Full Circle: UK alum returns to Kentucky roots

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 9, 2026) — Today, thousands of University of Kentucky alumni and friends will walk away carrying a piece of Aimee Griffith.

“When you paint something, it becomes a part of you,” the watercolorist said.

Griffith, a 2006 graduate of UK’s integrated strategic communication program in the College of Communication and Information, is the official artist behind this year’s Big Blue Day print, a partnership between Keeneland and the UK Alumni Association that melds racing excitement and Wildcat spirit. Prints of her original painting will be available to Keeneland guests during today’s meet.

It's a fitting assignment for an artist whose own path — out of Kentucky, and eventually back to it — mirrors exactly what events like homecoming are meant to celebrate.

For Griffith, homecoming isn’t only about a single football Saturday. It’s something she’s been sitting with since long before this commission came along.

“Next August will be 25 years since I walked on campus as a freshman,” Griffith said. “And I still see and hang out with some of my friends from that period of my life.”

College is a stage of life most people only get to experience once, she said, and the connections made there don’t announce their value until decades later.

“Those connections are formed and you don’t even realize what they’ll mean to you until 20 years later,” Griffith said. “There’s a thread that keeps you connected. It’s special.”

Seeing those same friends at homecoming, she said, collapses all the years in between.

“It just feels like there’s no time lost,” Griffith added.

That sense of a thread running underneath everything is, in a way, the story of Griffith’s own path since graduation.

Griffith, who grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky, and now resides in Lexington, was already known to horse racing fans before this commission. She was the official artist of the 2022 Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks.

But long before Churchill Downs came calling — she admits she actually asked how the fabled racetrack found her — Griffith left Kentucky altogether, and that departure is part of what makes this homecoming feel particularly personal.

“I think about homecoming in terms of branching out,” Griffith said, reflecting on the years after graduation that took her to Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia and eventually Australia. “Leaving after I graduated UK and experiencing  different cities and moving to Australia and having that experience — all those things just change you.”

That restlessness wasn’t rebellion so much as instinct.

“I felt like when you’re in your 20s, you feel this need to flee the nest,” she said. “And I’m glad we did, and I really encourage it. When you go somewhere like Atlanta or Sydney, you get to find yourself, because nobody else is paying attention to you in this big city, no one really knows you.”

She left Kentucky expecting a conventional career, not a creative one.

“When I left UK, I remember thinking, ‘Well, I’m going into media sales,’” Griffith said. “That seemed smart and responsible and safe.”

After her husband, Mark (a 2007 UK graduate), had a career opportunity in Australia, they moved to Brisbane (and later, Sydney), where the young mother found ways to fill her days with her children while soaking up the country’s art scene.

Painting wasn’t part of Griffith’s plan. It was on cultural outings with her children that something shifted.

“One of the things I used to do was tote my kids around the city, and we’d go to art museums because they had children’s activities that were free,” she said. “And that’s when I was like, ‘OK, I can try that. Why not?’”

She said she was always creative growing up, but Griffith had believed art wasn’t a viable path.

“I honestly never thought that being an artist was possible, because somehow I came to believe — and it’s probably just the culture that I was raised in — was that ‘starving’ and ‘artist’ go together,” she said. “And it’s not true.”

It took distance from Kentucky to unlearn that. And it took coming back to Kentucky for the new version of herself to feel complete.

“Coming back home to Lexington, it just felt like the right thing to do,” Griffith said. “It just feels…nostalgic, or comforting. It’s almost like a hug.”

That sense of return runs through the Big Blue Day piece itself. Thrilled by the invitation to paint the official 2026 artwork, Griffith described a quieter intention behind the piece, one she doesn’t expect most people to notice at first glance.

“It’s my secret hope that people see the diversity in it,” Griffith said. “My kids go to a Spanish immersion school. We used to live in Australia. We used to live in Atlanta. I think it’s important to celebrate the diversity at UK and at Keeneland... it’s beautiful, regardless of where you’re from. And we should celebrate it.”

The painting itself, titled “Bet on Blue,” shows the Keeneland paddock, framed by the venue’s stone archways, where a saddled racehorse is led past a crowd from different walks of life dressed almost entirely in vibrant Kentucky blue — a wash of color that ties spectators, horse and venue together in a single palette. It’s this piece of Griffith, quite literally, that thousands of alumni will carry home with them from Big Blue Day.

That desire to make people feel like they belong doesn't stop with the Big Blue Day piece — it’s what she’s after in everything she paints. She wants audiences and buyers — whether they live in Lexington or halfway across the globe — to have a visceral experience with her art.

“That’s what you want as an artist, is for someone to resonate with it enough to say: that reminds me of home,” said Griffith, who showcases her work at www.aimeegriffith.com. “That reminds me of that memory or that special place. That’s my goal, to connect people to emotional moments.”

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Register for Big Blue Day online, and don't forget to wear blue. For a full listing of UK 2026 Homecoming events, visit homecoming.uky.edu.