We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Devan Horton a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Devan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

My most meaningful project I believe is the one I am currently working on. Last year I was a recipient of the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s Art as Activism grant. With those funds I am transforming and unused plot in my hometown of Bellevue, Kentucky into a pollinator haven. I will be doing this by inviting the community to create a painting using botanical inks and homemade paper that I have filled with pollinator seeds. These paintings will be created and planted on-site, happening May 18th from 11 am – 3 pm at the end of Grandview and Washington Avenue. These pieces will bloom into a pollinator meadow later this growing season. The idea is to get the community involved with active restoration through creative expression, demonstrating the importance of caring for our environment, our future, and survival beyond our own species.

This project has been meaningful for many reasons. It takes art beyond the canvas and gets the community involved in cultivation, something I’ve been trying to figure out how to do for some time. It is my first true public art project and I am able to complete this project because of a grant opportunity I dreamt of receiving. The city and neighbors have welcomed this project with open arms and have offered help work and promote the event. A few neighbors have given me seeds from their gardens and one neighbor remembered this plot being a community garden when he was a kid. He even said, “I love you” for doing this project. Each time I step foot on the lot, good things seem to follow. Sometimes you do a project that confirms that you are on the right path, and this is definitely one of those.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up mostly in Northern Kentucky, but my entire family is from the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. I come from a family of farmers and my grandparents instilled the views of caring for the land and the importance of healthy ecosystems. I went to Northern Kentucky University and graduated with my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 2015. Since graduation, I have shown my work in local and national galleries and curated a series of pop-up art exhibitions throughout the city of Covington, Kentucky, called “Perennial”, which converted vacant urban buildings into art galleries. My work has always carried environmental themes, with my older work featuring subjects like mushrooms and swarming insects. I was interested in the micro-life and how seemingly insignificant individuals can become something fierce when in a swarm. In 2019, after being frustrated with always finding litter while on hikes, I began my series, “Penchant” which is a collection of trashed landscape paintings and is my largest body of work to date. The trash began stealing my focus and became a symbol that I used to showcase the human swarm. With this series, myself and another local artist, Paul Kroner, created and exhibition titled “Trash Talk”, which was a fundraising event for local sustainability organizations such as Green Umbrella, Keep Cincinnati Beautiful, the Cincinnati Recycle and Reuse Hub. The show then traveled to Dayton, Ohio which supported Waste Free Dayton. Since “Trash Talk”, I have joined the art committee for Keep Cincinnati Beautiful and I have become the curator for the Midwest Regional Sustainability Summit, held annually in Cincinnati. This series not only altered the way I was consuming, but it has begun to transform my entire artistic practice. While I have always been a painter mainly using oil paints, over the past year I have been on a mission to create art more sustainably using non-toxic botanical dyes and locally-harvested material. I have been creating my own paints and papers and even have a land cultivation project scheduled for May of 2024.This past August, I participated in the Urban Ecology Artist Program at the Civic Garden Center in Cincinnati, where I created an installation of 20 linen ribbons hung from a maple tree that were all botanically dyed using materials collected at the Garden Center. My current focus is on continuing my education of plants and natural color, curating work at the Sustainability Summit, and working on my 2024 meadow project.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Funding often seems to be the biggest limitation for artists, especially eco artists like myself. There are certainly grants and awards out there if you do some digging, but the more opportunity out there, the more we can all succeed. Private businesses and local governments should have more of a budget for funding public art. These projects engage the community and beautify the city, bringing more visitors and profits for the businesses. Projects like mine require a lot of experimentation and play to get to these places where a public piece can be created. There should be more funding geared specifically towards the research for these projects. I believe the freedom to experiment and push boundaries with scale and concepts is the greatest gift and artist can receive. Beyond being able to offer an artist financial support, anyone can support artists by attending their events or even doing something as simple as sharing an Instagram story. A little bit truly goes a long way.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Nature has always been the focus of all of my work. In college, I became fascinated with swarms and the idea of a collective, where a group of seemingly insignificant individuals become a force. I carry these themes whether I am working on a trashed landscape painting or projects like my meadow. Becoming distracted by waste inspired my mission to be fueled by sustainability and advocating for people to pay attention, not only causing me to change my life and consumption habits, but also my artistic practice. I have always been a passionate gardener, nature lover, and painter, but these lines continue to get blurrier the further I get in my career. I hope that my work causes us to become aware of the impact we have on our environments, whether in good ways or negative ways. Being passive got us into this mess and I believe art and togetherness is the way out. No matter the type of work I am creating, be it a traditional painting on a gallery wall or an experimental garden, I know my work will continue to carry these themes.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.devanhorton.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/hortondevan

Image Credits
My headshot and all of my trashed landscape photos where photographed by John-David Richardson. I was the photographer for the other photos.