Public Art

Welcome to the Breeders’ Cup Sculpture Exhibition, presented by LexArts and the City of Lexington ahead of the 2026 Breeders’ Cup. This two-year public art installation highlights the talent of local sculptors while enhancing our city’s aesthetics.

Take a moment to review the sculptures and cast your vote to help determine which artwork receives our featured purchase award.

Now on Display at Gatton Park Until October 27
On October 8, LexArts unveiled A Canvas of Silks at Central Bank Thursday Night Live, the culmination of hundreds of hours of work by LexArts staff and local artists.

More than 50 jockey silk forms, each 36 inches tall and designed and hand-painted by a Kentucky artist, now stand on display at Gatton Park in Lexington as part of the Breeders’ Cup Festival. Each artist brought a distinctly regional eye to the colors and traditions of horse racing. Together, the works connect Lexington’s arts community with its racing heritage and invite residents and visitors to experience Gatton Park as a gallery.

The installation will move to Tandy Park on October 27 for the Tandy Park Takeover, October 28-30.

Our latest Horse Mania project was scheduled for 2020, but the global pandemic put things on hold. Pushing Horse Mania to 2022 allowed this program to coincide with LexArt’s 50th Anniversary and Keeneland’s third hosting of the Breeders’ Cup World Championship – the ultimate celebration of Thoroughbred racing and breeding. It also created an opportunity to form important strategic partnerships with Keeneland, Maker’s Mark and Breeders’ Cup resulting in Trilogy, three painted horses that served as a 2020 warm-up for the main event – Horse Mania 2022.

A generous grant from The Kloiber Foundation made Horse Play 2022, an accompanying program of Horse Mania 2022, possible. Every public and private school in Fayette County was offered either a horse (for high schools) or a foal (for elementary and middle schools) to adorn. This program also allowed for a group of high school students to intern at LexArts and help with the administration of Horse Play.

A heartfelt program called Commonwealth Compassion: Horses of Hope sponsored by Independence Bank honored three communities hardest hit by the December 2021 tornadoes that devastated towns in western Kentucky. Graves, Hopkins, and Warren Counties were each gifted a horse to paint and proceeds from the auction of those horses were directed toward efforts to rebuild those communities.

To see Lexington come alive in early summer 2022 as Horse Mania horses and foals found their temporary homes around town was truly exciting and, honestly, well worth the wait. Under the leadership of Horse Mania 2022 Co-Chairs John Cioci and Ken Gish, LexArts staff, artists, volunteers and community partners put in thousands of hours to make this happen. Learn more here.

Hidden Horses brings playful foal sculptures to life across downtown Lexington,
strategically placed in over 20 locations from Thoroughbred Park to Triangle Park.
The installation features five different poses handcrafted by renowned equine artists:
Kiptoo Tarus, Steve Johnson, Michele Hunter, and Jocelyn Russell.

This unique blend of art and history offers a deeper appreciation for Lexington’s
equestrian legacy and was the original idea of founding Hidden Horses Committee
Member, Rebecca Sherman. Inspired to create a “love letter” to her community while
attending Commerce Lexington’s Emerge in 2019, Sherman imagined the Hidden
Horses project as an interactive public art installation of tiny bronze foals embedded in
the downtown streetscape, paying homage to the equestrian community.

With support from Keeneland and Maker’s Mark, the project transformed into a public
art installation highlighting what makes Lexington a vibrant community and an iconic
equine destination.

To Learn More, see hiddenhorseslex.com.

Unlearn Fear + Hate is a community-driven cycle of artworks by Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova. Inspired by a need to address growing racial tensions in the United States, the project has promoted public dialog through temporary and permanent activations of the words “Unlearn Fear + Hate,” from a commissioned poem by Frank X Walker, Kentucky’s first African American Poet Laureate. It is an invitation for everyone to join the work of diminishing the fears we live with by acknowledging our shared humanity.

The permanent sculpture at 201 West Short Street measures nearly 23 feet in diameter. The result of a three-year partnership between Kurt and Kremena and LexArts, the legacy piece was fabricated by Amanda Matthews and Brad Connell of Prometheus Bronze Foundry & Custom Metal Fabrication.

PRHBTN is an annual celebration of art forms that have been criminalized, marginalized, and under-appreciated in the mainstream, featuring public murals alongside an exhibition of street art works in a space that complements the raw, powerful nature of the message and artistry of each piece.

Over the past fifteen years, PRHBTN has produced over forty murals in downtown Lexington and helped exhibit and sell thousands of pieces of art by local and regional Kentucky Artists. Every year the non-profit event is funded completely through the generous donations of local residents and small business owners, LexArts is one of these donors.

To Learn More, see PRHBTN.com.

German duo Herakut stopped by Kentucky where they painted these two new walls on the streets of Lexington, The pieces are the first installments of a special children’s book project that the duo is working on, which centers around a young female character named Lily.

Herakut is well known in the world of urban art, with installations indoors and out. The pair work quickly: Siddiqui does the outlines and broad strokes, while Lehman said he concentrates on details and skin tones, which can require dozens of different colors.

The work emphasizes the relational existence of forms to contexts of materials, process, place, and collaboration in the public realm. The sculptures have an active role in their own making, the cylindrical elements form a community of similar yet distinct, dependent individuals- an aesthetic, structural and material ecosystem. The strength and physical integrity of these structures depends on the capacity to absorb and distribute stresses throughout the network of components that make up the whole.

The Downtown Art Center—itself a negotiation between two formerly distinct structures—forms a plinth for the proposed sculpture, nestled into the corner formed by the roof and the wall. Much in the same way that the Art Center augments, strengthens and shoulders the large community, the form of the sculpture references the buttress, an external support meant to shore up, reinforce and sustain the structure it leans against; both necessary and dependent on each other, in a communal relationship.

In July 2010, 82 freshly painted fiberglass horses of Horse Mania 2010 strode out of artist studios and workshops onto the streets of Lexington. Joined by 57 foals and horses decorated by students. Proceeds from the auctions of the artworks totaled $507,950. Of that amount, $182,008 was distributed to 84 charities, $182,008 to the public art fund, $36,805 to schools’ art programs and $36,805 to Arts Education Programs.

The funds and momentum generated by Horse Mania 2010 will continue to feed LexArts’ efforts to keep art in touch with the everyday life of the community.

LexArts, in partnership with the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, launched the Lexington Outdoor Mural Project (LOMP) in 2008. LOMP was a collaborative initiative between neighborhoods, business people, civic leaders and artists to enhance the beauty of Lexington by creating public outdoor murals.

The creation of community-inspired murals which launched a multi-year initiative that transformed blank walls into works of art, and reflected Lexington’s unique and colorful history while celebrating the character of its neighborhoods. The Mural Project provided meaningful opportunities for young people to work with and learn from professional artists, while developing communication and leadership skills.

The “Dynamic Doors” exhibit was a public art event unique to Lexington that utilized 126 doors reclaimed from Bluegrass/Aspendale, Lexington’s first public housing project.

On these non-traditional canvases, artists constructed multiple portraits of Lexington, revealing many of the facets and complexities of this particular place. Even the more abstract doors had something to say about the artistic spirit of Lexington and its people. “Dynamic Doors” public art project was truly a community event, involving hundreds of artists, educators, business and civic leaders, children and volunteers spanning the summer and fall of 2003.

Horse Mania swept into Lexington during June 2000, bringing seventy-nine art horses to the city streets. The colorful and imaginative horses were an immediate hit with the public and sparked a festival of public art throughout the summer and fall.

A portion of the $761,300 in proceeds from the original Horse Mania auction in 2000 got LexArts’ Public Art Fund up and running.