Paducah, Ky., gets new life as an arts and crafts mecca

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MCT) - These are not your grandmother's quilts.

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Some double wedding ring and other familiar patterns were on display at the National Quilt Museum, but tradition has given way to artistic exploration, and the museum prides itself in showing the best being made today.

"With the nation's bicentennial in 1976, quilting got to be popular again," said curator Judy Schwender. "We really consider ourself an art museum _ it's fabric art.

"We use our quilts for education, not just eye candy. Although eye candy doesn't hurt."

Walking through the galleries was a sensory overload. Some quilts were modeled after Indian sand paintings. One featured a colony of puffins and another showed a blue titmouse fluffing its feathers in the sun.

"Corona II: Solar Eclipse," a swirling mass of color, caused a controversy when it was honored in 1989 by the American Quilter's Society.

"It was the first time a machine-made quilt won best of show," said its maker, Caryl Bryer Fallert, who has captured that honor three times. "Mine was in no way traditional. It gave permission for people to make quilts in whatever means were appropriate."

Fallert, who moved to Paducah from suburban Chicago in 2005, is the face of this river town's revival in more ways than one. Another of her quilts, "On the Wings of a Dream," is the centerpiece of the city's tourism advertising campaign, which begins this spring in national art publications. The ad campaign highlights Paducah's "Artistic Movement," focusing on an artist relocation program that is drawing new blood to a historic neighborhood known as the LowerTown Arts District.

The quilt in the ad shows an exuberant red-haired woman dancing across the fabric. The woman is Fallert, and the design symbolizes her personal rebirth after the recent death of her husband of 34 years.

"There's an excitement, a freedom about starting over _ but it's also a little scary," Fallert said. "The eagle flying off in the other direction is about leaving the past behind."

Not all the artists in this town of 27,000 residents are newcomers.

Leather artisan Phil Phillips opened his Dixie Leather Works in 1991. It's now one of about two dozen galleries in the arts district. Phillips began making belts and other items as a hippie in the 1960s. He's still a hippie, headband and all, but now he specializes in historic reproductions for museums and for television and movie productions.

"I've done over 40 major motion pictures," he said. "The last time I worked for the Smithsonian was for the Lewis & Clark bicentennial."

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He has a showroom in his home but does most of his business through his website at www.dixieleatherworks.com. You can buy a one-of-a-kind handbag, a Confederate officer's pistol holster or a fancy seat and matching saddlebags for your Harley.

"The walk-in traffic has been a bonus to me," Phillips said. "People come to Paducah and see the downtown, which looks like New Orleans because of the iron foundries that did the storefronts. Enough people had enough sense to save some of those historic buildings.

"Paducah is the dead center of the United States, we've got four major rivers and they go every direction. You may have thought Paducah was redneck heaven. Au contraire: It's a very cosmopolitan area."

Paducah is named for Paduke, a legendary chief of the Chickasaws. The tribe was sent packing with the arrival of Gen. William Clark, who platted the town in 1827.

Paducah's location in Kentucky's western corner at the confluence of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, with the Cumberland and Mississippi not far off, gave the city a strategic importance for the steamboat trade and the railroads that followed. Money flowed in, which is reflected by Paducah's fine old homes.

That story is told in the River Discovery Center, situated in an 1843 building that is the city's oldest standing. You can see models of paddle-wheelers, including the Delta Queen, watch how the city was nearly wiped out by the flood of 1937 and step into a simulated towboat pilothouse and direct a barge between the pillars of a bridge.

The Quilt Museum opened in 1991, followed by the Carson Center for the Performing Arts in 2004. The two provided artistic anchors on opposite sides of the aging downtown, sparking a revival that is bringing in galleries, restaurants and antiques shops.

LowerTown is the residential area closest to downtown. The neighborhood had 20 square blocks of eclectic architecture, ranging from Queen Anne cottages to elegant Victorians; most had seen better days. In 2001, the city began its artist relocation program. The idea was to use real-estate incentives to bring a colony of painters, sculptors and other creative minds to the neighborhood, who in turn would bring tourists to their galleries.

Some city-owned homes went for as low as $10; private owners sold at bargain-basement prices.

Bill and Patience Renzulli, the first to jump at the relocation offer, didn't find bargains in the basement of their burned-out property _ just two dead opossums.

"We came from Maryland in 2002, we had seen ads about this exciting artist relocation program, which didn't exist yet," Patience Renzulli said. "We got here in the end of January. We were driving down Broadway, and I saw Bill's face as he looked at the beautiful old buildings. I thought, 'Oh my god, I'm moving to Paducah.'"

Bill, a retired doctor, is a painter who displays his work in Gallery 5, which the couple added at the rear of their refurbished home. They and eight whippets share the home, which they bought for $17,000.

Patience Renzulli noted that real-estate prices in the LowerTown Arts District have risen to the point that some of the new arrivals have found it cheaper to buy or build outside the district. "The program worked," she said. "Now, the challenge is to continue to attract talented artists."

Printmaker Freda Fairchild also was one of the first in the relocation program. "Paducah has always been a river town," she said. "It's used to having people coming in from the outside, so it's a little more open to new ideas."

Ceramicist Michael Terra and has family are the newest of the new. They relocated from upstate New York and are putting the finishing touches on a $10 house that required a gut rehab. Fortunately, Terra has a construction background that allowed him to do much of the work on his new Terra Cottage home, gallery and cookie shop.

"They came up with this cool way of rescuing one of the best parts of town," Terra said. "Who else but an artist can look at these old snaggletoothed buildings and see what they can be?"

Added his wife, Victoria: "We were told not to expect our income to come from Paducah. Because we do art shows all over the country, Paducah is a great location, six hours from Chicago, three from St. Louis, two to Nashville, six to Atlanta, 10 to New Orleans."

Fallert, the champion quilter, is on the vanguard of a movement in which artists not only sell their wares but market their skills. The home she built in Paducah has her residence on the second floor. She uses the first floor for an expansive classroom and studio where she can teach her techniques to up to 20 students a day. She even has a small dormitory for stay-over students.

"I'd been teaching workshops on the road for 25 years _ an itinerant quilting teacher," said Fallert, who also was a flight attendant for 28 years. "I decided I'd like to put down some roots and be part of a community. I love knowing everybody who walks down the street, and their dogs and cats."

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Charlotte and Ike Erwin own Working Artists Studio, where she offers workshops in printmaking and paper and fabric marbling and he gives instruction on fine bookbinding. They had just returned from the John C. Campbell Folk Art School in North Carolina, where she had learned marbling and is now an instructor.

"We bumped up our teaching schedule to make up for slow sales due to the economy," Charlotte Erwin said. "We've had as many as 120 in a three-day workshop."

Susan Edwards teaches watercolor and oil painting, and stained glass and jewelry making at her Wildhair Studios on Broadway in downtown Paducah. One of her most popular programs is Brushstrokes & Beverages, where students are invited to bring their favorite adult beverage to class.

Edwards says she enjoys sharing her painting secrets with students and in her watercolor class shows how to create clouds.

She splashed a cerulean blue across the top of her wet paper canvas, then used a wadded napkin to dab up some of the paint. "Flat on the bottom, fluffy on top," she told her five students.

Like magic, billowing cumulus clouds floated through the summer sky. Suitable for framing.

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IF YOU GO:

NATIONAL QUILT MUSEUM _ Open year-round 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Saturday. April through October, also open 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 for adults, free for children 12 and under. 215 Jefferson Street, 1-270-442-8856, www.nationalquiltmuseum.org.

The museum has tours, workshops and traveling exhibits. The scheduled exhibitions include "Best of Shows: 25 years of Quilting Excellence," which runs through July 6.

The American Quilter's Society Annual Quilt Show & Contest is April 22-25; for more information, call 1-270-898-7903 or visit www.americanquilter.com.

LOWERTOWN ARTS DISTRICT _ The Arts & Music Festival is May 23-24, Memorial Day weekend. For a list of galleries, call 1-270-444-8649 or visit www.paducaharts.com.

CARSON CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS _ 100 Kentucky Avenue. For a schedule of events, call 1-270-450-4444 or visit www.thecarsoncenter.org.

PADUCAH AREA PAINTERS ALLIANCE _ 124 Broadway. Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. An organization of more than 100 member artists. 1-270-575-3544; www.thepapagallery.com.

RIVER DISCOVERY CENTER _ Open 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $5 for adults, $3 children under 12. 1-270-575-9958; www.riverdiscoverycenter.org.

LODGING _ Chain motels are available close to Interstate 24. The Fox Briar Inn at RiverPlace has 10 spacious suites in a renovated building downtown; 1-877-369-4661; www.foxbriarinn.com. The Executive Inn near downtown has been closed since fall but has new owners, who promise a $40 million restoration that could be completed late this year.

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PADUCAH _ The Convention & Visitors Bureau is at 128 Broadway. 1-800-723-8224; www.paducah.travel.

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© 2009, St. Louis Post-Dispatch.