Transy students and North Limestone join forces
By Kremena Todorova and Kurt Gohde
If you live, work, or study on North Limestone, you may have already encountered one of us or the two dozen Transylvania students who have already participated in “Community Engagement through the Arts.” This course was created as a way to clear pathways and to open communication between two neighbors: Transylvania University and the North Limestone community.
Two years ago, we brought Transylvania students into the community for the first time. Because it is difficult to have pizza delivered north of Fourth Street and because our students, like everyone else, are influenced by this kind of social message, we crafted a course to address the visible and invisible walls erected to the north side of our campus. The already existing focus of our courses—literary narratives written from the American social margins in Kremena’s classes and interventionist art in Kurt’s—allowed us natural connections to this form of community engagement.
In the first year, we met on Wednesday nights at Al’s Bar (a once notorious neighborhood hang-out which had just reinvented itself under new and auspicious ownership) and tried to find out what the people in the neighborhood perceived as its biggest challenges. The area’s unfounded bad reputation emerged, almost unanimously, as the largest concern. We heard about it from the Commander of the Central Sector police force, from the owner of a brand-new gyro shop at the corner of North Limestone and 6th Street (since relocated to a different town), and from residents of the neighborhood with whom our students recorded oral history interviews.
To address this problem, our class produced a short documentary about the neighborhood. The documentary included on-the-street interviews with long-time neighborhood residents, excerpts from oral history interviews recorded by the students, and recorded short personal essays (written in the style of National Public Radio’s This I Believe series). The class was joined regularly by a couple of graduate students from the University of Kentucky and by Marty Clifford, President of the North Limestone Neighborhood Association. Many people who spoke with us as formal visitors to the class—local politicians, journalists, activists—returned for subsequent class sessions.
Last winter, we met at the Capoeira Center on North Limestone (because of the growing crowds in Al’s Bar, we could no longer hold class there. We were excited to witness Al’s success!). The class project last year was designed to bring people from the community onto the campus of Transylvania University. We created an exhibition in Transylvania’s Morlan Gallery to feature the collections of neighborhood residents. Working with students from the Lexington Traditional Magnet School, our class established contacts in the neighborhood and found people with collections of items ranging from black angels to refrigerator magnets. The show our class curated—North Limestone Gathers—also included furniture from the second-hand furniture store at 760 N. Limestone (owned and run by Marty Clifford), excerpts from oral history interviews recorded with the collection owners, and text from the This I Believe essays written by our students. Two long-time residents of the neighborhood joined our class every Wednesday night and for many of our community events (including a capoeira lesson).
This year our class will be quilting. We are inviting our neighbors from the North Limestone community to join us. We are inviting our neighbors from all of Lexington. Our class will host four quilting bees (box to left) with a single goal: getting to know the people of our community while enjoying a craft with a long tradition in Kentucky. We aim to produce 33 quilts for Build-A-Bed, an AmeriCorps project that will build 500 beds for needy children in Kentucky. Before donating our community quits to Build-A-Bed, we will turn them into slipcovers for the furniture in Marty’s second-hand furniture store. On Friday, April 2, we will host a reception for this one-day art installation from 5-8 P.M. Please come. In fact, join us for any of our class meetings. This winter we are gathering at the HopHop, located on the Northeast corner of North Limestone and Loudon. Our class meets every Wednesday, from 6-8 P.M.
You are also invited to join us for our quilting bees. No quilting, sewing, or stitching experience is needed. You will have to brave the wind and, at times, the snow of these wintery days in Lexington, but you will meet and become reacquainted with your neighbors. Join us and relax into the stories shared while decorating 9-inch squares of fabric: the building blocks of a community and of our community quilts.
Leave a Reply