Catalyst for Economic Aid in Louisville, KY
A section of Louisville is classified by the zip code 40203, and it is the community here that represents the 13th poorest mailing district in the nation.
Over the past three months, Christian Duvernois Landscape/Studio has been working closely with Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn and their artistic, entrepreneurial partner organization I.D.E.A.S 40203, located in the urban core of Louisville, KY. CDL/S and I.D.E.A.S 40203 convened over shared ideologies of landscape architecture, art, sustainability and community development. As a result, two flagship projects evolved, primarily focusing on the intersection of landscape, art and education.
The first component, a collaboration between CDL/S, Isabelle Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, former Chief Curator of Sculpture at the Louvre Museum, and Antoine Jacobsohn, Director of the Potager du Roi at Versailles, is a museum-scale arts exhibition entitled, From the Sun King to Marie-Antoinette: Kitchen Gardens at the Court of Versailles. The exhibit will showcase engravings, drawings, and artifacts related to Louis XIV’s Potager du Roi, Louis XV’s first garden of Trianon, and Marie-Antoinette’s Anglo-Chinese gardens at Le Petit Trianon. Scheduled to open in Louisville in the summer of 2016, the show is designed to travel to neighboring cities following the initial exhibition.
The second project is called I.D.E.A.S. UrbanGreen. It is a joint initiative between CDL/S, and local Louisville artists and outreach organizations. I.D.E.A.S. UrbanGreen will use artist-in-residencies to support ongoing sustainable economic and social prosperity in two underprivileged areas: Smoketown/Old Louisville in the east and Parkland in the west. The Urban Green initiative will focus on developing two compact (but high-visibility/high-impact) prototypes for innovative interim green uses of fallow urban lands in 2014-2015.