About the Exhibition

Featuring ten large-scale images of Kentucky farmsteads installed on the exterior of JSP’s historic barn, Linda Bruckheimer: Lost and Found Farmscapes captures the cultural, physical, and historical significance of the disappearing rural landscape and ways of life that shape our local heritage.

Kentucky’s cultural and economic foundation is built upon small family farms that date back to the late 1700s. Families worked collaboratively to build and support the needs of their communities. By the 1850s, Kentucky’s farmers operated at market scale, often with the labor of enslaved people, becoming a major producer of corn, tobacco, grains, and livestock, among others products, that were shipped nationwide. 

Josephine Sculpture Park is part of Kentucky’s agricultural legacy, established in 2009 on what had been the family farm of Founding Director Melanie VanHouten. JSP’s event barn was once a tobacco barn built in the 1960s, and restored in 2021. JSP also protects the rural landscape by conserving 40 acres of natural habitat.

Today, more than 49% of Kentucky’s land continues to be used as farmland, but that number is steadily declining. The loss of family-owned farmland has profoundly impacted the social fabric of rural communities. Over the last two decades, Kentucky has lost 17,000 farms and 1.4 million acres of farmland, largely due to urban development and sprawling growth. (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2022 Census of Agriculture)

Linda Bruckheimer has travelled Kentucky’s countryside to document the American farmstead. A nostalgic symbol of Kentucky’s agricultural past and present, these farm images are a testament to the enduring beauty and perseverance of rural Kentucky.

 Linda Bruckheimer, Three Barns - Eastern Kentucky ,  August 11, 2006