The story
Kentuck Festival of the Arts in Northport
The Kentuck Festival of the Arts is an annual outdoor folk and fine arts festival held each October at Kentuck Park in Northport, Alabama, produced by Kentuck Art Center. It showcases juried self-taught, outsider, and folk artists alongside contemporary fine artists, continuing a tradition tied to the career of Northport folk artist Jimmy Lee Sudduth.
Northport, sitting across the Black Warrior River from Tuscaloosa, became an unlikely center of American folk art largely through the work of one self-taught painter, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, who spent decades creating paintings using mud mixed with sugar water and natural pigments applied directly to plywood boards, a technique he developed without formal training and continued refining into a distinctive, widely collected body of work.