Arts Connect Eastern Kentucky

ACEky's mission is to provide art-making opportunities to people suffering addiction and/or undergoing incarceration, and to do so in a way that supports their efforts to re-create habits, family and community relationships, to sustain change and gain right livelihood.

Making art provides the opportunity to shape an outcome through a dialogical give and take with the work-in-progress. 

The trying and undergoing that an art-maker engages in as a piece of art comes into being refines the ability to make with care—to pay attention to detail, perceive part/whole relationships, tolerate the unknown, to hypothesize, try out and re-think, to practice patience with the work and with oneself, to self-correct.  Engaging in the process of art enables participants to experience the sense of ‘flow’ that comes with unifying the focus of mind, body and heart and not unimportantly, the flow of dopamine induced by a health-supporting activity. 

Since re-creating habits, thoughts and ways of living are the work of recovery, art-making is especially supportive to achieving and maintaining lifetime recovery.
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ACEky Virtual Art Exhibit

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Our projects involve art-making activities facilitated by our teaching artists to promote empowerment and self-development among people currently or formerly in Kentucky detention and recovery centers.

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2021 marked the year past ACEky participants joined our roster.
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