Traditional Arts Today: Art that builds community

This story was done in partnership with Visit Dubois County.

Kim Henzel likes to tell the story of a kid who really wanted a couple of paintings he saw while eating with his family at Main Street Bistro in Ferdinand.

Kim is the artistic director for Traditional Arts Today, the nonprofit in the historic Peter Muller home at 314 W. Ninth St. As part of its mission to connect with and build community through art, Kim installed a display called Small Wonders at the restaurant.

A waitress passed along that the boy really appreciated the art there. He loved two small acrylic paintings by artist Rachel Jacob. She specializes in animal portraits and nature scenes.

“Rachel had this four-by-four-inch little funky chicken painting and another one of a cat,” Kim said. “And this kid saved up money for weeks to buy both of the pieces.”

Kim loves imagining him saving up his allowance so he could look at these paintings every day. She also loved telling Rachel about the boy’s dedication to purchasing some of her work.

Sometimes an artist’s work draws people in, like the boy in Kim’s story. Other times, people need to have the artist in themselves drawn out. Traditional Arts Today has grown around both.

The nonprofit, which opened in 2018, began with a building Ann Knebel couldn’t let go of. She had grown up in Ferdinand and attended Marian Heights Academy. “I always loved this building,” she said about the Muller home.

The town miller’s name is attached to the home because Muller built it for his bride-to-be, and he’s known for parking Ferdinand’s first automobile, a Eureka, in the property’s carriage house.

When Ann and her husband, Ed Kornegay, heard it was going up for sale, they asked about buying it, and “it never went on the market,” Ann said.

They bought it without much of a plan. The sellers rented it back for a year. When the couple took it over in 2017, she still didn’t know what to do with the home.

“Some friends of mine I went to high school with and I sat down and started brainstorming,” she said.

Ann grew up with her mother quilting and her father woodworking, and she loves weaving. Several looms now sit in the carriage house, which serves as a multi-use room for classes, birthdays and other events.

“That’s sort of how we ended up with traditional arts,” Ann said.

They decided to lean into those traditional arts, teaching them to people today.

Joan Melton had never woven anything before she signed up for Traditional Arts Today’s first class. Her friend Patti Schroeder taught it, and Joan ended up with a scarf she still has today that she can’t believe she made.

She continued taking classes, learning a variety of art forms, including resin art, junk journals, Ukrainian pysanky eggs and scarf dyeing, to name a few.

She also joined the board of directors in 2024 after retiring as a nurse practitioner.

“You can walk around our house and you can see Traditional Arts all over the place,” she said.

Whether it is something she’s created or something she purchased from one of the artists whose work is on display in the shop, the house is full of it.

But the community is what brought her back repeatedly to take classes and become more involved in the organization’s mission. “It wasn’t the craft or anything,” she said.

Ann came to the same conclusion over time.

“I can’t say we had this vision of exactly what we wanted it to be,” she said about those beginnings and the organic transition to what Traditional Arts Today has become.

Working with the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA), they received a grant through the Building Socially Connected Communities program to make improvements to the home, including upgrades to the kitchen and the creation of gathering spaces.

“The OCRA grant really, I think, helped solidify in our mind that it wasn’t just about the traditional arts,” Ann explained. “It was about how the arts can benefit the community, how the creative process fills the soul, and how community engagement is so critical to combat isolation and loneliness, and really leverage the arts to be able to help that.”

One of the first signs the new space was working came during a rustic galette class. A mother and son had signed up to learn how to make the special pastry. However, when they arrived, the father and grandmother came along too, and the father and son decided to take the class together.

The mother and grandmother ended up in the new space with coffee, tea and coffee cakes from the Traditional Arts café. They pulled two chairs close, set a small table between them, and settled in to talk and look at the art. Every so often, they slipped into the kitchen to take pictures of “their boys” making galettes.

“That was one of the first examples of, like, wow, we really did the right thing,” Alexianna Mundy, the nonprofit’s chief operating officer, said.

They’ve leaned into their classes. Over the years, the handful they held annually has grown to about 70 a year, covering a broad range of categories, including culinary arts like pasta making in the improved kitchen. They’ve also expanded classes into senior homes, worked with the Dove Recovery House in Jasper, attended many community events and hosted special events at the home.

Some classes have been purposely designed to bring people together multiple times to build connections beyond a one-off class.

“You don’t build a relationship unless you see people more than once,” Ann said.

They’ve taken art into the community in ways that let a young boy invest a bit of his allowance in two art pieces he fell in love with. And now they’re putting art on a wall for the whole town.

The mural is the group’s biggest project yet. Traditional Arts Today led the fundraising and worked with Fleig’s Café, Framing Ferdinand, the Ferdinand Historic Society, the Dubois County Community Foundation and artist Adam Long to bring the mural to life.

Residents shared ideas at a public meeting, and planners met with various groups to design the mural.

Ann sees the mural’s creation as the mission at full scale. “At the core of what we do is partnering with the community to bring the benefits of art to the community,” she said.

Adam is a community builder at heart. He invites residents, children included, to help paint. Some just because they are consistently curious about his work. Others because they are invited to add a personalized touch, as Ann did Monday.

Adam said that kind of buy-in comes easier in small towns. “The bigger the community, the harder it is to get anything going,” he said about getting people involved in his work. In places like Ferdinand, people understand it is an investment that’s bigger than the cost and “start investing in the culture of the mural and what it’s bringing to town.”

When Ann and Ed bought the old Muller home, there was no plan. There certainly wasn’t a mural, thousands of people learning in the home’s classrooms, knitting groups meeting every Thursday, or local artists’ paintings ending up on a young boy’s wall.

“I, in no way, envisioned something like this,” Ann said. “I would never have imagined this. But look at what happened.”

Traditional Arts Today shop and café is open Wednesdays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.; and Saturdays, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. You can find a list of upcoming classes here: https://www.traditionalartstoday.org/events/schedule and contact them at 812-998-2487 or by email at info@traditionalartstoday.org.