Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, is ground zero for showcasing the power of arts-led economic and community development in rural communities. The 2024 CIRD local design workshop, hosted in this small town where the distinct cultures and landscapes of eastern and central Kentucky come together, is already informing the national rural design conversation. Gateway Regional Arts Center and their partnerships in Mt. Sterling offer insights for any community that wants to anchor the future of public space in arts, culture, and design.
Momentum in Mt. Sterling is strong toward the transformation of Adena Trail and nearby Hinkston Creek to encompass nature, art, commerce, as well as the town’s rich and sometimes painful history. Funds have been allocated for portions of the project and additional funding streams are forthcoming. The mayor and city council are supportive and engaged, responding to constituent feedback. Business leaders and tourism officials have given input and endorsed the plan. Water management experts have weighed in. And insights from local youth have influenced architectural renderings in the design book that CIRD presented to the community in August.
In a few years—give or take—Hinkston Creek and the Adena Trail will be a place where locals and tourists alike will want to spend time, living out the community’s “Where Old Becomes Bold” motto. They’ll enjoy concerts in an amphitheater that sits between the trail and the creek, or exercise under a canopy of native plants while taking in murals and outdoor arts as they walk toward the dog park. They might stroll via the trail’s well-marked connections toward nearby downtown, where they’ll dine and shop. Perhaps they’ll trek their way past a mound erected by the indigenous Adena people and then cross railroad tracks and head up a hill to the DuBois Community Center, a living and vibrant reminder of the town’s cultural history located on the grounds of a former Rosenwald School.
CIRD’s team in Mt. Sterling was quick to credit decades of work in the community which provided a foundation for the plan that emerged from the local design workshop. After all, ideas for the area had been tossed around for many years, with a consensus that the area offered untapped potential for connecting the town, but without a coalescing agent between the government, schools, businesses, cultural entities, and private sector landowners along the trail. Until the Gateway Regional Arts Center (GRAC) stepped in.
GRAC’s application to CIRD noted the organization’s strong infrastructure and its potential as an organizing force in the community. GRAC’s headquarters are a historic church building anchoring the town’s business district, a place that bustles with diverse programming—and energy. Inside GRAC’s building is North America’s largest known collection of Kenyan art and an outpost for Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a testament to GRAC’s wide-ranging scope and the confidence that the philanthropic community has in GRAC. In seeking CIRD’s assistance, GRAC wrote of the community’s need for help to make a long-planned trail and waterfront revitalization a reality. And GRAC promised the wherewithal to bring key players as well as overlooked voices to the design table.
To disseminate lessons from Mt. Sterling, CIRD interviewed key players in the community about their CIRD experience, starting with Jordan Campbell, GRAC’s Executive Director. Campbell emphasized the power of CIRD’s citizen-led approach to rural design.
“My favorite part is that so often consultants come in and they tell us what would be best for our community. CIRD completely, completely turned that on its head.
How often do people get asked, especially in rural Appalachia and Eastern Kentucky, ‘What would you like to see here? Sky is the limit.’ So, [being asked that question and] seeing those wheels start to turn for a lot of our community members, we had people who showed up to the meeting who didn't really even know what they were there for exactly… but by the end they were putting Post-its on the board…We had youth who were so brilliantly saying things that validated what we already knew and highlighting deeper issues for us and challenges as a community that they wanted to see solved.”
Campbell said that CIRD gave the community a much-needed "license to dream” while emphasizing the role of design, arts, culture, and placemaking as bridges in a contentious political climate. “CIRD really centered on our community and used our creativity to share what's great about our community. That's really the heart of this project and I appreciate CIRD’s emphasizing and helping that blossom,” Campbell added.
Admittedly, most communities of 7,500 people lack an arts organization as active and well-funded as GRAC. But GRAC’s staff and board members emphasize that their growth was incremental, intentional, and rooted in small victories.
The best example of arts-driven community projects providing the foundation for CIRD’s engagement might be Mt. Sterling’s public art trail, including a much-photographed Umbrella Alley, historic buildings, and a series of works by regional and local artists. In interviews with CIRD, community leaders were unanimous in sharing that GRAC’s successes with highly visible arts (including performing arts) and placemaking projects are foundational to the credibility and organizing power that GRAC brought to CIRD’s process.
When 100+ community members joined CIRD’s team at the DuBois Community Center to break bread together and engage with the design process, it reflected the deeply rooted partnership between GRAC, the DuBois Community Center, and the broader community. DuBois Center’s leadership works to ensure that the Center serves as a regional gathering place, whether for basketball, a community garden, health fairs, family gatherings, after school programs, or cultural events, while also serving as a hub for Black culture.
Located on the grounds of a Rosenwald school that an arsonist torched in 1964, the DuBois Center is also focused on not forgetting the past. Its leaders were emphatic that CIRD’s design concepts link the Center to the Adena Trail and Hinkston Creek, helping to bridge racial divides in Mt. Sterling established long ago by redlining. During the workshop, CIRD staff joined DuBois Community Center’s board members and volunteers for a walking tour of Mt. Sterling landmarks significant to local Black history. The walking tour included close-up views of local efforts to ensure that a lynching victim in Mt. Sterling —James Mitchell—is part of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, linking a painful part of the town’s history to a national remembrance where soil from Mt. Sterling will remain in perpetuity.
Perhaps not surprisingly in Mt. Sterling and beyond, CIRD has found that rural community-led design processes along with public arts and culture projects and placemaking efforts can help to heal long-held tensions in a community; this is recognized as an international trend. Community leaders in Mt. Sterling were quick to note that an inclusive design process via CIRD was crucial; several city leaders also said that an outside presence like the CIRD program enhanced trust-building around the community design process.
Taunya Jones, President of the DuBois Community Center board, spoke to CIRD about partnerships, CIRD’s design process, and the role of arts, culture, and placemaking in her community. Jones noted that CIRD’s work will have "permanence” there because CIRD’s inclusive approach led to rapid buy-in for her and the broader community. Looking forward five years, Jones envisions families using the Adena Trail for recreation and as a gathering space linked to downtown, which she believes will bring flow to the whole community. And Jones is preparing to visit Athens, Ohio, where she’ll learn how CIRD’s work catalyzed an effort to turn a historic Black church into a hub for Black Appalachian culture and commerce.
The case for the economic impact of the arts and culture sector is compelling and growing, with new and deeper insights particularly for rural communities. Examples of rural arts organizations leading comprehensive design and development projects are emerging—especially in Mt. Sterling—but also in places like Keene, NH, where artists and Arts Alive! led a CIRD-supported project to make arts more visible in public space. CIRD is taking on new efforts to capture and disseminate what’s working in these places so that more rural communities can enjoy the benefits of arts-led rural design efforts that double as economic and community development. Stay tuned!
