Horse racing is one of Kentucky's most time honored traditions.

It's one of the things the Commonwealth is most known for.

But many of the industry's African-American pioneers are largely unknown.

The Cayman Library seeks to remedy that with its exhibit, The heart of the Turf.

Saddle up as we take a look into the untold story of Kentucky's iconic sport.

And this week's look at arts and culture Tapestry.

Start at turf racing's Black Pioneers covers just over 200 years of history, and roughly 100 lives are featured from enslavement to today.

The exhibit itself comprises as hundreds of photographs from Keeneland library collections, loaned artwork, artwork from our collections as well, and biographical vignettes of roughly 75 of those lives.

We were never going to be able to capture the thousands upon thousands of lives that have played a part in this industry.

But what we wanted to do is to highlight the depth and the breadth of the roles.

So you're going to see farriers.

You're going to see jockeys.

You're going to see grooms.

You're going to see exercise riders.

You're going to see some top owners and breeders.

Sometimes you'll see a handful of folks that had multiple roles, basically did everything that is that you could do in this industry.

Even she won races.

So we wanted a representative sample of that work and we were able to highlight roughly 100 lives.

We see, of course, the superstar black jockey athletes that a lot of folks will have that kind of name recognition, Isaac Murphy.

And then we will have other folks that that folks won't maybe recall their names.

So we're trying to tell their stories as well.

The closer we get to 1900, the more we start to see that Jim Crow era and everything that it brought about legally and culturally, we start to see more and more signs of that.

Those opportunities for those highest paying positions, those headline making positions for the most part.

The further we get beyond the turn of the century.

So in the early 1900s, we start to see a shift away from that and a shift toward backside work.

So work on farms, work on the back side of tracks.

And that really was, for the most part, the norm in terms of opportunities in this industry until we get closer to the civil rights movement.

And then we also highlight lives that very much started after the civil rights movement bringing us to today.

My hope would be that that there's exposure to just the sheer impact from every life that is represented here in some way, whether it's a biographical vignette or a photograph.

And to know that this is a small sampling, it's illustrative, but it's small nonetheless.

So for every story you see here, there are thousands others that aren't featured here in this format.

But the primary goal of this exhibit was to start conversations.

With the intent to continue conversations with the intent to elicit action.

What a great project.

The exhibit will run at the Kingman Library until December eight, and the traveling exhibit at the Lexington Central Library will run until December 3rd.

Plans are being made for it to travel to Montana, Chicago, Saratoga Springs and more.