Current Exhibits
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KINKEAD GALLERY
Meredith Coffey
This Thing is Garbage
June 2nd – July 24thThis work explores environmental issues through the lens of consumer waste, fast fashion, and single-use products. Influenced by the Anthropocene, I use discarded and second-hand materials to create sculptures that encourage reflection on the impact of human consumption.
By recreating familiar objects such as plastic bags, labels, and caution tape in textiles and craft materials, the work contrasts labor-intensive making with disposable culture. Through satire, material transformation, and environmental messaging, these sculptures challenge viewers to reconsider the everyday products that contribute to pollution and climate change.
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GLO GALLERY
Hannah Smith
Crystalbluffmadonna
Jun 1 – Jul 28
Oversized jewelry-like forms stretch, puncture, and deform the gallery, transforming it into something between a body, a construction site, and a cartoon. Electroplated nickel and custom tapioca-starch rubber blur distinctions between metal, flesh, plastic, and ornament.
Inspired by Dada and digital fabrication, the work embraces absurdity, material transformation, and the instability of fixed categories. Through humor, play, and unconventional materials, the sculptures create moments when familiar assumptions briefly stop working and alternate possibilities emerge.
Sometimes the best way to imagine a new reality is to poke a hole in the old one.
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ATRIUM GALLERY
Ken Burney
Stories in Color
June 5th - August 22nd 2026
Ken Burney is a Lexington-based contemporary artist whose vibrant paintings explore culture, history, music, movement, and personal narrative through bold color and expressive brushwork. Influenced by his early artistic training in Detroit and a professional background in graphic design, Burney creates dynamic works that blend emotional storytelling with cultural reflection.
In 2024, Burney was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Kentucky to create the official artwork for the 150th Governor’s Derby Celebration. His painting Winners entered the Kentucky State Art Collection and was displayed in the Kentucky Capitol.
Stories in Color highlights Burney’s passion for visual storytelling, with each painting capturing moments of memory, identity, and human experience. Through expressive color and form, he invites viewers to connect their own stories to the work.
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COMMUNITY GALLERY
The Down Syndrome Association of Central Kentucky
The Down Syndrome Association of Central Kentucky is a registered 501(c)3) organization that has been helping and supporting families since 1993, when a small group of parents envisioned better opportunities for their children with Down syndrome. Today, that vision and our organization have expanded, enabling us to offer a range of programs and services completely free to our students and their families.
Kinkead Gallery
This Thing is Garbage
Meredith Coffey
My work addresses the politically charged topic of the environment, with a primary concern for consumer and production waste that negatively impacts our shared planet. The geological Anthropocene era greatly influences my artistic approach and practice. The Anthropocene era's sole focus is on how human activity continues to be the dominant negative influence on climate change and the degradation of the environment. My studio practice, based on materiality, gravitates towards everyday materials and objects that are familiar and often used in our daily lives. Disseminating information about the harmful consumption of single-use products and fast fashion is the focus of my research and studio practice.
Discarded and second-hand materials are manipulated and repurposed to make sculptures. The works tend to vary in form, but the primary focus is on the materials, or conversely, the absence of the materials. The replacement of plastic products with a fabric/textile stand-in is a means to initiate a conversation around the topic of sustainability. Certain works play with satire and irony through text constructed of beads and sequins, utilizing techniques of craft. The embellishments are used to emphasize the contrast between the fast paced production and consumption of single use products with the labor-intense processes involved in the making of my works. Within this body of work, I also incorporate print media as a means to disseminate information about practical and helpful environmental practices.
The contextualized objects I choose to emulate and incorporate into my work, like plastic bags, labels and caution tape, have personal and social associations. Within my work, I use that context to emphasize what I have changed about the familiarity of the objects. In certain works I use the object's context to bring a new or heightened awareness to things such as clothing that might not typically be read as harmful. Similar to the Anthropocene era, my work deals with products made from human invention - made out of necessity and/or luxury. Fast fashion and single use products, although convenient and readily available at lower financial cost, are a significant contributor to the pollution of our shared planet. This social and environmental concern influences my studio practice, and informs my use of these familiar but also harmful products.
Glo Gallery
Crystalbluffmadonna
Hannah Smith
June 8-July28
Oversized jewelry-like forms stretch, puncture, and deform the architecture, transforming the gallery into something between a body, a construction site, and a cartoon. Electroplated copper sits alongside custom tapioca-starch rubber; surfaces slip between metal, flesh, plastic, and ornament without committing to any one identity. The walls appear caught in the act of becoming something else.
The work draws inspiration from Dada and its embrace of nonsense as a tool for challenging common sense. In their manifestos, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara rejected rigid systems of logic, hierarchy, and cultural convention, instead championing contradiction, absurdity, and play. This approach is also informed by my experience working in digital fabrication and 3D modeling software. In digital space, materials are remarkably fluid: chrome can become rubber with a click, stone can become slime, and physical limitations seem temporarily suspended. The ease with which digital tools allow movement between radically different material states echoes Dada's enthusiasm for unexpected juxtapositions and irrational connections. Both suggest that categories are more flexible than they appear. Many of the rules that shape contemporary life—what is valuable, acceptable, productive, or beautiful—are neither natural nor inevitable. They were invented, and they can be reinvented. Rather than offering fixed meanings, the work invites viewers to entertain alternate possibilities, however absurd they may initially seem.
Beneath the humor and visual excess is a quieter concern for the systems that shape our relationship to the world around us. Many of the materials in this exhibition emerge from ongoing experiments with alternative fabrication methods, including bio-based and unconventional compounds. Yet the work avoids straightforward solutions or moral lessons. Instead, it embraces play as a way of imagining different futures. These sculptures are less interested in delivering answers than in creating productive glitches—moments when familiar assumptions briefly stop working. In a culture that often demands efficiency, certainty, and obedience to established categories, I want to make room for nonsense.
Sometimes the best way to imagine a new reality is to poke a hole in the old one.
Atrium Gallery
Stories in Color
Ken Burney
Ken Burney is a contemporary visual artist whose work explores culture, movement, history, and personal narrative through bold color and expressive brushwork. Based in Lexington, Burney creates paintings that merge emotional storytelling with dynamic compositions inspired by music, community, Black culture, and lived experience.
Originally from the Metro Detroit area, Burney’s artistic journey began at an early age through youth art programs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. His creative path later expanded through studies at City College of San Francisco and years working professionally as a graphic designer for advertising agencies and newspapers, experiences that continue to influence the structure, rhythm, and visual energy of his paintings.
Burney has become widely recognized for work that balances contemporary expression with cultural reflection. In 2024, he was commissioned by the Commonwealth of Kentucky to create the official artwork for the 150th Governor’s Derby Celebration. His painting, Winners, became part of the Kentucky State Art Collection and was displayed in the Kentucky Capitol behind Governor Andy Beshear’s desk. His work has also appeared in Vogue during coverage surrounding the historic Derby celebration.
The exhibition Stories in Color represents Burney’s ongoing commitment to visual storytelling. Each painting serves as a narrative fragment — capturing emotion, memory, identity, music, and movement through layered color and expressive form. Whether depicting musicians, cultural icons, imagined moments, or abstract human experiences, Burney invites viewers to find pieces of their own stories within the work.
As a Kentucky Crafted artist, Burney continues to create work that bridges fine art, public art, and community engagement while celebrating the power of storytelling through paint.
The Community Gallery
The Down Syndrome Association of Central Kentucky
What is Down Syndrome?
In every cell in the human body there is a nucleus where genetic material is stored in genes. Genes carry the codes responsible for all of our inherited traits and are grouped along rod-like structures called chromosomes. Typically, the nucleus of each cell contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, half of which are inherited from each parent.
Down syndrome occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21.
This additional genetic material alters the course of development and causes the characteristics associated with Down syndrome.
One in every 772 live born babies in the United States is born with Down syndrome, making Down syndrome the most common chromosomal condition.
Down syndrome occurs in people of all races and economic levels.
Our Mission
The Down Syndrome Association of Central Kentucky exists to celebrate our Down syndrome community, support individuals with Down syndrome and their families in our region, and educate ourselves and others about the true joys and challenges of Down syndrome.