TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE FOR THE SOUTHERN SOULWEEKENDS
1 Folk Hero
BEREA, KENTUCKY
1| “People have been coming to Berea for craft for a hundred and twenty years,” says Michelle Weston, who for decades has been transforming 2,050-degree molten glass into captivating, often aquatic-themed sculptures—jellyfish, tide pools, seahorses—at her Weston Glass Studio. Since the 1890s, folk arts and crafts have served as the beating heart of this Kentucky hamlet that edges the Appalachian foothills about forty miles south of Lexington.
The town grew up around the leafy campus of Berea College, a much-admired (and tuition-free) liberal arts “work college” founded by abolitionists in 1855, with a deep-rooted craft tradition of its own. (The once described it, rather bluntly, as a school “for the academically talented but economically strapped.”) Many of the local creative professionals are Berea graduates who stayed put. The place “continues to have that allure,” says Todd Finley, executive director of the Kentucky Artisan Center, a limestone mega-gallery that stocks a dizzying variety of artworks—from duck calls to patchwork quilts—by more than 850 makers. “It’s just a
