Judi Jennings leaving Foundation for Women

Earlier this month, Kentucky Foundation for Women's Judi Jennings was among arts leaders from across the country gathered in Nashville for the annual convention of Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit devoted to advancing the arts and arts education.

Reinforcing the foundation's use of art as a catalyst for social justice and advancing feminism for women living throughout the state has been Jennings' mission since she became executive director in 1998.

Although she retires from the job Monday, at the convention, Jennings was a voice for women and rural people in Kentucky and on a national level, as she has been during most of her career. It was during a session about creative placemaking — the practice of including arts and cultural projects in community development as a valuable economic development strategy — that she displayed her trademark habit of questioning prevailing attitudes.

"I had to raise my hand and say, 'What about rural areas? If there is anywhere that place matters more in this country, it's in rural areas and small towns,' " she said.

Jim Clark, LexArts president and CEO, recalled that several heads in the room nodded.

"You could tell there was a strong urban bias (from the speakers)," said Clark. "Her message was that creativity is spread throughout the country and doesn't just happen in dense urban populations."

Changing the course of conversations has been at the heart of Jennings' work at the foundation and her career with philanthropic organizations. Over that career, she has become widely known in arts and social justice circles for focusing conversations on the power of art in empowering women and disenfranchised populations.

At the Kentucky Foundation for Women, she influenced the organization to broaden its mission beyond feminism to include social change that empowers women and communities by way of "feminist expression in the arts."

"That's a positive change," foundation founder Sallie Bingham said from her home in New Mexico. She credits Jennings for leading the organization through a significant transformation. Bingham created the foundation using the $64 million she received from her family's 1986 sale of The Courier-Journal, WHAS-TV and other media properties.

As Bingham describes it, Jennings' leadership began when the broad support that women's organizations had enjoyed in previous decades was waning.

"She made the board much more diverse," Bingham said. "She reached out to more diverse communities of artists all across the state. I think we penetrated further in the state than we had before."

Learning to question

Jennings learned to influence the direction of conversations not so much growing up in her hometown of Lexington, but throughout her career holding positions as a history professor at Barbourville's Union College, a grantmaker with the Kentucky Humanities Council, a fundraiser at Appalshop, the first leader of the University of Louisville's Women's Center and leading the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Jennings' perspective — based in part on working in rural areas and on her scholarship of history — aligns feminist issues with social justice values. She pointed out that Kentucky's rural communities have often included strong women, such as Eula Hall, who founded a health clinic in Kentucky's Floyd County.

"Even the people who were leading the environmental movement (in Kentucky) were women — even in a patriarchal society," she said.

At the foundation, she expanded the grant program to include annual grants available to artists of all stripes. She also set up an independent evaluation process for grant applications to be reviewed by artists and experts from varied backgrounds across Kentucky and the nation.

The foundation, under her leadership, also offered a new grant called Arts Meets Activism. It funds community-based projects intended to have a long-term positive social change and impact on women. For example, one recent grant was awarded to a project aimed at providing incarcerated women with writing workshops and readings to explore how violence has affected their lives.

Under Jennings' leadership, the foundation has awarded approximately $3 million in grants to 1,750 women and organizations. At the same time, it has continued to operate Hopscotch House, a women's retreat center that also hosts summer residency programs. It has seen an average of 500 individuals and groups use the space each year.

Working the state

On other fronts, she and her staff have regularly held workshops in nearly every Kentucky congressional district to talk about the meaning of feminism in each community and the power of art in social change. Former foundation grants manager and current theater director Amy Attaway said she learned more about Kentucky by traveling around the state for those workshops.

"The most gratifying reactions I got when traveling were from people who had never heard of KFW or would never have thought of themselves as feminists," she said. "When they would tell me about a project, they'd often start with "I'm not a feminist, but …"

Attaway called Jennings "super smart and fierce in her beliefs," as did many current and former colleagues and counterparts in other philanthropic organizations.

Among them are Caron Atlas, director of the Brooklyn-based Arts & Democracy that has similar goals to KFW, and Tommer Peterson, deputy director of the national organization Grantmakers in the Arts. The foundation is a member of Grantmakers in the Arts, and Jennings is on the board.

Atlas, who met Jennings when both worked at Appalshop, called Jennings courageous.

"She is willing to speak truth to power," she said. "But she isn't reckless in that. She also had this great ability to connect with a wide range of people."

Peterson said Jennings' work with Grantmakers in the Arts has led her to become a kind of conscience for the organization, making its leaders think about the consequences of its actions. That, he said, has led the organization to make racial and cultural equity in philanthropy one of the core issues of discussion among members.

"Sometime the messages can be very difficult for people to hear given their histories and investments, but she addresses concerns with a genteelness and humor and lack of ego," Peterson said.

Effect on artists

Louisville artist Joyce Ogden has worked with Jennings and KFW since she began leading the organization in 1998.

"She was huge and instrumental in my work and development," said Ogden, who has worked with groups to create several public projects, including a mosaic sculpture in Old Louisville's Memorial Park.

Ogden recalled a multitiered project Jennings included her in that encompassed public art and theater and that introduced her to people in Harlan County. Another with the Louisville Metro Department of Corrections had Ogden and other artists work with inmates to create a handmade clay tile mural in the exit lobby of the jail. The project also continues to provide art activities in the visiting area for children waiting to see incarcerated family members.

"That was a huge project and a great example of Judi and the foundation working to really make a difference for people by doing something no one else was likely to do," Ogden said.

Jennings said her determination to follow her conscience, even in the face of resistance, stems from losing both parents in 1981. They had divorced when Jennings was 6 months old. But when she was 31, her father, then 54, died of a heart attack, followed by her mother's death from lung cancer at 55.

"Having my parents die in the same year gave me a certain strength," said Jennings. "It put a lot of other things in perspective."

After their deaths, she left her job as a newly tenured history professor at Union College to live for a year in London, where she had spent time as a University of Kentucky graduate student.

That time allowed her to reflect on her own life and revisit places that had helped guide her own education. During her graduate studies, she had examined how history intersects with the art and economy of any given era — a lens she still uses today for understanding the world.

Impact on students

Although she left teaching, her influence from that time lives on. One of her former students, Paintsvillle attorney Donald Jones, talks about making those connections often in the nearly dozen classes he took from her when he was a history major at Union College.

"For every exam she gave, you had to understand the politics, economics and the arts of whatever class it was," he recalled.

He said Jennings took students to Washington, D.C., and England, where he got to visit the British Museum and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

"She was the kind of professor you wanted, especially for first-generation college students, like me," he said. "She had incredibly rigorous standards, but she was so much fun she made students want to do well in her class."

The mentorship Jennings offered Jones became stronger when he ran into her after her parents died at the same time he lost a close family member.

These days, the idea of a life with limited time is not far from Jennings' mind and is one reason she gave for retiring.

"I feel like I'm in the bonus place," she said. "I need to enjoy my life."

Reporter Elizabeth Kramer can be reached at (502) 582-4682. Follow her on Twitter at @arts_bureau.