KENTUCKY MAKERS NOW 2025
Lena Wolek and Kaviya Ravi
The KMAC Shop is bringing back our Kentucky Makers Now Program! This time, we’re featuring two emerging Kentucky artists; Lena Wolek, a ceramicist, and Kaviya Ravi, a jewelry and textile artist. A reception for these artists will be held on Friday, February 7th, 2025 from 5-8 PM, alongside the Scholastic Reception.
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Lena Wolek was born in a small Siberian town on Lake Baikal during the last decade of the former Soviet Union. Generations of her family were designers and craftspeople of the famed Perevalov porcelain factory that collapsed soon after the demise of the communist state. She grew up playing with chunks of clay found in the local soil, while her elders went off to work utilizing their knowledge and skills creating industrial ceramics.​
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Lena came to the United States in 2001 settling in Los Angeles. She returned to her childhood passion of art and studied intensely, first obtaining a BA degree from University of California, Los Angeles and MFA degree from California State University, Long Beach. She now lives and plays with clay in Kentucky, making functional and sculptural work combining her childhood methods with the time-honored traditions she has learned since. ​
Lena designs her ceramics in the Siberian spirit showcasing the balance of nature through creativity and survival skills interwoven into daily life. With humor and joy, she draws folk art and every-day-life-inspired caricatures on surfaces of her pottery in hopes of bringing smiles and delight through her art.
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Kaviya Ravi is an artist, biochemist, maker and a small business owner. She was born and raised in the south Indian city of Coimbatore. Working with her hands and learning new things bring her the utmost joy. She uses art as a means to not only tell her stories but also to process her deeply patriarchal upbringing and life as a south Asian, immigrant woman. She strives to create work that is unapologetically colorful. You can find her most days exploring the world with her partner and her pup or creating colorfully, whimsical things in her little home studio in Louisville, Kentucky.
KENTUCKY MAKERS NOW 2020
Lonnie & Twyla Money
LONNIE & TWYLA MONEY
AUGUST 7 - OCTOBER 31, 2020
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Kentucky Makers NOW is a rotating showcase of emerging Kentucky artists and designers who redefine the boundaries of ART, CRAFT and DESIGN through the objects they make.
Lonnie & Twyla Money
A true Kentucky treasure, Lonnie and Twyla Money are self-taught artists who have been working together making folk art since 1985. Lonnie does the carving and sculpture with wood and gourds, and Twyla does the painting. Lonnie and Twyla, both raised along the Jackson/Laurel County line in Southeastern Kentucky, went from full-time farmers to full-time artists when they converted their barn into a studio.
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Lonnie attributes his talent as a carver to his great-grandfather, a carver in Switzerland before immigrating to the United States in 1883. Influenced by his surroundings, Lonnie began carving the likeness of animals: a fox carrying a chicken, birds, dogs, and farm animals.
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Twyla began working with Lonnie in 1985 when she began to paint the carvings that Lonnie made. Their collaboration resulted in whimsical, finely crafted and painted animal figures that have been delighting collectors for more than 30 years. The pastoral setting of the farm Lonnie and Twyla live on has inspired a menagerie of carved animal figures both wild and domesticated. Among their favorite subjects are opossums, skunks, pigs eating corn, and roosters. Twyla's painting has developed into a signature style that comes from the heart and reflects a graphically sophisticated and deceivingly simple palette that completes and perfectly harmonizes with Lonnie's carving technique. If you collect Kentucky folk art, you can definitely tell when a critter has been painted by Twyla.
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Theirs is a labor of love, and a reflection of their symbiotic collaboration and partnership.
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"We love the challenge of creating and designing pieces of art from whatever is at hand," says Lonnie. "Ideas and materials come from our surroundings and lifestyle. Country living gives us so many thoughts and ideas for creating art."
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Website: moneysfolkart.com
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