Kerr Creates: one of 50 cultural districts in Texas, and a Kerrville ziggurat that became a coloring book
“Artists are not just the story keepers but the story makers of our community,” Boyette said Wednesday on Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week. “It’s very important — and about whose story gets told and whose story doesn’t.”
When the River Trail reopened after the 2025 flood, a sculpture was unveiled the same day — installed at Schreiner University as a statement that the community was coming back.
That is how Katharine Boyette thinks about public art: not as decoration, but as civic declaration.
“Artists are not just the story keepers but the story makers of our community,” Boyette said Wednesday on Lead Live’s Nonprofit Week. “It’s very important — and about whose story gets told and whose story doesn’t.”
Boyette coordinates Kerrville’s Community Arts Program, operating as Kerr Creates. The program manages the city’s growing portfolio of public art, supports the creative economy, and recently secured one of the most significant designations available to a Texas municipality: downtown Kerrville is now an official Cultural District, recognized by the Texas Commission on the Arts. It is one of only 50 such districts in the entire state. The designation unlocks tourism funding, downtown capital improvement grants, and enhanced eligibility for state arts programming. Plans are underway to amend the district boundary to formally include the Cailloux Theater.
The cultural district designation puts an economic frame around what Kerrville’s creative community has always known intuitively. The creative sector supports 537 local jobs and generates millions of dollars annually in direct economic activity — numbers that put the arts in the same conversation as tourism, healthcare, and retail.
The program’s public art inventory has grown substantially in recent years. Key pieces include the Regenerate Mural (2021) on the Vocal Building, the Kaleidoscope (2023) near downtown, a Gateway Sculpture at Schreiner, and the Ziggurat — or the ramp that connects the Butt-Holdsworth Library to the River Trail. The ramp features a structural artwork titled Ode to a River that maps the Guadalupe watershed from the night sky to the riverbed. The Ziggurat has since been adapted into a children’s coloring book for distribution in schools and communities.
After the floods, Boyette launched the Kerr County Love Project — a collaborative effort bringing together art therapists, classroom teachers, and first responders to design a public therapy mosaic. The project speaks to what Boyette calls art’s essential role in community recovery: not as comfort, but as processing.
Mayor Joe Herring made an impromptu appearance during the segment.
“Art not only enriches your life but it helps you understand life,” the mayor said. “And to have no art at all in your life is to live a shallow life.”
More at kerrcreates.com.
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