About
Barbie Hunt
Artist, author, and founding director of Healing Rooms Kids. The art and the prayer come from the same daily rhythm.
The studio
Barbie, a lifelong Kentuckian, has been making things for more than forty years. She trained as an artist — a BFA and two master's degrees — and has been a business owner since the 1980s, beginning at Pennyroyal Pottery. She spent ten years directing the Glema Mahr Center for the Arts, helped develop both the Center and Mahr Park Arboretum in her hometown, and led statewide arts and education organizations. In 1998 she returned to her own work full time and has not stopped since.
Her studio is at 113 East Center Street in Madisonville, Kentucky, next door to Main Street Prayer Center. From it come hand-painted prayer silks, watercolors, acrylics, pottery, and sculpture. The silks — painted with a line of scripture or a hymn — are the work most people know her for, and they have found their way into churches and homes across the country.
The studio and its shop live at prayersilks.com.
The prayer room
In 2011 Barbie founded Healing Rooms Kids, an equipping ministry for children's prayer teams. Every Tuesday since, teams of children — led and covered by trained adults — have prayed for people who come for prayer, some they know and many complete strangers. What began in one room in Madisonville now reaches teams around the world.
She never planned to lead an international ministry. Through Healing Rooms Kids and the HRK Leadership Academy Community she now trains adults worldwide to nurture childlike faith through kids' prayer teams, and her training manual has been translated into more than six languages.
She and her husband Rush, married for more than fifty years, co-direct Main Street Prayer Center, where the prayer teams meet. A wife, mother, and grandmother, she is the Nana the children's stories are addressed to. The ministry has its own home at healingroomskids.org; the short version is on this site.
The same daily rhythm
Barbie does not describe the art and the prayer as two lives. Painting a silk and sitting with a child while they pray for a stranger ask the same things of her: show up, pay attention, let go of the outcome, and expect God to be kind. The studio is quiet in the morning; the prayer room is loud on Tuesdays; the posture is the same.
Ten years of those Tuesdays became a book. Never Too Little to Pray gathers sixty true stories of healing through the prayers of children, organized around the fruit of the Spirit. Read about the book.
Speaking and interviews
Barbie speaks about children and prayer, and about equipping adults to lead well.