By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Kelsey Mackley-Limpf remembers vividly her first visit to the Black Swamp Arts Festival.
She was 11 or 12 and came to Bowling Green from Toledo with a friend and her family. “I was pretty wowed, honestly,”she said. It was her first time experiencing an art festival atmosphere, being surrounded by hand crafted jewelry, ceramics, glass, paintings, and more and the artists who created it.
“It was pretty crazy to my 11- or 12-year-old mind,” Mackley-Limpf said.
She was already enamored with the arts, a prediliction fueled by her grandmother.
Mackley-Limpf ended up attended Bowling Green State University, graduating with a degree in Visual Communications Technology in 2019. Since 2022, she has been a member of the Black Swamp Arts Festival’s marketing committee.
Earlier this year, her colleagues in marketing asked her to design the poster. “It was an easy ‘yes,’” she said.
Wednesday afternoon, Visual Communications Technology, Mackley-Limpf set up inside Juniper Brewing to give the public the first look at her work: The simple, bold design of blue cattails rising from yellow grass into a grey sky that reveals itself to be a fingerprint with the festival’s logo of a salamander curled around paint brush in place of pride in the center.
That design sense, Mackley-Limpf said, is shaped by her work as a designer of packaging. She works for the design firm Damen Jackson on site at Owens Corning as a packaging designer.
As a packaging designer, she said, she often has to fit a lot of content into a small space. “So it’s informed my personal style to be very minimalistic. I don’t like a lot of busy-ness. I tried to keep this very simple, very clean lines.”
For the poster, she said, she employed “a lot of organic shapes, bright colors. The term ‘Black Swamp,’ to me, sounds like something out of a video game or a fantasy novel. So I wanted the color palette to be kind of trippy, almost, mystical.”
She continued, “the fingerprint in the background represents how art is such an integral part of our lives as humans.”
[Read Mackley-Limpf ’s artist statement: Black Swamp Arts Festival to unveil its 2025 poster]
Charity Bejarano, of Bowling Green, was on hand to collect the new poster. She’s a fan of the festival’s signature art.
She has a number of the posters, which she displays at home and in her office. Her favorite she said was the round edition from 2011.
The festival’s artwork has received a number of awards.
Mackley-Limpf said she’s drawn inspiration from that lineage.
She also credits her own lineage for her pursuing a career in arts.
As a child Mackley-Limpf spent a lot of time in the care of her grandmother while her mother worked. Her grandmother introduced her to books with prints by Monet and Van Gogh, the works of Shakespeare, and classical music. A pianist, her grandmother inspired her granddaughter to play. At Anthony Wayne High School, Mackley-Limpf had a chance to study art. She decided to study coding as well. “I was curious about web design.”
This also offered a path where she could use her creative interest in a career other than being a starving artist.
Now her work is highly visible to anyone who shops at Lowe’s or Home Depot.
A resident of Maumee, Mackley-Limpf loves being a member of the festival committee. “I love giving back to the community. It’s definitely in my genes as much as being an artist is.”
