© 2024 WMKY
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Kentucky Folk Art Center Opens New Exhibition

Kentucky Folk Art Center

Morehead State University’s Kentucky Folk Art Center has announced its upcoming exhibition, “Joe Sartor: Morehead Mind Games.”

The opening reception will be held Thursday, Feb. 23, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

The exhibition presents four dozen of the artist’s paintings which draw inspiration from the people, places and landscapes of the local area. Many works will be offered for sale.

Sartor was born in 1939 and raised in Fulton, Missouri, a small town located some 100 miles west of St. Louis. In 1962, he received his bachelor’s degree in Art from Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. He enlisted in the Army after graduation and was stationed in Germany until he completed his service in 1965. He earned his M.A. degree in Art from the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1968.

Afterwards, Sartor accepted a teaching position at Morehead State University, where he taught studio art until his retirement in 2000. He still lives in Morehead with his wife Nancy, and he is still painting actively. Since 2005, he has kept a studio at The Rowan County Art Center in the county’s historic courthouse building on Main Street.

As a professor and working artist, he has painted hundreds of works during his career, and this exhibition should by no means be considered a retrospective. However, it does represent well the artist’s incisiveness, creative vision, and technical skill. The four dozen works included in this show were painted between 1999 and the present day. Residents or regular visitors to Morehead and Rowan County are likely to recognize many of the places and landscapes that are depicted. And, all viewers will be left to decipher the amused and often amusing messages in these paintings.

“All of us live somewhere,” said Matt Collinsworth, KFAC director. “And, artists often draw inspiration from their home communities, whether those communities are chosen by the artists or whether they were forced upon them by the circumstances of life. Joe Sartor does what each of us should try to do. He sees and depicts his home community with a sense new of wonder in painting after painting. Even if there is unease or heavy intent in some works, the Morehead, Kentucky of Joe Sartor’s making is an extraordinary place where strange and astounding things are still possible. These paintings are real, and they are magical.”

Kentucky Folk Art Center is a cultural, educational and economic development service of MSU. The Center is open Monday-Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Additional information is available by calling 606-783-2204 or visit www.moreheadstate.edu/kfac/.

(story provided by the Kentucky Folk Art Center)

Related Content