An artist relocation program put Paducah, Ky., on the creative map

In the riverfront town of Paducah in western Kentucky, art isn't just a luxury. It's a lifeline.

It helped salvage one of the city's oldest neighborhoods with an artist relocation program that lured talent from around the country.

And art, in the form of 52 murals and a national museum devoted to quilting (much cooler than it sounds, I promise), served as a shot in the arm for downtown revitalization, sparing the historic area from the fate of many a small city destroyed by suburban sprawl.

More recently, art is what prompted UNESCO to designate Paducah as one of only six "Creative Cities" in the U.S.

You could say art is woven into the fabric of this town of roughly 25,000, known as Quilt City USA (again, cooler than it sounds). And the creative vibe that comes along with it has kept Paducah from devolving into just another pit stop off the interstate.

"There's a lot more here than gas stations," said Ed Musselman, one of several Paducahans who, in the past couple of years, have resurrected dilapidated pieces of the city's past and recycled them into creative new spaces.

Musselman and his wife, Meagan, recently restored an old Coca-Cola bottling plant in midtown and filled it with a craft brewery, restaurant and artist collective, among other things. The Coke Plant, as it's known around town, also houses Time on the String, where the curious can take a lesson in playing the fiddle — or just about any stringed instrument — with owner Josh Coffey, a staple on the local music scene.

Before the Lower Town Arts District was called that, it was a rundown part of Paducah that few people would visit by choice.

"It's changed a lot from when I got here; it's a walkable, safe neighborhood now," said mixed-media artist Char Downs, who lives above her Pinecone Art Gallery & Studio.

Downs moved to Paducah from the San Francisco area in 2004 as part of the city's artist relocation program, which offered incentives to get creative types to live and work in this 26-square-block area between 3rd and 9th streets, and Jefferson Street to Park Avenue.

"It was a big deal in the art world," Downs said about the program. "Suddenly everyone knew about Paducah."

A creative vibe and strong arts-and-crafts culture have helped keep the riverfront town vibrant despite suburban sprawl and other changes.

Fallert's "Corona II" is among the crown jewels of the National Quilt Museum's 500-plus collection. The world's largest quilt museum, opened in 1991, annually draws more than 100,000 visitors. These are not your grandma's bedspreads. They're intricate, modern works of fiber artistry that will leave you with a new appreciation for what's possible with needle and thread.

Nearby in downtown Paducah — refreshingly free of been-there-done-that-franchises and chains — you'll find several cute-as-a-button arts and crafts shops. Two good ones: Bricolage Art Collective and Must Stitch Emporium. Both are on Market House Square, within a ball of yarn's throw of Yeiser Art Center, whose permanent collection has more than 300 pieces by local artists, as well as big names like Mary Cassatt and Alexander Calder.

If all this gets your creative juices flowing, head to Make at 628 Broadway. About two years ago, artist Kijsa Housman transformed this old photography studio and church into a public workshop space offering lessons in everything from painting to crochet to hand-lettering.

Housman, a Texas native, has an infectious passion for the arts, and she's happily spreading that passion around her adopted hometown.

"Everywhere you look, art is being cut from the schools, funding is down," said Housman, a mother of three. "The experience of creating something with your own two hands — we're losing that. I wanted to start a fun place where that's still possible."

"It's the diary of the town," said Fowler Black, a fourth-generation Paducahan who works for the city's tourism bureau. Black was a teenager when the murals started going up in the mid-1990s.

"This three-linear-block project is what I would credit as being the resurrection of community pride made tangible," he said.

Night and day, tourists and locals stroll alongside these panels of visual history, snapping pictures and reading the descriptions at the base of each mural. The paintings are spread across 14-foot-tall concrete walls built by the Army Corps of Engineers after a flood in 1937 nearly decimated the city.

"What protected us also partitioned us from the river," Black said. "People used to congregate by the water, but that changed when the walls went up."

And it changed again — for the better — when Dafford and his team used art to turn the flood walls into a canvas.