The Bluegrass and Beyond

One of Lexington’s most significant black-history landmarks would become a concert hall, a cultural center and a museum if a new non-profit foundation can raise several million dollars to buy, restore and operate it.

The First African Foundation has reached a tentative agreement with Central Christian Church to buy the former First African Baptist Church building at the corner of Short and Deweese streets. A final agreement must be approved by Central Christian’s leaders and congregation, said James Hodge, a church trustee. He declined to disclose the purchase price or terms.

William Thomas, a Lexington native who moved back in 2008 after retiring as music department chair at the prestigious Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, said he was inspired to organize the effort after reading about the building’s amazing history two years ago.

The Italianate-style sanctuary, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is a handsome building. What makes it amazing is that most of the people who built and paid for it in the 1850s were slaves.

First African Baptist Church and Historic Pleasant Green Missionary Baptist Church trace their roots to Peter Durrett, a slave who in 1790 started the first black church west of the Allegheny Mountains. Durrett died in 1823 and was succeeded by London Ferrill, a slave who gained his freedom and was widely respected by blacks and whites alike.

In 1833, Ferrill became a local hero when he risked his life to minister to victims of a cholera epidemic that killed 500 of Lexington’s 7,000 residents. That same year, he moved his congregation to the corner of Short and Deweese. Construction of the present building began about 1850. Ferrill died in 1854, and his funeral procession attracted 5,000 mourners. The sanctuary was completed in 1856.

Ferrill was a powerful preacher who baptized thousands. Because slave families were often split up by sale, many walked miles each Sunday to attend services at First African Church — and have their only opportunity to see each other.

First African Baptist Church added a Tudor-style addition and a columned portico on the sanctuary in 1926. The congregation moved to Price Road in 1987 and sold its historic building to Central Christian. A child-care center now in the building would be relocated if the sale is approved, Hodge said.

Architect Gregory Fitzsimons, who developed a renovation plan for the foundation, said the building is in good condition. Still, it would take about $4 million buy, renovate and enlarge the building for the foundation’s proposed uses. Thomas also wants to raise several million more dollars to operate and endow the building and programs.

The old sanctuary, now used as a gymnasium, would become a 400-seat concert hall. Thomas would like the proposed concert hall to host local musicians and visiting ensembles that highlight African-American music. One such group is the American Spiritual Ensemble, a Lexington-based international touring company founded by Everett McCorvey, director of the University of Kentucky’s Opera Theatre program.

“It’s something we would certainly consider,” McCorvey said. “I was very impressed with the potential of what that facility could become. The church has a wonderful history. It’s certainly worth preserving.”

Thomas, who taught at Phillips Andover for 36 years, spent three years as artistic director of Project STEP, a classical music academy for gifted minority students in Boston run by the Boston Symphony and the New England Conservatory of Music. Thomas would like to start a similar program here.

Yvonne Giles, who started the Isaac Scott Hathaway museum of Kentucky black history, is on the foundation’s board. The building could eventually house that collection and host a variety of cultural programs, Thomas said.

The 10-member board includes Dan Rowland, a UK history professor; Lisa Higgins-Hord, UK’s vice president of community engagement; Urban County Councilman Chris Ford and architect Van Meter Pettit.

First African Baptist Church leaders support the project, and several were among about 50 people who attended a fund-raising reception Saturday at a home near Nicholasville. The event included a string quartet that played classical music by black composer William Grant Still.

“Fiscally, we’re in tough shoes, but this building is a national treasure,” Thomas said of the foundation’s ambitious fund-raising goal. “To know that folks in bondage committed their resources, which were so limited, to build such a remarkable structure inspires us to do great things with it.”

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At a five-year anniversary meeting of Poezia, a poetry-writing group she helped start, on Feb. 9 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, Katerina Stoykova-Klemer is greeted friends, including group co-founder Colin Watkins, right. Photos by Tom Eblen

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer already was a classic American success story.

Born in Bulgaria, she immigrated to the United States at age 24 with her young son and married her American pen pal, Daniel Klemer. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science, then a master’s in business administration. She became a software engineer for IBM, then a project manager for Lexmark International.

Increasingly, though, she felt something was missing in her life.

Then, on Dec. 20, 2006, while driving down a Lexington street, she realized what it was. A poem popped into her head. She pulled into a Kroger parking lot and wrote it down.

Stoykova-Klemer, 40, had begun writing poetry at age 8. She was published in Bulgaria, to some notice. But in her rush to build a new life in a new country, she had stopped writing. The poem that popped into her head was her first in 11 years and the first she had written in English.

“I suddenly had this feeling of joy and thought, ‘I can’t let go of this!’ ” she said. “The most important voices in our lives are often quiet ones.”

A year later, Stoykova- Klemer quit her job at Lexmark, where her husband works as an engineer.

“Before I started writing again, my job was the most important thing I did; then it was just something I did,” she said. “I realized that I didn’t want to spend so much time doing something I am not passionate about.”

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer talks with poet Jude Lally. Accents Publishing has published two of Lally's books, including his new collection, "I'm Fine, but Thanks for Asking."

Since her passion for poetry reignited, Stoykova-Klemer has been a ball of fire. She started a poetry group, earned a master’s in fine arts from Louisville’s Spalding University; taught classes at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning; and created Accents, a radio show about arts and culture that she hosts on WRFL-FM at 2 p.m. each Friday. She writes poetry and encourages dozens of other writers.

In 2010, she combined her business, technical and artistic skills to start Accents Publishing, which has produced 21 poetry books by 20 authors. Eight authors are Kentuckians, including well-known poets Richard Taylor and Frederick Smock.

“I think she is one of the most creative people in this town,” said Neil Chethik, director of the Carnegie Center. “She has a combination of business sense and creative juice, and she is such a compassionate person.

“Her poetry is fantastic. Plus, she’s trying to find a way to make literature and poetry marketable, to help other creative people make a living. She’s exactly what Lexington needs.”

Chethik watched Feb. 9 as more than 50 people came to the Carnegie Center to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Poezia. That is the writing group Stoykova-Klemer started with Colin Watkins, a poet and songwriter she met at a New Year’s Eve party 11 days after her epiphany in the Kroger parking lot.

The writing group meets at 7 p.m. Thursdays at Common Grounds coffeehouse. New members are always welcome. Poezia got its name when a member asked Stoykova-Klemer the Bulgarian word for poetry.

At the anniversary celebration, Stoykova-Klemer announced she was stepping down as a leader of the group, in part to focus more time on Accents Publishing.

The company’s most popular and profitable books are small “chapbooks.” Making them is a family affair: Stoykova-Klemer prints and cuts them, and her husband binds them. Her son, Simeon Kondev, a student at Rhode Island School of Design, creates cover art.

Stoykova-Klemer handles distribution to stores from Kentucky to New York and New Hampshire. “They all know me at the post office,” she said.

Chapbooks sell for $5. “What we found out is that people rarely buy just one,” she said. Profits from chapbooks help support larger, professionally printed paperbacks that sell for $10 to $15.

“Our idea of affordable books seems to be working,” she said. “They say poetry books don’t sell, but our books sell. We keep selling more and more of them.”

Accents Publishing sponsors an annual contest to find new authors. “We have had hundreds of people submit work,” she said. The company covers all publication costs and pays authors by giving them 10 percent of the press run. Accents broke even its first year, and she expects a profit this year.

Stoykova-Klemer wants to keep growing the company — adding prose books and widening distribution — as long as it doesn’t crowd out her writing time.

“I say the most important thing I can do for Accents Publishing is to keep writing,” she said. “That keeps me centered for everything else.”

Keeping up with Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Personal Web site: Katerinaklemer.com.

Company site: Accents-publishing.com.

‘Accents’ radio show: 2-3 p.m. Fridays, WRFL-88.1 FM, or Katerinaklemer.com/radio.

Poezia writing group: 7 p.m. Thursdays, Common Grounds coffeehouse, 343 E. High St. Online at Meetup.com/poetry-439. A prose writing group meets at 7 p.m. Tuesdays. Meetup.com/writers-583.

Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning: Carnegieliteracy.org.

A selection of books published by Accents Publishing of Lexington. Poet Katerina Stoykova-Klemer started the publishing company to make inexpensive poetry books available to a wider audience.

Hurricane Katrina almost wiped out Tulane University. Then, the disaster gave the 178-year-old New Orleans institution an exciting new vision.

That was the story that Tulane provost Michael Bernstein told last week, when he came to Lexington to speak as the guest of the University of Kentucky’s Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching.

Before the August 2005 storm, Bernstein said, Tulane’s engagement with the surrounding community “was haphazard at best.” Now, he said, “it is part of the DNA of the institution.”

Making the university more a part of the community — and the community more a part of the university — was a valuable lesson for Tulane. UK could learn that lesson, too, and it doesn’t require a cataclysmic disaster.

Before Katrina, Bernstein said, “It used to be study and then go into the city to have fun.” When the storm almost destroyed New Orleans, Tulane included, university officials canceled the fall semester and fled to Houston to regroup, reorganize and refocus the university around its most successful academic programs.

With Tulane’s campus and finances either literally or figuratively under water, officials were forced to take a fresh look at the school’s core mission — its very reason for existing.

“Instead of running from what the storm did to us, we have embraced it, and we’re leveraging it in a powerful way,” Bernstein said. “Now we are more focused on how the community can be used in learning and service for students.”

The university has rebranded itself around the motto “Tulane Empowers: Helping People Build a Better World.” Academic programs and learning activities have been refocused around themes of public service, public education, disaster response, urban redevelopment, public health and community medicine.

Unlike Tulane, a private institution, UK and similar state land-grant universities have had public engagement as part of their mission since Abraham Lincoln signed legislation during the Civil War that led to their creation.

Former President Lee T. Todd Jr. focused on revitalizing UK’s land-grant mission statewide, especially in the areas of economic development and health care.

When Eli Capilouto became UK’s 12th president last summer, he took on two long-simmering issues of town-gown relations. How he deals with them could well set the tone for UK’s relationship with Lexington during his tenure.

Just a year ago, UK athletics officials were pushing for a new basketball venue to replace the 35-year-old Rupp Arena that anchors Lexington’s downtown convention center.

Mayor Jim Gray sought to refocus the conversation in broader terms: renovating Rupp Arena and redeveloping the convention center and acres of underused surface parking as an economic engine for Lexington.

Gray created a task force that came up with a visionary and generally popular plan for doing that over the next decade or two. Capilouto has seemed somewhat cool to the idea, though, saying he doesn’t want to jeopardize state funding that UK desperately needs to improve its campus.

With state resources scarce, Capilouto said, UK’s priority needs to be renovating substandard academic buildings and building more and better housing for students. For years, UK students have either lived in scarce, neglected dormitories or been pushed off campus, largely to the detriment of surrounding neighborhoods.

Capilouto’s stand hasn’t pleased everyone, but it is the right approach.

The Arena, Arts and Entertainment Task Force’s visionary plan for Rupp Arena and its surroundings will happen eventually. Few forces are more powerful in Kentucky than the love of UK basketball, so Rupp Arena is hardly in danger of falling into neglect.

On the other hand, UK’s housing and academic structures have been neglected for years — in some cases, decades. So has the university’s relationship with many of the neighborhoods surrounding campus. It is long past time that UK acknowledged and addressed those responsibilities.

Tulane’s decision to embrace New Orleans and their shared fate was not only the right thing to do, but the smart thing to do. Bernstein said community engagement has improved life in New Orleans and Tulane’s educational potential. It even has helped attract students hungry for such real-world learning experiences.

UK already has many community-engagement efforts. But, as Tulane discovered, much more could be done. A closer relationship between UK and Lexington would pay huge dividends to both. Simply becoming a better neighbor is a good way for UK to start.

Impromptu memorials to traffic crash victims have become a common, if rogue, element of the American landscape. They linger for years, often well tended, in the no-man’s land between highways and private property.

Most people speed past them, paying little attention. Mowing crews take care to go around them. Vandals and thieves rarely bother them, as if acknowledging the spot’s special significance to loved ones of the departed.

For the past six years, Phillip March Jones has been stopping, looking closely at each memorial, taking a Polaroid photograph and recording the location’s GPS coordinates. He has done this from New York to California, and, because he lives in Lexington, all over Kentucky.

Jones has collected 139 of these photographs in a book, Points of Departure (Jargon Society, $40). He’ll sign the book Saturday at The Morris Book Shop.

“I had always been interested in roadside memorials on several levels,” said Jones, an artist, writer and curator who started Institute 193, a non-profit contemporary art space at 193 North Limestone, and who is director of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, which promotes appreciation for vernacular visual arts of the black South. “These memorials speak to a basic human need to create in response to death.”

Jones said he has always been interested in art created by people who might not consider themselves artists. Jones doesn’t consider himself a photographer, either.

“I wasn’t trying to study them as art objects,” he said, or even to make great photographs of them. Jones said he just wanted to document and catalog the memorials in a way that readers, who might otherwise speed by them at 60 mph, could slow down and take a look.

Jones chose to use Polaroid film, a pre- digital technology for creating “instant” pictures. It seemed appropriate because police once used Polaroids to create unalterable images at accident scenes as evidence.

Points of Departure is the 114th book published by the Jargon Society, a press started by two poets, Thomas Meyer and the late Jonathan Williams. Over the years, the North Carolina-based press has specialized in avant-garde works of literature and photography, although its most famous title was the 1986 best-seller White Trash Cooking.

Meyer wrote an introductory essay, but other than GPS coordinates showing where each photograph was taken (except for one, left out by mistake), there is little more explanation. Jones said he wrote an essay about the project, then decided not to include it.

“I wanted the images to speak for themselves; I was never trying to inject meaning into them,” Jones said. “It’s in the spirit of Jargon. There’s a bit of poetry in it all.”

IF YOU GO

Phillip March Jones signs ‘Points of Departure’

When: 2-4 p.m. Feb. 25

Where: Morris Book Shop, 882 E. High St.

Learn more: (859) 276-0494, Morrisbookshop.com, Roadsidebook.com.

Kentuckians love a good story. But when it comes to recording the stories of blacks in the commonwealth, historians have had a lot of catching up to do.

Gerald Smith, a University of Kentucky history professor, makes that point in the introduction to a special black-history issue of The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, which he edited for publication in April.

Historians had written about slavery in antebellum Kentucky, but a deeper exploration of the black experience didn’t really begin until 1971, Smith writes. That was when the Kentucky Human Rights Commission published Kentucky Black Heritage, a supplementary text for seven- and eighth-grade students.

Then, in 1982, The Fascinating Story of Black Kentuckians was published by Alice Dunnigan, who was born in Russellville in 1906. Dunnigan made history of her own in 1948 when she accompanied Harry S. Truman on a Western tour, becoming the first black journalist in Washington to cover a presidential trip.

A scholarship milestone came in 1985 when George C. Wright published a book about black life in Louisville between the Civil War and 1930, Smith said. Wright followed that five years later with the chillingly detailed study, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940. Wright, now president of Prairie View A&M University in Texas, and Marion Lucas, a Western Kentucky University history professor, published the two-volume A History of Blacks in Kentucky in 1992.

Since then, more academics have mined this rich vein, including Smith and fellow historians J. Blaine Hudson, John Hardin, Tracy E. K’Meyer and Douglas A. Boyd. Another valuable resource is the UK Libraries’ Notable Kentucky African American Database.

Smith, Hardin and Karen C. McDaniel are now editing the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia and trying to raise money to finish the book by 2014.

Smith said this issue of The Register is another significant milestone. The Register, created in 1903, is one of the nation’s oldest historical journals. The quarterly publishes work from leading academics, but it also tries to be accessible to average readers. It is a good mix of scholarship and storytelling.

Hudson writes about the free black community in antebellum Louisville, and Hardin tells the stories of key figures in the desegregation of higher education in Kentucky. Smith writes about Kentucky chapters of the Congress of Racial Equality during the civil rights movement. Joshua D. Farrington’s article looks at strategies used to pass public accommodation laws in Louisville in 1960 and 1961.

One of the most interesting stories, by Sallie L. Powell, is titled “It is Hard to be What You Have not Seen.” It tells about Brenda Hughes of Lexington and the complex issues of race, gender and sports culture that she navigated to become a pioneer in Kentucky’s unofficial religion, basketball.

The Kentucky High School Athletic Association certified Hughes as a basketball referee in 1973. She went on to become the only black woman to officiate at a Kentucky girls’ state tournament game during the 20th century.

Good timing helped Hughes, a young mother of two, succeed. In 1971, a federal judge had ordered the KHSAA to hire more black referees. That was because, 15 years after desegregation, half of student athletes were black, but only 1 percent of refs were. The year after Hughes became a referee, the federal Title IX law forced Kentucky to reinstatement girls’ high school basketball after a 40-year absence that many people blamed on sexism.

While studying at the old Dunbar High School and UK, Hughes’ only athletic opportunities were cheerleading. But she grew up with three brothers, and sports became her passion. The full-time postal worker became a part-time youth sports leader for the city’s Parks and Recreation Department.

“This is no front or cause for me,” she told Lexington Leader reporter Gary Yunt in 1973. “I want to be a referee.”

Hughes died in 1986 at age 39. Nine years later, she was inducted into the Dawahares-Kentucky High School Athletic Association Sports Hall of Fame. Her story, and others told in this issue ofThe Register, remind us that Kentucky history is a rich tapestry of stories, from epic social movements to a young woman determined to become what she has not seen.

After five years in California working for Cypress Semiconductor, Alan Hawse decided in 1996 that he wanted to move back home to Lexington.

The computer chip maker didn’t want to lose Hawse, so it created a research and development facility in Lexington for him to run. Still, Hawse figured that his climb up the corporate ladder was over.

If you want to be a player in Silicon Valley, you have to be in Silicon Valley, right? Not necessarily.

In 2003, Hawse was made vice president of information technology. Last February, he was put in charge of the company’s software-design applications. This month, he was promoted to executive vice president of software development.

Hawse, 43, is now one of a dozen top executives of Cypress, a $3.5 billion company that is one of the world’s leading makers of programmable chips. He oversees about 250 software engineers working in this country, India, China, Turkey and Ukraine.

Hawse plans to create a software-design unit in Lexington, too, “as soon as I find the right person to run it.” That would add about 10 jobs to Cypress’s office at the corner of Main and Mill streets, where about 40 engineers design chips.

“Cypress likes Lexington,” said Hawse, who has degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Kentucky and Georgia Tech. “We attract good people who do good work, and the cost to the company is reasonable.”

For the moment, though, Hawse has bigger tasks on his plate. He said software problems last year delayed the introduction of Cypress’s TrueTouch Gen 4 chip, which brought a new level of precision to touchscreens used in smartphones and many other devices made by such companies as Samsung, Apple and Sony.

That delay caused Cypress’s stock price to take a hit, costing shareholders millions of dollars. “Now, it’s my responsibility to fix,” Hawse said. “It was a crazy year. This year is going to be crazy, too. It’s amazing intellectual stimulation. Everything is new, and the stakes are very high. But I’m an engineer; I’m good at putting stuff together and making it work.”

Software development is essential to Cypress because its chips are programmable. In addition to touchscreens, those chips are used to control such things as touch buttons on appliances and computer peripherals that work through USB connections.

Programmable chips are a big, global business — and getting bigger all the time. People are always creating new uses for chips, as Hawse did when he sought a solution to a problem in his back yard.

Hawse, his wife, Jill, and their two children live in Scott County. Elkhorn Creek runs behind their property, and they never know when the water might be rising so much that it could flood their barn. So, Hawse connected a Cypress chip to a water-pressure sensor to measure the water level and display it online. Now, he can log onto a Web site from anywhere and check the creek’s level.

That has come in handy because Hawse spends a lot of time traveling around the world.

“I spent 100 nights in a hotel last year, which isn’t fun, but it’s part of the job,” he said.

Hawse figures Lexington is a better place to do his new job than at company headquarters in San Jose, Calif. For one thing, this time zone is more convenient for reaching Cypress employees in many other parts of the world at convenient times.

Still, Hawse marvels at his good fortune, and at the changes in business and technology that allow him to be a successful engineer and top executive at one of the world’s top technology companies, yet still get to work in his hometown.

It’s also nice, he adds, to still come to work most days wearing jeans, running shoes and a sweatshirt. And be able to keep a bicycle outside his office so he can squeeze in a 20-mile ride at lunch on a pretty day.

“It’s jaw-droppingly amazing when you think about it,” Hawse said. “I drive down Newtown Pike every day through the amazingly beautiful place where we live, and when I walk though these doors, I’m in Silicon Valley. The ability we have to hire good people here and play with the big boys is amazing.”

I will admit to suffering a bit of CentrePointe fatigue when I went to see a preview of the fifth iteration of Dudley Webb’s still-unfunded downtown hotel, retail, office and condo development. But it was worth the trip.

I liked the designs that were shown informally Wednesday to the Courthouse Area Design Review Board, which must approve them.

Most of all, I realized how valuable this long and difficult process has been. Not only has it improved CentrePointe’s design — assuming the project is ever built — but it has taught Lexington some valuable lessons about the value of good design and public engagement.

CentrePointe was unveiled in March 2008 as a hulking tower that required the leveling of a block of downtown buildings dating to 1826. With no proof that Webb had financing, the review board, some of whose members have been replaced, allowed the block to be cleared.

Public outcry caused Webb to redesign CentrePointe twice — first as another generic tower, then as a squat slab. All three versions would have stuck out like a sore thumb along that human-scale stretch of Main Street.

Without financing, CentrePointe has spent more than two years as a grassy field, which has afforded a nice view of the restored old buildings across Main Street, most notably the Trust Lounge and Bellini’s restaurant.

At the urging of Mayor Jim Gray, Webb hired Jeanne Gang of Chicago — one of only three architects to ever win a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant — to reimagine CentrePointe. After she did some fine work, Webb inexplicably replaced her with EOP Architects of Lexington.

At the same time, Webb added a lot more square footage. After the Louisville-based boutique hotel company 21C decided to look at other Lexington locations, Webb again focused on building a big Marriott hotel with a 10,000-square-foot ballroom.

That meant two elements of Gang’s plan — elegant “tube” towers and public space inside the block — were no longer feasible.

EOP inherited a tough job but has done well. The firm retained Gang’s two biggest contributions to CentrePointe: a less-dense site plan that reduced the size of the tower and pushed it back to Vine Street; and the idea of using several local architects to design varied, human-scale buildings along Main Street.

EOP’s Rick Ekhoff retained much of the look of Gang’s proposed glass office building at Main and Limestone streets. And he designed a stunning building for the corner of Vine and Limestone to house an Urban Active gym. One review board member likened it to the “bird’s nest” stadium built for the Beijing Olympics, but it reminded me more of a forest. Some people won’t like it, but it struck me as the kind of innovative architecture Lexington could use more of.

EOP and three other local architects showed review board members their preliminary designs for Main Street, and they all were thoughtful and original.

The process was pretty remarkable, too. Here were four firms being asked to design side-by-side pieces of urban infill that complemented each other and surrounding buildings without sacrificing originality.

The exercise reminded me of how Lexington has, for so many years, ignored the potential for architecture as public art. That is especially ironic, considering that Lexington has so many examples of it from earlier generations, including the 1849 McAdams & Morford Building and the 112-year-old former Fayette County Courthouse, both right across the street from CentrePointe.

EOP tried hard to make the big tower look less massive, but it is still a big tower.

What bothered review board members most was a proposed pedway across Upper Street and a lack of accessibility to public space inside the block, which has been moved from the first floor to a fourth-floor roof.

Webb loves pedways, those space-age relics that were designed to get people off the street and out of bad weather. He wants a pedway to connect CentrePointe to the garage of his nearby Lexington Financial Center.

Upper Street already will serve as the entrance to CentrePointe’s loading docks, and a pedway would make it even more of a canyon. It also would clutter the view of the McAdams & Morford building and the red 19th century building that houses McCarthy’s Bar and Failte Irish Imports. If the review board does nothing else, it should nix the pedway.

Expect to see further tweaking of CentrePointe’s designs before a public meeting is scheduled next month and certainly before the review board signs off on them.

Lexington might have a bit of CentrePointe fatigue, but the project has become better at each step of the process, both for the developer and for Lexington.

More important, though, it has sent a refreshing signal that design excellence now matters in this city.

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TakeItArtside!, Kentucky’s public art smartphone app that I wrote about last March, has made some big improvements in time for Friday’s LexArts Gallery Hop.

The free app for iPhone and Android platforms now includes a filter that allows it to include information about a wider variety of cultural assets: public art, historic homes, museums, galleries, studios and archeological sites across Kentucky.

TakeItArtside! also can now publish special events for any of the sites listed in its database. App users can be notified the day of an event. By clicking on the home page announcement, they are directed to other sites for detailed information.

The app was developed by the Kentucky Museum Without Walls Project, a statewide collaboration initiated by the University of Kentucky’s Gaines Center for the Humanities.

LexArts is the newest partner, joining several other arts organizations, colleges and universities. A new special events page on the app lists galleries and other locations participating in Friday’s Gallery Hop.

The free app is available through online phone app stores. For more information about getting the app, or advertising an arts event on it, go to: KentuckyMuseumWithoutWalls.com.

Dr. Mary E. Britton is surrounded by men at this 1910 meeting of Kentucky physicians, dentists and pharmacists. Photo courtesy of Thomas Tolliver.

In Mary E. Britton’s time, a black girl in Lexington wasn’t supposed to grow up to be a teacher. Much less a journalist, a civil rights activist, a social reformer or a medical doctor.

Britton became all of those. “She has an amazing story,” said Gerald Smith, a University of Kentucky history professor who is editing the forthcoming Kentucky African American Encyclopedia.

Britton was born in 1855 to Henry and Laura Britton, a free black couple who lived on Mill Street in what is now Gratz Park, just a few doors down from the future Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan.

Undated photo of Mary E. Britton. Photo courtesy of Berea College

From 1871-74, Britton attended Berea College, the first institution of higher learning in Kentucky to admit blacks. About the only profession open to educated women of any race at that time was teaching, and Britton taught in segregated public schools in Lexington and Fayette County, according to a biographical material in The Kentucky Encyclopedia and on the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights’ Web site.

As Southern states enacted “Jim Crow” laws in the late 1800s to repeal civil rights afforded to blacks after slavery and to enforce segregation, Britton wrote commentaries opposing those laws for several Lexington newspapers.

“She came out of that Berea tradition of a teacher who becomes a social activist,” Smith said.

In a lengthy commentary in the April 19, 1892, edition of The Kentucky Leader, Britton didn’t pull any punches in telling the newspaper’s largely white readership why the General Assembly should not approve a law requiring blacks and whites to ride in separate railway coaches.

“We are aware that the Assembly has the power to inflict such a law, but is it right?” she wrote. “While we have no longer to chill the blood of our friends by talking of branding irons, chains, whips, blood hounds and to the many physical wrongs and abominations of slavery, this foe of American prejudice renders our lives insecure, our homes unhappy, and crushes out the very sinew of existence — freedom and citizenship.”

The Separate Coach Law passed anyway, and Britton turned her attention to another problem afflicting her race: the lack of adequate health care. Britton enrolled in the American Missionary College in Chicago and graduated with a medical degree.

In 1902, she became the first black woman in Lexington to be a licensed physician.

Mary E. Britton treated patients from her home. Photo by Tom Eblen

Britton treated patients in her small home at 545 North Limestone. Her specialties included hydrotherapy and electrotherapy — the use of water and electricity to treat illnesses and disease.

It is hard to imagine now just what a pioneer Britton was for her time. Thomas Tolliver lives in a house on East Third Street that once belonged to T.T. Wendell, another early black physician. Tolliver found an old photograph in the attic from a 1910 meeting of the Medical Society of Negro Physicians. The photograph shows Britton on the front row, surrounded by men.

Despite a busy medical practice, Britton remained active in civil rights and the growing women’s rights movement. “You talk about a civil rights advocate,” Smith said. “Here was a woman in the late 19th century who was really going at it.”

Britton was one of 15 black women in Lexington who founded the Colored Orphan Industrial Home on Georgetown Street. The century-old building now houses the Robert H. Williams Cultural Center and the Isaac Scott Hathaway Museum. Britton died in 1925 at age 70 and is buried in Cove Haven Cemetery.

Two of her siblings also achieved fame in their time. Brother Tom Britton (1870-1901) was a successful jockey who won the 1891 Kentucky Oaks aboard Miss Hawkins and came within six inches of winning the 1892 Kentucky Derby on Huron. His health and fortunes declined after a bad racing accident, and he eventually killed himself.

Sister Julia Britton Hooks (1852-1942) also attended Berea and became the college’s first black faculty member, teaching instrumental music. She moved to Memphis, married Charles Hooks and opened a music school. Among her students was the blues legend W.C. Handy.

Like her sister, Hooks was politically active, becoming a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Her grandson’s name might be familiar: Benjamin Hooks was executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992.

When Drew Curtis started Fark.com, he was a 26-year-old smart aleck who thought there was money to be made by collecting the world’s funniest and weirdest news stories on one Web site and letting readers comment on them.

Now, Curtis is a 39-year-old smart aleck looking for bigger opportunities.

Not that he plans to change Fark and its often-crude brand of humor. Far from it. The site gets bigger and more successful all the time, Curtis said.

Fark now gets 56 million page views a month, said Curtis, the company’s sole owner. Revenues from advertising, merchandise, premium subscriptions and conference generate enough income to support 10 employees in addition to Curtis, his wife and their three young children.

“We’re operating at only about 10 percent of what the full potential is,” he said.

But the Lexington native, who lives in Versailles, has ambitions to become a deal-maker, connecting other Internet entrepreneurs and helping them turn crazy ideas into profitable reality.

“I really like Fark, but it’s not a billion-dollar idea,” Curtis said. “I want to help people with 95 percent of a good idea achieve the other 5 percent. My great strength is that I see patterns in stuff.”

Curtis is now in his third of five semesters in the prestigious Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program, a joint venture of New York’s Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley. “You have these two massively different ideologies, and you get flavors from both of them,” he said of the program.

Why get a master’s degree in business administration? “It fills in the gaps,” Curtis said. “Besides, it removes certain questions from the table when you propose crazy ideas. Like, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’”

While Curtis wants to branch out, he has no plans to leave Central Kentucky.

“I don’t think there’s anything I would fix about the place, to be honest,” he said of living here.

But over lunch at Stella’s Deli on Jefferson Street, Curtis was frank about some things he would fix about Central Kentucky as a place for technology entrepreneurs.

The biggest problem, he said, is the lack of enough venture capital.

“There are a lot of talented people with good ideas, but the funding environment is really weak,” he said. “If a (startup) company got traction, they wouldn’t know what to do next.”

Curtis funded Fark on his own, but it took 13 years to build the company to what it is today. That’s much too slow for entrepreneurs with ideas big enough to shape the global business landscape.

Many Kentucky investors want a controlling interest in companies they put their money into, Curtis said, and that isn’t attractive to entrepreneurs with the best ideas.

“They’re not doing it wrong on purpose,” he said of investors. “There’s just an experience gap.”

Many Internet startups have died because investors pushed them to grow too quickly, Curtis said, adding that could have happened to Fark had investors been pushing him for quick returns.

“There’s a reason why most Internet companies with financial backing last no longer than five years,” he said.

Curtis said that creating Fark has given him a good sense for how to succeed online. It is different than most people imagine — even good business people.

For one thing, he said, companies must learn that using social media is more of an art than a science.

“You can’t successfully develop a social-media strategy because they don’t exist,” he said. “Post stuff that’s good. Done!”

New media, like old media, is a reflection of what consumers want, and that changes every day. For example, you can’t make a video go viral on the Internet.

“The trick is knowing what to do when it happens,” he said.

One thing is to request a response from viewers to keep the wave of attention going.

Curtis said Fark has been successful for the same reason The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has been: they both contextualize news and highlight stories people care about.

“Putting stuff online is easy,” he said. “But figuring out what people care about is key. It’s editing, basically.”

One of the challenges of newspaper writing is deciding what to cut. With any good topic, there is always more interesting information than newsprint space. My Sunday column about Kentucky’s fine writers mentioned many of them, past and present. But within minutes of it being posted online, readers were pointing out other good writers I left out.

What I really hated to leave out of the piece — but did, both for space and because it was a slight diversion from topic — was everything poet Nikky Finney had to say about the influence of the mountains on Kentucky and Kentucky writers.  Here are Finney’s full comments, which were sent as an email following up on our conversation the evening before:

 When speaking of the greatness of Kentucky writing I often hear people say, “must be something in the water!” I don’t think so. I think it’s in great part due to the mountains that rise and stretch out all around our homes and farms. Our greatness as writers has to do with the land. Our connection to it. A wonderful old man in South Carolina once told me this wonderful thing, “God ain’t making no more land.” He was right. He was trying to tell me to remember what was important in this life. We don’t really own the land. The land owns us. Mountains that have been with us here in Kentucky for a million years. We never credit the mountains enough for helping shape who we are, for giving us a specific lens through which to see the world, a lens to nurture what we have to say about our human presence in it. We never credit the mountains enough. We think that they are tough and resilient and can take care of themselves but more and more we know that is not true. We have to be better caretakers of this landscape that is so particular to our sensibilities. We act as if the mountains will always be there — surrounding, protecting, helping to situate our contemplative nature, and yet we know it just takes a little dynamite and greed to change all that. The history of Kentucky writing has been what it has been because the mountains that inhabit so much our our particular skyline have long been our favorite horizon; that wondrous place where our eyes land and lift.

If you agree with Finney about the importance of protecting Kentucky’s mountains from destructive surface-mining, you might want to be in Frankfort on Tuesday for the annual I Love Mountains Day march and rally. Click here for more information.

Tens of thousands of Kentuckians were focused last Tuesday night on cheering for the Wildcats as they thrashed the Florida Gators.

Still, a few blocks away from a packed Rupp Arena, the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning also was filled to capacity. The standing-room-only crowd of more than 200 was there to cheer for local writers. Basketball isn’t the only pursuit where Kentuckians play at the top of the game.

Ed McClanahan read a hilarious tale of adolescent angst from his new retrospective collection, I Just Hitched in from the Coast. Bobbie Ann Mason read from her new novel,The Girl in the Blue Beret. Nikky Finney read from her new poetry collection, Head Off & Split, which recently won the National Book Award. Before the all-stars took the microphone, several aspiring writers read from their work.

Finney’s National Book Award — and the viral Internet video of her amazing acceptance speech — could not have come at a better time for a new Carnegie Center initiative. Neil Chethik, the center’s new director, has proclaimed Lexington as the Literary Capital of Mid-America and the Carnegie Center as its statehouse.

“It’s not as if we’re trying to be something we’re not,” Chethik said. “We are the literary capital and have been for many years. Half the job is marketing what we already have, and the other half is using that energy to create more.”

Many states have rich literary traditions. But few can top what writers who were born in or moved to Kentucky have produced — and are producing.

Robert Penn Warren was the nation’s first poet laureate, as well as the first writer to win Pulitzer Prizes in more than one literary genre. William Wells Brown was the first published black novelist. Hunter S. Thompson helped create a new genre of first-person narrative, “gonzo journalism.”

Wendell Berry, whose environmental writing has attracted an international following, was selected last week to give the 2012 Jefferson Lecture on April 23 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. It is the federal government’s most prestigious honor for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Eastern Kentucky’s mountains have produced, nurtured and inspired many outstanding writers, including James Still, Jesse Stuart, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Harry M. Caudill, Gurney Norman, Janice Holt Giles, Verna Mae Slone, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and Silas House. Western Kentucky’s great voices have included Mason and Irvin S. Cobb.

Central Kentuckians James Lane Allen and John Fox Jr. were national best-sellers a century ago, just as Kim Edwards, Sue Grafton and Barbara Kingsolver are today.

Elizabeth Hardwick and Cleanth Brooks were two of the 20th century’s most influential literary critics. Other notable Kentucky writers from the recent past include Thomas Merton, Allen Tate, Gayle Jones and Guy Davenport.

Among today’s heavy hitters: Sena Jeter Naslund, Frank X Walker, Maurice Manning, Richard Taylor, Chris Offutt, C.E. Morgan, Crystal Wilkinson, Jane Gentry Vance and Erik Reece.

Despite a deep streak of anti-intellectualism, Kentucky has always nurtured great writing. But why? Some say it is the state’s location. Kentucky was the first Western frontier, a Civil War border state and a place always in the midst of transition, migration, clashing values and regional tensions.

“Conflict makes for great stories,” Chethik noted.

“I think it’s because we like to talk so much and tell stories on one another,” McClanahan said. “It’s so much a part of life. Maybe it’s in the water.”

It is not the water, but the land, said Finney, a South Carolina native who has lived in Kentucky for two decades. “Our greatness as writers has to do with the land. Our connection to it,” she said. “We don’t really own the land. The land owns us.”

More than anything, Finney said, it is Kentucky’s mountains: “We never credit the mountains enough for helping shape who we are, for giving us a specific lens through which to see the world, a lens to nurture what we have to say about our human presence in it.”

Writing is a solitary endeavor. But writers need a supportive community, and Kentucky has it. You see it in the attendance at huge annual book fairs in Frankfort and Bowling Green, at bookstores across the state and at events such as the monthly Holler Poets reading, which packs Al’s Bar on North Limestone Street.

You also see it in the attendance at classes and events at the non-profit Carnegie Center, housed in a beautiful old building in Gratz Park that used to be the Lexington Public Library.

“This is a sacred space; a nurturing space for writers,” said Finney, who wrote much of her book,Rice, in one of the center’s study carrels. Mason has taken French classes at the center since 2006, and they helped inspire her to turn her father-in-law’s experiences as a World War II bomber pilot into her latest novel.

The Carnegie Center will have a public forum Thursday at 6 p.m. to gather ideas for this initiative. But Chethik already has some: a marketing campaign, literary conferences and more events that combine literature, music and visual art. Kingsolver is the keynote speaker for the center’s first Books in Progress Conference for authors and aspiring authors, June 8-9.

“There is something going on here,” Finney said. “There is a community hungry for good books and good words. And it has been for a long, long time.”

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The Isaac Scott Hathaway Museum’s new home seems almost fitting: Black history was once something of an orphan when it came to the study of Kentucky history.

The museum moved last summer into the Robert H. Williams Cultural Center, a century-old building on Georgetown Street that once was the Colored Orphan Industrial Home.

“Our purpose is to highlight Kentucky African-Americans,” said Yvonne Giles, the driving force behind the museum and one of Lexington’s go-to people for black history information.

Much of the museum’s collection has been donated or loaned by black Kentuckians who want to preserve their heritage. Several exhibits highlight the accomplishments of black Kentuckians such as Hathaway, a Lexington native for whom the museum in named.

Hathaway (1872-1967) was an art professor, ceramic artist and sculptor who was the first African-American to design U.S. coins: half-dollars honoring Booker T. Washington in 1946 and George Washington Carver in 1951.

One exhibit tells the story of the Tandy family. Henry Tandy (1853-1918), a builder who did the brick work beneath the stone facade of the old Fayette County Courthouse, was thought to be the richest black Kentuckian at the turn of the last century. His son, Vertner Tandy (1885-1949), was the first black registered architect in New York and one of the seven founders of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

The daughter of “Smoke” Richardson, a local jazz band leader, donated his records and photos, and a violin. Richardson played sax, but when his daughter was young, she wanted to learn to play the violin. So he sold his sax to buy her one, Giles said. Next to that display is information about contemporary jazz pianist Kevin Harris, a Lexington native who now teaches at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The museum doesn’t shy away from some unpleasant or controversial aspects of black history. There are shackles and other slavery artifacts, a lawn jockey, a collection of black dolls, and old advertising art that promoted black stereotypes.

Several items depict Aunt Jemima of pancake fame. Nancy Green was born into slavery near Mount Sterling in 1834, and at age 56, she was hired to become one of advertising’s first living trademarks. A good cook and storyteller, she drew big crowds when she launched the pancake mix at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. She traveled the country as a popular brand ambassador until she was killed in a car wreck in 1923.

“People are always looking at these things and saying: He was from Lexington? She was from Kentucky? I didn’t know that!” Giles said.

The museum, founded in 2002, has had about 1,000 visitors since moving in July from the old Fayette County Courthouse. That building, which houses the Lexington History Museum and two smaller museums, is in desperate need of renovation. The heat and air conditioning no longer work, which Giles said made it difficult to recruit volunteers.

Moving to the old orphanage also was a way to showcase that historic building. The Colored Orphan Industrial Home’s fascinating story is told in a 1995 book by Lauretta Flynn Byars.

The orphanage was an early example of leadership by Lexington’s black women. Fifteen women established the institution in an old house on Georgetown Street in 1892 and raised operating money through a variety of creative means.

One important — and ironic — fund-raising method was to pay Robert Fitzhugh to travel the nation soliciting donations. Not only was Fitzhugh white, but he was from a pro-slavery Virginia family and had been a captain on Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s staff during the Civil War.

A fire in 1912 destroyed the orphanage and killed three children. But the women and Fitzhugh quickly raised money for the current building, where orphans lived, were educated and learned trades in a sewing studio and adjacent blacksmith and shoemaking shops. The orphanage closed in 1988 and became a cultural center named for Robert H. Williams, one of the orphanage’s major donors.

“We’ve had several visitors to the museum who, as children, lived at the home,” Giles said. “They’ve even come in and said, ‘My bed was over there.’”

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The Lexington Venture Club’s annual celebration of local entrepreneurs last week had a ’70s disco theme, but it was all about the future of economic growth in Central Kentucky.

As a couple hundred people mingled beneath glittering disco balls at Buster’s Billiard & Backroom on Manchester Street, Warren Nash, director of the University of Kentucky’s Lexington Innovation & Commercialization Center, reported some encouraging statistics.

The 78 early-stage companies surveyed by the Lexington Venture Club reported receiving $69.9 million in funding last year, the most since statistics started being kept in 2005. The biggest source of that funding was so-called angel investors — people willing to risk their own money on other people’s good ideas.

Those 78 companies produced revenues of $127.2 million in 2011 — up 35.3 percent from the previous year. And they employed 780 people (605 full-time and 175 part-time) with an average annual full-time salary of $65,651. Those employees included 279 people (182 full-time and 97 part-time) hired last year — a 16.2 percent increase over 2010.

“You represent the future of Lexington and our country,” UK President Eli Capilouto, one of the few people in the room wearing a tie, told the entrepreneurs.

What is always fascinating about this annual event, organized by Commerce Lexington, is the diversity and creativity of these entrepreneurs and how most of them are trying to leverage new technology to solve old problems.

Nearly half of the 78 companies the Venture Club focused on are in biotechnology and health care fields, with the next largest clusters involving software, information technology and advanced manufacturing.

The program included videos highlighting three companies:

■ Seikowave uses special optics to make quick, three-dimensional measurements for applications as diverse as auto parts, dental implants and video games.

■ CoPlex Therapeutics is developing therapies that the company thinks can prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Like Seikowave, CoPlex Therapeutics grew out of technology developed by UK researchers.

■ SoJo Studios, an entertainment company that creates social games on Facebook to finance real-world development projects in the United States and Haiti. The company’s Wetopia game recently received endorsements from entertainers Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Bieber.

Many other local start-ups are just as fascinating. Rick Gersony of Medmovie.com told me how he has combined his interests in art and medicine to develop online medical animations for doctors and patients. And Subodh Das of Underground Recovery LLC is developing technology to recover valuable metals from urban landfills and industrial sites.

Wes Keltner is a local marketing guy whose company, Gun, has become one of the nation’s largest consultants for video-game makers. “That’s right; we play video games for a living,” he said. Michael Hartman’s Frogdice has become a leading independent developer of video games and virtual environments.

Mayor Jim Gray told the entrepreneurs that he wants Lexington — like Austin, Texas, and Boulder, Colo. — to become known as a city that nurtures out-of-the-box thinking and the entrepreneurial companies that result from it.

Gray read from an email he received recently from Ezra Roizen, a California investment banker on the board of the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who spent some time in Lexington recently.

“Lexington has many of the key ingredients for being a hub of entrepreneurship and innovation: a great university, comfortable college town environment, access to capital and a draw for global leaders through the horse community — those are real strengths, and it means you will grow great people, and great people like to come here,” Rosen wrote.

“Entrepreneurs like to be around smart people, they need to be around money, and they enjoy being in a nice place. San Francisco has these things, but it’s not the only place. Cities like Austin and, more recently, Boulder have built world-class entrepreneurial ecosystems,” he wrote.

“But it’s in the ecosystem. It’s not one thing; it’s not a single person or a shiny, new tech park or a loan program. It’s a community and a way of life.”

My new house when it really was new, 1907. Photo by Thomas A. Knight

By the time you read this, Becky and I have either moved to our renovated, century-old house near downtown or died trying.

Our move this weekend completed an exciting and exhausting five-month odyssey that began when we offered to buy this house from a nice lady who had lived there for nearly 40 years.

I was curious about the house’s history, and the Lexington Public Library’s Kentucky Room turned out to be a valuable resource. My best find was a promotional booklet for the then-new neighborhood, published in 1907 by Thomas A. Knight, a well-known photographer.

The booklet included several photographs of the street, including a portrait of our then-new house. The picture cleared up several mysteries: a missing front chimney, a strange door that used to be a window and a low spot in the front yard that was then a giant tree stump.

Old city directories in the Kentucky Room showed that the house had been owned by a road contractor, a cabinet maker, a traveling salesman, a physician and an insurance executive. But we were only the third owners since 1928, when a Louisville & Nashville Railroad engineer bought the house. He died in 1952, but his widow lived there until about 1970.

The house spent a couple of years as rental apartments before she sold it to the lady we bought it from and her husband, who died last spring. She remembers the neighbors thanking them for rescuing the house from hippies, who were growing marijuana in the dining room. The house was such a wreck, she said, that the first time her sister saw it, she cried.

Over the next few years, the lady’s late husband and his contractors did major restoration. They jacked up the downstairs floor and installed a new roof, wiring, plumbing, heating and air conditioning.

Still, there was much work to be done after we bought the house. For more than two months, I choreographed a parade of contractors. They refinished old wood floors and installed new ones. They removed acres of wallpaper, repaired plaster, painted, plumbed, wired and tiled.

We hired professionals for jobs that I didn’t have the skills for — or would never have finished in my lifetime. I did a lot of small stuff: light carpentry, some painting and a lot of caulking and fix-it chores.

Moving is hell, but some of the renovation work was fun. And I am pleased with the results. Like any major experience, it was educational. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Home renovation always takes longer and costs more than you think it will.

• My house’s former owners were newspaper subscribers. An electrician found a 1938 Courier-Journal in the crawl space. I know that the living room’s pocket doors were last opened on or about Dec. 6, 1979, because that day’s Lexington Herald was used to seal them shut.

• Old wallpaper can hide a multitude of sins. So can new caulk and paint.

• Old carpet can hide beautiful heart-pine floors. Or a big mess. You never know until you pull it up.

• A leaky valve beneath a kitchen sink will fail at the worst possible time, such as early on Thanksgiving morning, after you have had $700 worth of unfinished hardwood flooring installed.

• I could buy a new BMW for what it would cost to line and cap my three unlined masonry chimneys. I can’t afford either.

• I now know most of the clerks at Ace Hardware, Home Depot and Lowe’s by sight, if not by name.

• I don’t need a gym to get a good workout. The most challenging moves of my stretching regimen involved straddling a clawfoot bathtub — one foot on a window sill, the other on a step ladder — screwing a shower curtain rack into a 10-foot ceiling.

• Be good to good contractors and they will be good to you.

• Caulk, paint and Advil are my friends.