Through intentional and culturally inclusive exhibitions, performances, workshops, and gatherings, Levee provides essential resources and opportunities for our community of racialized femme, women, and queer artists, creatives, healers, and culture workers.

Through intentional and culturally inclusive exhibitions, performances, workshops, and gatherings, Levee provides essential resources and opportunities for our community of racialized femme, women, and queer artists, creatives, healers, and culture workers.

Levee is a practice of intersectionality and collaboration, a relational space led by the values of mutuality and equity, where we respond to people’s potential, honor our community, and live out our belief that everyone deserves respect, care, beauty, and calm.

Since our opening in March of 2024, Levee has curated six visual art exhibits, including an international exhibit featuring South Korean artists, hosted our first Legacy Artist-in-Residence summer program, published five zines, and organized over a dozen events that connect and support local artists, poets, musicians, and other creatives.

• Arts Education/Youth Arts
• Literary Arts
• Performing Arts
• Visual Arts
• Public Art

Levee requests $5,000 to underwrite the production and celebration of four Levee Zines, 2027, as well as the yearlong programming that supports these projects.

ZINE
Levee will create, print, distribute, and celebrate four seasonal poetry and collage zines featuring women and femme writers and visual artists of the global majority who live in Central and East Kentucky. Participants selected to be in the zines will bring their creative pursuits to the public eye in a safe and encouraging environment, with additional professional development opportunities including individual chapbooks, prints, readings, and exhibitions.

Levee’s self-published zines and curated gallery space are key to our mission and values. Zine launches are places for performers and musicians to have a live audience for the first time in their young careers. Likewise, poets and visual artists can list our zines as their first publication.

Now in our third year of publishing these zines, Levee will continue to work in local communities of racialized women and femmes, amplifying their lived experiences and building lasting relationships among artists, while providing opportunities and professional development to those in the margins. We do this by connecting artists in various stages of their careers to share and exchange knowledge with each other. We treat collaborating artists in a way that honors their artistry and experience, showing them the process of self-publishing and exhibiting.

Each zine will be developed by a similar process and in a similar timeline.

1. Connecting with communities of writers and artists (ongoing): Levee will work with leaders in creative communities, such as The Carnegie Center, UK, Berea, and BCTC to recommend writers and visual artists for themes derived from each season.

2. Selections for seasonal zine (1 month prior to launch): Levee’s rotating editors will select creatives from the community, including individuals from the various organizations above, as well as from Levee’s growing collective.

3. Zine design and production (2 weeks prior to launch): Levee's rotating editors will invite the writers and featured visual artists to create one or more pages of the zine, providing guidance and feedback on the work. Pages will be complete and compiled to send the zine to print.

4. Zine Launch event (on the seasonal solstice or equinox): The event includes readings from participating writers, an exhibit by the featured artists, abundant seasonal foods, local live music, and a community ritual to bind those in attendance to the particular time, the particular place, and to each other.

5. Individual mentorship and professional development (ongoing): Writers and visual artists who contribute to the zines have opportunities to exhibit more work and/or develop chapbooks, depending on what they would like to achieve. Some examples of what the creatives may choose to learn include pairing written and visual work, making prints for sale at varying price points, and hand-bookbinding. Levee is a safe place for these creatives to publish and exhibit without losing rights to be published and show work elsewhere.

YEARLONG PROGRAMMING
Over the last two years the consistency of Levee's zine launches have laid the groundwork for a community at the intersection age, class, race, ethnicity, gender and culture. In order to honor and respond to these relationships Levee's programming has developed into several supportive initiatives between zine launch events for which Levee seeks to use funding from this grant to help sustain.

1. Health & Recreation: Levee community members have recognized an opportunity to reconnect racialized people, especially women, to nature by creating inclusive, educational outdoor experiences that honor ancestral knowledge and challenge systems of exclusion. Through our initiative called Rooted, teaching, mentorship, and access to resources in hiking, climbing, rafting, and beyond, cultivates safety, confidence, belonging, and healing through connection and community in outdoor recreational spaces that have historically been out of reach. Funds from LexArts will be used for camping and caving gear, food, and gas for travel.

2. Food Security: Many of the people who have been drawn in by our zine launches are food insecure. Levee has begun a community garden, food pantry, and an outdoor warm/cold hydration hub for any of our neighbors. Funds from LexArts will be used for supplies such as tools, shelf-stable foods, seeds, and other supplies.

The community we seek most to receive the benefit of our project is racialized femme artists in the Lexington area. This bountiful community of creators is typically considered last or not at all in local and regional arts ventures. At Levee, those on the margins are considered first. Women and femme artists in our area are gifted, accomplished, organized, and determined, and this project benefits them by ensuring that they are also resourced, acknowledged, and amplified.

When artists on the margins are lifted, all artists benefit. When unseen creative perspectives are given a platform, all creative perspectives grow.

The word “Levee” describes the fundamental purpose of our space: a place for people to land and be held. All of our marketing efforts, from the visuals to copy, keep close to our brand expressing femme strength in community care. We use social media, our growing email list, and our website, to communicate Levee’s events, initiatives, and our story. Additionally, we produce brochures, cards, stickers and other ephemera (such as branded journals and matchboxes) to build the physical strength of our brand.

Levee grows its participants and audience with great intention, choosing depth over breadth. New guests typically arrive through relationships—artists and members bring their friends, and the friends bring more. We also reach new audiences through our programming which includes workshops, classes, and wellbeing sessions.

Levee’s target audience can be summed up in a response to “Who is Levee for?”: We center racialized Women and Femmes, artists, creatives, healers, and culture workers in the Lexington area. We welcome everyone willing and able to do the same. Our project, Levee Zine, 2027, mirrors this statement. More specifically, this particular project aims to forge connections among writers and visual artists in different communities, from the Carnegie Center in Lexington to students at Berea College, and amplify underrepresented voices to those who appreciate these art forms.

Diversity: Levee is wholly intersectional through race, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, and artistic medium. Although all of these identities are engaged, we focus on and uplift those who are racialized and/or marginalized. In our zines we have featured writers, painters, creatives, architects, and mystics, most of whom are Black, Mexican, Afro-Latino, Asian, Indian, South American, biracial, queer, and young.
Equity: As an entity led by racialized femmes, we thrive inside a system of inequity. We create an environment that is free from these biases, creating a buffer allowing people to focus on their creative and spiritual practices, without having to fight to be seen and treated with the care and honor they deserve.
Inclusion: At Levee, those on the margins are considered first. Many in our collective are survivors of gendered, racial, and economic violence. When those who are strategically disregarded are centered, educated, intentional, courageous, and liberating for all.

Levee Zines will be made possible with partnerships in Lexington and Eastern Kentucky. Beginning this fall, Levee will host Young Poets Society, which is Teen Howl's new iteration. This past year, Levee hosted La Voz, a monthly bilingual open mic centering Latinx voices. Levee also collaborates with Casa de la Cultura, artfarm, and artists, musicians, and performers from SCAPPA and Luigart. Due to Levee’s values of working outside traditional institutional means, we have a unique connection to young adults living and learning in Berea. Many students and young people without particular affiliation to a specific department or medium have been contributing writers, featured artists, and musical entertainment for the zines and zine launches. Levee will continue to work with this growing group of creatives.

Project goals for Levee Zine & Supporting Initiatives 2027, include “providing essential resources and opportunities” to writers and visual artists, which is in direct alignment with our mission statement. Specifically, our goals include:
1. Publishing & providing readings for the work of 8 or more writers we have not previously published
2. Featuring & exhibiting the work of 4 or more visual artists we have not previously featured
3. Providing wholistic support to our community members throughout the year with our initiatives that offer wellness and nourishment.

We will evaluate achievement of our goals both numerically and anecdotally. We will be able to count the number of regular attendees to our zine launches, as well as the number of community members who use our space between launches. A further measure of success will be measured in the form of Levee community evolution and participation.

As mentioned, since last year, there have been new initiatives born from members of our community who were initially drawn in by the zine launch events. In Levee's measure of achievement and feedback, there would be no higher bar than to provide support and guidence to zine launch attendees so that they can create their own zine launch event, or start a community garden, or begin a camping and caving initiative for our members.