Paducah, KY - SoHo of the South?

Dianne Squallace walks the riveted-steel floor of Mark Palmer's bright and spacious gallery, taking in the lush oil paintings.

Squallace left this small riverboat port in western Kentucky for Liverpool, N.Y., in 1974. And though she moved back here six months ago, she still can't believe what she sees.

"When I left 30 years ago," she said, "this town was nothing like this."

Only eight years ago, in fact, the town's cultural crown jewel was a new quilt museum — albeit the nation's largest one. Around it, neighborhoods had been in decline for decades. Certain street corners had effectively been ceded to drug dealers.

Since then an ambitious artist-relocation program has taken root, heaping on financial incentives — from tax breaks to land grants to favorable financing rates — to make itself a magnet for painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, and others willing to leave urban centers for the land of bluegrass. And scores of them have come.

In fact, still-quiet Paducah; lower town fine arts district parts of which remain very much in the jackhammer phase, represents the latest in a string of provincial pearls — others include Rising Sun, Ind.; Fergus Falls, Minn.; and Cumberland, Md. — banking on the arts for economic revival.

The Artist Relocation Program is about artist ownership, thus giving the artists a vested interest in our community. To date we have relocated forty-five artists who have taken us up on our financial and cultural incentives. These artists have relocated from Illinois, San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis, Memphis, Nashville, Okalahoma,Maryland, Washington, North Carolina, Michigan, Kansas, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Texas, Arizona, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Washington D.C., and Kentucky.