WHY WE ARE PUTTING ON A CONCERT

CSA  LIVE  CELEBRATES  ONE  YEAR  OF  HOMEGROWN  CREATIVITY

This time one year ago, LAL launched Kentucky’s first Community Supported Art program. At the time, it was the only CSA program in Kentucky. Since then, our friends in Covington visited LAL to see how it worked and adapted a model for Northern Kentucky. Not long after LAL’s CSA debuted, the New York Times published an in-depth feature about how CSA’s are emerging as a national grassroots trend in art buying and collecting.

We’re proud that LAL literally put Kentucky on the CSA map. In its first year, LAL’s CSA directly supported the careers of over 30 local artists, providing income, visibility, and connections to new audiences. The purpose of CSA Live: An Evening of Story and Song is to celebrate and highlight the talent growing in our own backyard.

But we’re a visual art organization, so why are we putting on a concert starring musicians and writers, you might ask.

Good question.

LAL’s Community Supported Art program is interdisciplinary by nature. Each crop of local art includes at least one original musical work and one literary selection. LAL understands that many local artists work across multiple genres; and further, that cross-pollination among the different arts can only strengthen a creative community.

“The boundaries of creative practice among artists here is fluid,” LAL Curator Becky Alley explains.

“Performing artists, musicians, writers, and visual artists are friends, they share ideas, and they collaborate on projects,” she says. “By design, the CSA program supports the creation of new work, and LAL feels that extending an invitation to writers and musicians only strengthens the program and its community-minded spirit.”

CSA Live: An Evening of Story and Song celebrates the diversity of Central Kentucky’s lush artistic landscape. What’s more, it is designed to give participating musicians and writers a chance to curate their own creative experience--from the freedom to collaborate across boundaries and genres, the encouragement to create original works in response to other works, and to originate ideas beyond the scope of their “usual” gigs.

By weaving poetry, music, and visual media such as video, CSA Live promises to be an unforgettable evening of pure creativity and fun for artists and audience alike. Check out the lineup below! And don't forget to buy your tickets today!

CSA Live: An Evening of Story and Song is on June 27, 8 p.m. at the Lyric Theatre. Tickets are $15. 

MEET THE ARTISTS

Members of Small Batch, which is a five-piece collective whose members are a part of at least a dozen other Lexington bands. The band is of that clusterfolk variety that steals handily from country, bluegrass, folk and old-timey music until it's convenient to ignore those same forms in search of some other feeling or sound. They play mostly original songs written and sung by the three different songwriters in the band, and there is more than a little harmony that happens all the time. There are also expletives, booze songs (both about quitting and continuing), songs about cheating, family tales and stories of love and hate. With Tree Jackson on vocals and guitar, Warren Byrom on vocals and guitar, Reva Williams on vocals and banjo, Scott Wilmoth on upright bass (who, sadly, cannot join us for the CSA live event) and Robby Cosenza on vocals, harmonica and drums, Small Batch sounds like its name: a good and unique blend of some of the best music around.

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Emily Hagihara is a classically trained multi-instrumentalist who has recorded with artists such as Ben Sollee, Cheyenne Mize, and Jim James (My Morning Jacket). She received a Bachelor's Degree in Music Performance for Percussion from the University of Kentucky. She has also written and performed music for the Contemporary Dance Collective and Blackbird Dance Theater. She served as musical director and performer in the Kentucky Conservatory Theater/Summerfest Series. Having recorded and toured extensively with Chico Fellini, Hagihara currently performs as a solo artist and plays drums/keyboard in Ancient Warfare. Emily will be accompanied by a collection of local musicians, including Severn Edmondson, Joe Drury and Derek Rhineheinmer

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Born a raw two-piece in the deep South, Ancient Warfare is now a multi-membered, multi-layered organism led by singer and guitarist Echo Wilcox. Ancient Warfare has shared the stage with national acts such as Richard Buckner, Mr. Gnome, Lucius, Chelsea Wolfe, Scout Niblett, Prince Rama, and The Ghost Wolves. Debut album The Pale Horse to be released Autumn 2014 (Alias Records).

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Savannah Sipple is a poet from Eastern Kentucky. She is working to publish a manuscript of persona poems set in a small Appalachian town. Her work has appeared in Her Limestone Bones, Deep South Magazine, Now & Then, Still: The Journal, Appalachian Heritage, The Louisville Review, New Southerner, Motif 3: All the Livelong Day, as well as on the Accents Publishing Blog as part of Lexington Poetry Month, and is forthcoming in the Southern Indiana Review. She is co-creator and a writer at Structure and Style, a blog about poetry.

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Marianne Worthington, a native of Knoxville, Tenn., is a poet and educator living in Whitley County, Ky., since 1990. She is co-founder and poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary journal as well as poetry editor for Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine. Her poetry chapbook, Larger Bodies Than Mine (Finishing Line Press, 2006), won the 2007 Appalachian Book of the Year in Poetry Award. She edited the first three volumes in the MOTIF Anthology Series from MotesBooks. She is associate professor of communication and journalism at University of the Cumberlands. Worthington's essays, reviews, poetry and feature articles have been published widely and anthologized most recently in The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volume VI, Tennessee, Her Limestone Bones, American Society: What Poets See, and Cornbread Nation. She received the Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and is a grant recipient from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

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Leatha Kendrick has widely published essays, poems and fiction in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Baltimore Review, The Southern Women's Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III; What Comes Down to Us - Twenty-Five Contemporary Kentucky Poets; and I to I: Life Writing by Kentucky Feminists. Recipient of two Al Smith Fellowships in poetry, she was honored by the Kentucky Foundation for Women with the Sallie Bingham Award in 2013. Larkspur Press published her fourth volume of poems, Almanac of the Invisible, in 2014. Her MFA in Poetry is from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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