A Northern Kentucky multimedia artist is plotting a way to turn a vacant city lot in Bellevue into a pollinator meadow, and she’s inviting the community to help.
Devan Horton is a Bellevue native and a 2015 graduate of Northern Kentucky University who curates pop-up art galleries in unused spaces and has recently been serving as artwork curator for the Midwest Regional Sustainability Summit and lead artist for the local mural group Immersion Alley. She says her work has always been nature-focused and it has recently become more guided by sustainability, thanks to her series “Penchant,” a collection of trashed landscape paintings that were inspired by her frustration of finding and collecting trash in nature.
Horton says the series changed her artistic practice as a whole, and she has since been experimenting with botanical dyes, paper making and creating her own non-toxic paints and inks. Now, she wants to use art as a way to involve the community in her upcoming pollinator garden project, called “Perennial.”
The plot, located at the ends of Grandview and Washington avenues in Bellevue, was a community garden decades ago. Horton says when she first saw the plot, nothing but ragweed was growing there and it was fenced in. But now, work has been done to clean up, mow and till it to get it ready for spring planting.
As part of “Perennial,” on Saturday, May 18 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., participants will create art using natural dyes Devan created and seed paper full of native pollinator plant seeds before planting them in the lot. There will also be art and native plants for sale, and Roebling Books & Coffee will set up a mini library.
“The community will create a living, breathing work of art that restores an unused plot of land, offering both a resting haven for pollinators and beauty to the neighborhood,” Horton said in a press release.
A grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women's Art as Activism helped fund the project.
To learn more, you can follow Horton on Instagram at @hortondevan and her website, devanhorton.com.
