Kentucky is rich in natural beauty and the diversity of its cultural offerings. Storytellers, dancers, weavers, painters, bluegrass musicians, sculptors, quilters, cello players and banjo pickers, actors, opera singers—Kentucky’s artists inhabit the whole spectrum of art forms.

Not only does a thriving cultural life generate income, jobs and tax revenue, more importantly, it also creates a state where intangible needs are met—a state which becomes attractive not just as a destination but as a place to call home. The arts are worth it for their own sake.

FACT—The arts and cultural life are principal determinants of quality of life, a critical factor in decision making for New Economy workers and companies. A 1998 KPMG (Klynveld, Peat, Marwick & Goerdeler ) survey of more than 1,200 high-technology workers found that “community quality of life was the second most important factor—just below salary—and more important than benefits, stock options, or company stability” in determining the attractiveness of a new job.

Source: “The Role of the Arts in Economic Development,” National Governors’ Association Center for Best Practices, Issue Brief, June, 2001.

 

The art forms that we are involved with are very diverse and enormously wide . . . A lot of people tend to think that the arts are only the formal arts—opera, ballet, classical music, art that you would see in a gallery. But we have a very broad concept of what the arts are. And the arts come out of our culture, out of our Kentucky heritage, and those cultures which have made our state so rich, which have moved into the state . . . Our grants support a lot of projects that are local projects that have to do with art produced in the community by people who probably don’t think of themselves as artists—quilters, knitters, whittlers. People who sing in small quartets: they may be gospel, they may be country music. It might be clogging . . . And that’s why we have so many grant programs and services for the state: to make it possible for anyone, at whatever stage that they have worked the arts into their lives.

Gerri Combs, Executive Director, Kentucky Arts Council