentucky, where my family has lived for.

I'm the eighth generation to live in farm in Henry County.

My daughter Virginia, who started Kentucky Arts and Letters Day, is the ninth generation to live in Henry County.

It's here because this is home.

>> Newcastle is not necessarily like a destination place in Kentucky, and it brings a lot of people to a small Kentucky town, a town that is, you know, mostly been built around agriculture and rural life.

And of course, you know, sort of the center of the Wendell Berry world.

So a lot of people want to come here to see the place.

Wendell Berry is writing about all of us who come here to read.

You know, we have such deep respect for Wendell Berry that we just want to be in his orbit.

And it's a real honor to be asked to to read here with him.

>> And the day sold out this year in 12 minutes.

I mean, that just I can't think of anything more hopeful really, than that, that there's so many people in this state that want to hear from these writers.

>> Well, over the next year, seven cities across Kentucky will play host to a new traveling Smithsonian exhibit.

It's based on an award winning exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian Americans, dives deeper into national imagery, symbols and stories, and how they influence us today.

Our Laura Rogers takes us to the debut site in Paducah.

>> It's a new exhibit where one of the first four states to host it.

It's a way to bring the Smithsonian to the people.

>> Kentucky Humanities has partnered with Smithsonian's Museum on Main Street since 2004.

>> They're always a strong partner.

They always find venues that really know how to host the exhibition well.

>> Those venues include the River Discovery Center in Paducah, where we joined them on installation day.

>> We not only focus on the river, but all things Paducah and the history of where we've been and where we're going.

The rivers have really led a lot of Americans along the journey throughout history.

>> The exhibition is called Americans and explores much of that journey from the Trail of Tears.

>> It's something that we discuss quite a bit in our educational programs, in conjunction with the wall to wall murals that are right outside our front door.

>> To the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, a decisive yet temporary Native American victory.

>> And how after that event, the United States really saw American Indians in a different way and were depicted in a different way.

>> Tiffany Chang is a Kentucky native who works as a project director with Museum on Main Street.

>> Getting people to take a second look at stories that you may be very familiar with and you think you know everything about it.

This is asking you to take a second look and find some things that you didn't know before.

>> This is the third time the River Discovery Center has hosted a Smithsonian exhibition.

>> It is such a great opportunity for Paducah.

>> Lindsay Ramsey says the center has educational programs for school groups that will complement what they learn from Americans, something that will happen in every community.

>> This is just the starting point when it comes to the town.

They then do their own local storytelling, their own programs.

>> Chang says.

It's a continuation of work for the host sites on the tour, a mix of museums and libraries.

>> They're already doing the storytelling.

They're already preserving these stories in this history that's so important.

>> So it's going to be a great added bonus to our already existing exhibits.

>> It's expected to draw more foot traffic over the next month from surrounding communities across western Kentucky, southern Illinois and eastern Missouri.

>> We just want to give everyone access to this who can't get to D.C.

and we want to bring the Smithsonian to their town so they can celebrate the exhibit as well.

>> For Kentucky edition, I'm Laura Rogers.

>> Thanks, Laura.

It's an item all of us have in our homes.

But at son House Craft in Berea, a broom is more than an instrument for cleaning.

It's a way to keep the art of Appalachian broom making alive.

>> I tell people to think of us more like a bakery, like a really good French bakery.

Except what we're making in this case is usually brooms.

So the handle goes in here.

This gets attached to it with this wire here, and you kind of stand here and slowly wind this with your feet with the wire.

So that's what attaches the head to the broom.

And then this dries for a couple days.

Wetting it just kind of helps it cinch down really tightly onto the head.

We make a lot of craft.

We focus on brooms and brushes in traditional Appalachian style, but we make everything by hand here in house and are really focused on our sourcing and our quality.

Basically, the broom goes in here, the string gets wound around it, and then these two needles pass back and forth through the broom, stitching it back and forth while the broom slowly kind of manually gets kicked out of place.

So most of the brooms we use are made out of a type of sorghum.

It's called broom corn.

It was a crop that was really commonly grown here, but it pretty much left the US due to a series of whether it's trade agreements or labor.

It had mostly moved to Mexico, so we've been working the last four years with the lazy Eight stock Farm and Bryce Bowman over there to bring back broom corn growing to the US, and we're hoping by the end of next year to grow all our broom corn locally.

You can think of traditional craft as being made with natural materials, but I think a lot of people found when they started getting into craft that, you know, the plastics and those sorts of things had kind of infiltrated even traditional craft, filling in the gaps and finding the pieces and figuring out what you need to change in the process to bring back to being a natural material is something that our shop is really known for, and something that I obsess over.

That is just a really fun avenue of research that we do in our products.

This is called a turkey wing, and this solid weave like this is actually kind of based off of the Kentucky Shakers, did a solid weave in hemp.

This one is actually made out of recycled T-shirts fibers.

So that's the original colors of the shirts woven into a fiber.

So it's 100% recycled cotton.

We use kind of in the traditional style.

People are so excited right now about handcraft, and I think it's an echo of what people saw in the 1920s, just as technology at the time was surging.

You saw the Arts and Crafts movement.

So here we see technology taking a big role in people's lives and a real desire to feel connection again and work that resonates a handmade thing, as most of us hopefully have gotten to experience, feels a little different than something completely made by machine.

And that quality is something that's hard to put your finger on.

But I find people are really drawn to it, and I think there's this really strong craft legacy here in Kentucky and here in Berea especially.

And I think there's a place where you can have a successful shop that is American made, American sourced, American grown from here, that can thrive and pay people well and kind of do all the things.

And it's kind of an open question mark, like, can we pull this off?

Can we pay people above living wage but still make handcraft?

And I think the answer is yes, but the mission is to connect people to the land through craft, through our work, and kind of see where we can go from there.

>> Lexington artist David Napier's life was forever changed by an unusual request.

His wife asked him to make her a spoon.

The musician soon found himself swapping guitar strings for woodworking tools and has honed his craft, making elaborate and functional wooden spoons.

We paid a visit to the Happy Spooning workshop.

>> My wife walked into my office one day and I was.

I was a full time music teacher during the pandemic.

That shut down, of course.

So I'm sitting here, I taught a couple of students online, but I was pretty bored.

She walked into the office and make me a spoon and I was like, all right, cool.

I made a tiny little spoon.

And then she posted that online.

My whole living is is, is this now you know where it was?

I was in a band for ten years.

And, you know, I went from starving artist to artist.

I'm about 80% self-taught and then 20% comes from influence from all over the place.

So really the big thing is.

Just each piece of wood kind of tells me the story.

You know, the grain has direction.

And that look, you know, when you look at a cloud and you see a cloud that looks like a dog or something like that, I see the same kinds of things in wood and in the grain and in the movement of that wood.

And so I try to keep it structurally sound while also letting the grain dictate how you see the movement of the spoon.

The, the functionality comes from.

I've actually worked with a lot of people that have had like hand disabilities and things like that.

So I'm always trying to be cognizant of how it feels if you're cooking with it.

But at the same time, I get from a lot of people that they actually just put their spoons on their wall.

And so I actually now I focus on both of them.

So the art intent is the art is just as much intentional as it is the functionality.

I wanted to look pretty and and last a long time.

So I've got some spoons that are a foot long.

I've got a staves that are almost six foot tall, some Cajun.

So some of those will take 20 hours.

Plus I've got some that are guitar spoons, some that are feather spoons, some that are just amorphous shapes.

Just whatever comes off the top of my head that I can see with the piece of wood, I try to create it.

I grew up sitting in a house with a mother that was a seamstress, a singer, a songwriter.

She did a little bit of everything.

So if you think that I've done a lot of stuff, you should see my mom.

This was my creative source right here.

Anything that I wanted to do, my mother was there to just back me up.

And she she never stopped me from wanting to be my creative self fully.

Yeah, for me, art is just trading one outlet for another.

I'm saying the same things in my in my woodworking that I would with music.

I'm trying to have that same kind of conversation, acceptance and diversity and inclusiveness and just about every way.

It's all about just just putting my feelings down somewhere.

Whether or not you're drawing or writing a song or, you know, carving some wood, like I go into, I try to go into a different place anytime I'm doing any kind of work and you're good to go.

>> Well, from the western coalfields to the Appalachian Mountains, the land that makes up our state is as diverse as it is beautiful.

Gaia's Sentinels is a series of paintings inspired by the women who take care of this land, from dairy farmers to forestry directors.

Learn about the special connection these women have to their land.

>> So in 2022, I received a grant from the Kentucky Foundation for women to do a series of three workshops at nature conservancies around Kentucky.

Interestingly, when I did these workshops, several of the participants and for instance, the director of the conservancy were women, and they had a really incredible story to share.

So I applied again for another grant to actually feature these female land stewards.

So that could be a a farmer, a scientist, a forester, a land manager.

What my purpose was is I wanted to feature the most meaningful or sacred place on their land that they steward and bring that kind of awareness to a broader audience.

Bridget Abernathy, she is the assistant director of forestry of the whole, the state forestry office in Kentucky.

Littleton Trail was a very meaningful place for her because that's where she would hike frequently.

And when she was pregnant with her first child, she went on this hike on this Mother's Day hike for her very first Mother's Day.

And so that really became an important place for her.

They all had stories like that.

Each one had significant, meaningful, tangible relationships with the land.

They steward folks who are in the conservancy field.

It is hard to to to kind of toot their own horn and draw attention to it in a way that impacts the viewer or the the average person.

So I think art does a lot to help draw that awareness to what they're doing in a very interesting way.

I've, I have discovered that not only as an artist, but as an art educator, that nature and art really go hand in hand and are, you know, it's an important way to advocate for nature.

Most of all, I want people to come away with hope and a sense of wonder and curiosity about the natural world.

I don't want to paint just pretty pictures, because these places can disappear and they can disappear without a whisper.

So I just hope that we appreciate what we have now, and I hope that we enlarge the garden of what is possible, even at our own, our own small ways, in our own yards, in our own lives.

How can we enlarge the garden like these fantastic women are doing?

>> Very cool.

Frazelle guitars has been strumming along since 2021.

In Danville, owner Brandon Edwards creates guitars from scratch and repairs broken instruments, and recently he made a guitar for Alex Miller, a Kentuckian from Lancaster who was on American Idol in 2021.

>> We're full service, so we're like a hospital here.

I was 25 years, 24 years old when I started this place.

And I mean, it's been a roller coaster of emotions.

You know, it's never easy, especially being a young business owner.

You know, it's really hard because a lot of people, when you start out coming here, they expect to see somebody older and they see a young guy in here doing this and it's like, wow, you know, I started this on my own.

Nobody finances but me.

I saved up money when I lived in Nashville and pretty much come back and started my dream.

I went to school at Musician's Institute, Guitar Craft Academy for building guitars and become a certified acoustic and electric guitar building repairman.

And when I graduated, they got me a job working for Gibson Custom Shop.

A few people there were kind of like, hey, you need to start your own thing.

I wanted to come back and be in my community, be closer to my family, and really just to give back to the place where I grew up at.

I like to really give the Kentucky artists the first chance.

These are the cats that are going out every weekend.

They're playing, they're doing.

They're they're they're giving their heart and soul for something, and they don't know if they're going to make it or not, but they don't bother.

I think everything that comes out of here gets attention.

>> People tend to forget the little guy, especially when it comes to things like instruments.

You know, everybody goes for the bigger names and and they tend to forget that you can find a very high quality crafted instrument right here in your hometown.

>> Every guitar that's come out of here, none of them are the same.

Each one of them are unique and they have their own unique identity, something about them.

And it's really whatever I feel on my heart is what would come out.

What inspiration comes at the time, what I'm thinking, what I'm saying, and really, about 99% of the time people ask me to make come up with something they don't know.

And I come up with something and it's like, wow, you hit it out of the park.

Like, I wasn't thinking about anything and you hit everything I wanted.

But it's about getting to know the people.

So, you know, you research them, you get to talk with them for a while, and you get to get inside their head what they like, what they don't like, what they know and all that stuff.

And that's what really makes it great.

They come in the door here, we fix it and get it back out or fix it, get it back out the door.

They're trusting me to get that guitar back.

They bring in different stuff.

And this story or this guy's been playing music his whole life, and this is his favorite guitar.

And he's took it everywhere with him on the road, wherever.

And he gets that guitar back.

It's a story.

It's fixing it back up, getting it playable so he can get back on the road and use his talents and abilities to tell the story again.

And that connection and, and really just, you know, making sure it's beyond, you know, it's beyond if I fix a guitar and I'm playing, I want to go out and see the work I fixed.

>> Music is really good for your brain.

It's really good for expression.

And I think that having a place like this helps foster that connection within people, and it helps bring music more to the forefront.

>> It's really good to have a lot of community support with Danville.

A lot of people don't know that Danville is the oldest city in the state of Kentucky, and these people have become more than just customers.

They become a part of your life.

They're family.

And the family is like, when I walk through the door here, you can kick off your shoes like grandma's house, family.

You know everything on the walls here.

The memorabilia.

It's a it's a statement of me, what I like, what I do.

And, you know, I try to really put forward and give that back to the community.

>> People are really gravitating towards the instruments.

And when when you play them, it's it's a special thing.

I mean, like I said, this, this thing is like a third arm for me.

Like it's just another part of me.

And people are starting to have that same connection with his instrument.

>> That does it for Kentucky Edition, where we inform, connect and inspire.

You can watch full episodes and clips at ket.org.

Have a great night!