By Delia Rose Gibbs
Contributing Writer
(Photos provided by Institute 193)

In the late 2000s, Phillip March Jones, an artist and writer from Lexington, was preoccupied with a troubling phenomenon. His hometown and communities like it were full of artists, writers, and musicians, yet many of them weren't being exhibited, published, or otherwise given the attention they deserved. 

He wanted to help change that. 

In 2009, he signed a lease on the 400-square-foot storefront at 193 North Limestone in Lexington and secured nonprofit status for what would become Institute 193. He transformed the space into a gallery, but his ambitions extended well beyond its walls. From the beginning, the project combined the physical exhibition space with a robust online presence, a community gathering place, and a publishing project — all dedicated to documenting, supporting, and amplifying contemporary art made in or pertaining to the American South. 

In the Beginning

In the fall of that year, Institute 193 opened its inaugural exhibition, Selections from the Archive, featuring the work of Louis Zoellar Bickett, who lived above the gallery. The exhibition drew from Bickett’s vast collection of ordinary objects, all diligently archived: a place setting from a meal he ate at a la Lucie in 2006; a small jar filled with soil he gathered from Gratz Park — the Market Street side, its tag specifies — one Saint Patrick’s Day. 

The six other exhibitions Jones displayed that first year included:

• The work of Jessie Dunahoo, a septuagenarian from Eastern Kentucky. Deaf and blind from a young age, Dunahoo stitched together fabric scraps, plastic bags, and other found materials to create translucent, billowing structures he called “shelters.”

• The self-portraits of Mare Vacarro, a photographer from Louisiana with alopecia, in which she depicted herself draped in elegant costumes and without the wig and drawn eyebrows she donned in her public life.

• Mountains of refuse collected over years by Lexington’s Robert Morgan, who covered them in polyurethane, so they glinted in the sunlight.