Calendar of Events

Call for Artists for a New Art Deco Masterpiece –
Part of the Urban Trail

Issue Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Deadline: Monday, May 13, 2024 by 5:00 p.m. 

Call Summary:

• The City of Asheville and Public Art and Culture Commission (PACC) seek a qualified artist(s) or designer(s) to submit their qualifications for a piece of public artwork that reimagines and replaces Station #7, the Art Deco Masterpiece, part of Asheville’s Urban Trail.
• Responses to this Call for Artists (CFA) will be reviewed by an Artist Selection Panel and up to three semi-finalists will be asked to submit proposals. Semi-finalists will be paid a $500 honorarium.
• Artwork will be integrated into the existing Outdoor Dining Area in front of the historic S&W Building, located at 56 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC.
• The budget is $80,000 to engage with community stakeholders, design, fabricate and install the piece.

To Apply:

• More information and the Call for Artists can be found on the City of Asheville’s Bid page at ashevillenc.gov/bids under “Other”.
  • Project Number: 298-CFA-ArtDecoRedesign-24

Baker Exhibit Center

In an age of complex environmental challenges, why not look to the ingenuity of nature for solutions? The forms, patterns, and processes found in the natural world—refined by 3.8 billion years of evolution—can inspire our design of everything from clothing to skyscrapers. This approach to innovation, called biomimicry, is becoming increasingly popular.

Nature’s Blueprints is supported in part by The North Carolina Arboretum Society, The Laurel of Asheville, RomanticAsheville.com Travel Guide, and Smoky Mountain Living Magazine.

Historians estimate that skilled Black artisans outnumbered their white counterparts in the antebellum South by a margin of five to one. However, despite their presence and prevalence in all corners of the pre-industrial trade and craft fields, the stories of these skilled workers go largely unacknowledged.

Borrowing its title from a Black culture and politics magazine of the same name, Hammer and Hope celebrates the life and labor of Black chairmakers in early America. Featuring the work of two contemporary furniture makers – Robell Awake and Charlie Ryland – the pieces in this exhibition are based on the artists’ research into ladderback chairs created by the Poynors, a multigenerational family of free and enslaved craftspeople working in central Tennessee between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Through the objects featured in Hammer and Hope, Awake and Ryland explore, reinterpret, and reimagine what the field of furniture-making today would look like had the history and legacy of the Poynors – and countless others that have been subject to a similar pattern of erasure – been celebrated rather than hidden. Hammer and Hope represents Awake and Ryland’s attempts, in their own words,  “at fighting erasure by making objects that engage with these long-suppressed stories.”‍

Robell Awake and Charlie Ryland are recipients of the Center for Craft’s 2022 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship. This substantial mid-career grant is awarded to two artists to support research projects that advance, expand, and support the creation of new research and knowledge through craft practice.

Join us April 18-20, 2024,  for QUILTFEST GREENVILLE, SC! Experience the ultimate in QuiltFest hospitality in one of the South’s most beautiful cities. Enjoy the entries to our National Spring Competition and shop the aisles of the Merchants Mall, or discover our workshop offerings and learn the newest quilting techniques in the industry. Located at the James H. Woodside Conference Center of the Greenville Convention Center, South Carolina you don’t want to miss this spectacular springtime quilt festival at one of America’s most up-and-coming destinations.

For more information: QuiltFest Greenville, SC » Mancuso Show Management

For Directions: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Lr6E9RH4T28PRtF86

Saturdays from 10:30 AM – 12 PM

Images: Left: Minna Wright Citron, Squid Under Pier, 1948, color etching, soft-ground, and engraving on paper, edition 42/50, 15 x 17 7/8 inches, 2010 Collections Circle purchase, Asheville Art Museum. © Estate of Minna Citron/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Right: Dorothy Dehner, Woman #2, 1954, watercolor and ink on paper, 22 3/4 x 18”, courtesy of Dolan Maxwell.

The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition American Art in the Atomic Age: 1940–1960, which explores the groundbreaking contributions of artists who worked at the experimental printmaking studio Atelier 17 in the wake of World War II. Co-curated by Marilyn Laufer and Tom Butler, American Art in the Atomic Age which draws from the holdings of Dolan/Maxwell, the Asheville Art Museum Collection, and private collections will be on view from November 10, 2023–April 29, 2024.

Atelier 17 operated in New York for fifteen years, between 1940 and 1955. The studio’s founder, Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) established the workshop in Paris but relocated to New York just as the Nazi occupation of Paris began in 1940. Hayter’s new studio attracted European emigrants like André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miró, as well as American artists like Dorothy Dehner, Judith Rothschild, and Karl Schrag, allowing for an exchange of artistic ideas and processes between European and American artists.

The Asheville Art Museum will present over 100 works that exemplify the cross-cultural exchange and profound social and political impact of Atelier 17 on American art. Prints made at Atelier 17—including those by Stanley William Hayter, Louise Nevelson, and Perle Fine—will be in conversation with works by European Surrealists who were working at the studio in the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition will also feature a selection of domestic mid-century objects that exemplify how the ideas and aesthetics of post-war abstraction became a part of everyday life.

In the early 1900s, travel by train and automobile became more accessible in the United States, leading to an increase in tourism and a revitalized interest in landscape painting. The relative ease of transportation, as well as the creation of National Parks, allowed people to experience the breathtaking landscapes of the United States in new ways. Artists traveled along popular routes, recording the terrain they encountered.

This exhibition explores the sublime natural landscapes of the Smokey Mountains of Western North Carolina and Tennessee. While there were several regional schools of painting around this time, this group is largely from the Midwest and many of the artists trained at the Art Institute of Chicago or in New York City. Through their travels, they captured waterfalls, sunsets, thunderstorms, autumn foliage, lush green summers, and snow-covered mountains—elements that were novel for viewers from cities and rural areas. Though some of these paintings include people, they are usually used for scale and painted with little to no detail, highlighting the magnificence of nature.

Rudolph F. Ingerle, Mirrored Mountain, not dated, oil on canvas, 28 × 32 inches. Courtesy of Allen & Barry Huffman, Asheville Art Museum.

Bender Gallery Artists Featured in Asheville Art Museum Exhibition The New Salon: A Contemporary View The Asheville Art Museum will be opening their exhibit, The New Salon: A Contemporary View, on March 8 and it will run until August 19, 2024. The New Salon offers a modern take on the prestigious tradition of the Parisian Salon with the diversity and innovation of today’s art world. Guest-curated by Gabriel Shaffer, the show will include works from Pop Surrealism, Outsider Art, Street Art, and Graffiti genres.   Bender Gallery has been collaborating with the Asheville Art Museum to loan four paintings from three of our artists. The artists are Laine Bachman, Kukula, and Yui Sakamoto. Be sure to check out this special exhibition in downtown Asheville. Learn More Kukula, Impossible Voyage, oil on board, 48 x 24 inches Kukula (b. 1980, Israel) Nataly Abramovitch, better known in the art world as, Kukula, paints imagined worlds filled with elaborately dressed women in fanciful settings. The artist does extensive research on the layouts of paintings from the Renaissance and Rococo periods. Kukula subverts these images by depicting women characters in place of traditionally male positions and settings. Her characters are powerful, commanding, and have an air of indifference. Available Work Yui Sakamoto, Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 63 x 63 inches Yui Sakamoto (b. 1981, Japan) Our surrealist artist, Yui Sakamoto, will have two paintings featured including My Soul and Self Portrait. Self Portrait is still available from his recent solo exhibition at Bender Gallery. Standing in front of Self Portrait, one is immersed in the dual-worlds of Sakamoto’s Japanese and Mexican cultures. There is a sense of calm reflected in the repeating rose pattern, mixed with the uneasy realization that the coral, fungi, and otherworldly forms are what makeup the figure. Available Work Laine Bachman, Night Bloomers, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches Laine Bachman (b. 1974, USA) Our prolific Magical Realism artist, Laine Bachman, makes a feature in the exhibition with her painting, Night Bloomers. She has been hard at work making 17 new pieces for her solo exhibition at the Canton Art Museum in Canton, Ohio. The Canton show opens on April 28 and continues through to July 28, 2024. Available Work

Exhibition and Public Programming

Vera B. Williams, an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books, started making pictures almost as soon as she could walk. She studied at Black Mountain College in a time where summer institutes were held with classes taught by John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Williams studied under the Bauhaus luminary Josef Albers and went on to make art for the rest of her life. At the time of her death, The New York Times wrote: “Her illustrations, known for bold colors and a style reminiscent of folk art, were praised by reviewers for their great tenderness and crackling vitality.” Despite numerous awards and recognition for her children’s books, much of her wider life and work remains unexplored. This retrospective will showcase the complete range of Williams’ life and work. It will highlight her time at Black Mountain College, her political activism, and her establishment, with Paul Williams, of an influential yet little-known artist community, in addition to her work as an author and illustrator.

Author and illustrator of 17 children’s books, including Caldecott medal winner, A Chair for My Mother, Vera B. Williams always had a passion for the arts. Williams grew up in the Bronx, NY, and in 1936, when she was nine years old, one of her paintings, called Yentas, opens a new window, was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. While Williams is widely known for her children’s books today, this exhibition’s expansive scope highlights unexplored aspects of her artistic practice and eight decades of life. From groundbreaking, powerful covers for Liberation Magazine, to Peace calendar collaborations with writer activist Grace Paley, to scenic sketches for Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, to hundreds of late life “Aging and Illness” cartoons sketches and doodles, Vera never sat still.

Williams arrived at Black Mountain College in 1945. While there, she embraced all aspects of living, working, and learning in the intensely creative college community. She was at BMC during a particularly fertile period, which allowed her to study with faculty members Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, and to participate in the famed summer sessions with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, M.C. Richards, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1948, she graduated with Josef Albers as her advisor and sculptor Richard Lippold as her outside examiner. Forever one of the College’s shining stars, Vera graduated from BMC with just six semesters of coursework, at only twenty-one years old. She continued to visit BMC for years afterward, staying deeply involved with the artistic community that BMC incubated.

Anticipating the eventual closure of BMC, Williams, alongside her husband Paul Williams and a group of influential former BMC figures, founded The Gate Hill Cooperative Artists community located 30 miles north of NYC on the outskirts of Stony Point, NY. The Gate Hill Cooperative, also known as The Land, became an outcropping of Black Mountain College’s experimental ethos. Students and faculty including John Cage, M.C. Richards, David Tudor, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Stan VanDerBeek, and Patsy Lynch Wood shaped Gate Hill as founding members of the community. Vera B. Williams raised her three children at Gate Hill while continuing to make work.

The early Gate Hill era represented an especially creative phase for the BMC group. For Williams, this period saw the creation of 76 covers for Liberation Magazine, a radical, groundbreaking publication. This exhibition will feature some of Williams’ most powerful Liberation covers including a design for the June 1963 edition, which contained the first full publication of MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Williams’ activism work continued throughout her life. As president of PEN’s Children Committee and member of The War Resisters league, she created a wide range of political and educational posters and journal covers. Williams protested the war in Vietnam and nuclear proliferation while supporting women’s causes and racial equality. In 1981, Williams was arrested and spent a month in a federal prison on charges stemming from her political activism.

In her late 40’s, Williams embarked in earnest on her career as a children’s book author and illustrator, a career which garnered the NY Public Library’s recognition of A Chair for My Mother as one of the greatest 100 children’s books of all time. Infinitely curious and always a wanderer at heart, Williams’ personal life was as expansive as her art. In addition to her prolific picture making, Williams started and helped run a Summerhill-based alternative school, canoed the Yukon, and lived alone on a houseboat in Vancouver Harbor. She helped to organize and attended dozens of political demonstrations throughout her adult life.

Her books won many awards including the Caldecott Medal Honor Book for A Chair for My Mother in 1983, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award– Fiction category– for Scooter in 1994, the Jane Addams Honor for Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart in 2002, and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature in 2009. Her books reflected her values, emphasizing love, compassion, kindness, joy, strength, individuality, and courage.

Images:

Cover of Vera B. Williams’ A Chair for My Mother, published in 1982.

Vera B. Williams, Cover for Liberation Magazine, November 1958.

We’re back for another fun spring market full of of artists, makers, and delicious cocktails!
Join us in the South Slope brewing district for the South Slope Makers Market & Bar Hop to shop local artists, makers and vintage vendors with a drink in hand!
Find vendors, drinks and food at all of these fun locations! 👇
Green Man Brewing
27 Buxton Ave
Urban Orchard Cider Co
24 Buxton Ave
Twin Leaf Brewing
144 Coxe Ave
The Funkatorium
147 Coxe Ave
Hi-Wire Brewing
197 Hilliard Ave
Products will be a wide variety of handmade and vintage goods including original art, home decor, clothing, paper products, metal working, jewelry, soap, candles, and a whole lot more!
No MLM or direct sales will be present.
This event is FREE to attend! You only pay for the items you wish to purchase and the drinks you want to consume.
​This is a family friendly event, however please note alcohol will be present due to the nature of the venues.
If you are 21 or older and choose to drink, please drink responsibly.

Join us to make your own unique plant markers using scrabble tiles. Plant markers help you remember what seeds you planted in your garden or identify your  potted plants.  This event is for teens and adults. All supplies will be provided. Registration is required and space is limited.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center board member Jolene Mechanic developed a fundraising idea that grew into the {Re}HAPPENING, a dinner and performance event inspired by John Cage’s 1952 Theatre Piece No. 1, considered by many to be the first Happening. For the first six years, the Media Arts Project (MAP), an artist-run non-profit in Asheville, collaborated to organize and produce the event with BMCM+AC.

The {Re}HAPPENING is a one-day event at the historic campus of Black Mountain College, 20 minutes from Asheville. It is part art event, part fundraiser, and part community instigator, providing a platform for contemporary artists to share their responses to the vital legacy of Black Mountain College by activating the buildings and grounds of the BMC campus with installations, new media, music, and performance projects.

The annual event which takes place at what is now Camp Rockmont, provides a forum for regional and national artists and an accessible, immersive, educational experience for attendees.

Since 2010, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (BMCM+AC) has hosted the {Re}HAPPENING inspired by John Cage’s 1952 Theatre Piece No. 1, an unscripted performance at Black Mountain College considered by many to be the first Happening. The annual {Re}HAPPENING brings together dozens of contemporary artists whose work responds to and extends the legacy of Black Mountain College visionaries such as John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Anni Albers, M.C. Richards, Ruth Asawa, Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers, and Robert Rauschenberg.

The 2024 {Re}HAPPENING celebrates the event’s 12th anniversary, featuring a host of artists presenting work throughout the Lake Eden campus. Visitors will encounter an immersive collection of projects in the tradition of BMC—installation, sound, movement, visual art, and interactive media.

The {Re}HAPPENING will also feature all-day installations including a large-scale immersive performance sculpture installation by Cilla Vee Life Arts; an audio-visual projection tunnel by Geo Lynx; an installation exploring the relationship between music and textiles by Qianwen Yu; an interactive, animated bog ecosystem by Victoria Bradbury; a spatialized multi-channel immersive audio experience by Christopher Hamilton; a solar-powered sound collage by Matt Allison; a multi-media event with historical footage and live sound mixing by Matt Greenwell and Ron Buffington; and a prismatic playground by Swannatopia, 10-year veterans of the event.

Interdisciplinary performances will include an experimental fantasy operetta by Majid Araim; a layering of bodies, projections, fabric, and sound by Caitlyn Schrader, Sean Mulachy, and Bjorn Bates; a participatory gathering of clay, movement, and improvisational sound by Kiran Jandu and Michael Medeiros; a nomadic dance journey by Julie Becton Gillum; a three-phased interdisciplinary happening by the Chicago-based Sound Performance Land Collective; a 4-6 hour reading performed at a distance by Justin William Evans; an improvisatory music and dance exchange with a plant by Lindsey Jones and Allen Fogelsanger; a multi-channel video performance based on Xanti Schawinsky’s Spectodrama by Miles Lamberson; a workshop, film,  and performance with salvaged plastic by Tom Hansell, Trevor McKenzie, and Julie Shepherd-Powell; and an aria for the elements by experimental vocalists Alisha Erao (Lush Agave) and Elisa Faires.

Sound-based projects will also include a cello performance inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing” by John Popham; harmonic and polyrhythmic performances with invented instruments by Spiral Garden; a new collaborative performance by filmmaker Madison Brookshire and composer Laura Steenberge; a concrete compositional experiment between poet Rachel Allen and sculptor Nathan Carter; and a presentation of little-known works by the 20th century composer Netty Simons, performed and organized by Zach Aliotta.

Other participatory and family-friendly sessions will include a collaborative bookmaking workshop with artists from Local Cloth; a chance to build Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic structures with Michael Webster; and a meditative music gardening circle with Sarah Louise.

See the full lineup at https://www.blackmountaincollege.org/rehappening/2024-artists

About the {Re}HAPPENING

The {Re}HAPPENING is a one-day event at the historic campus of Black Mountain College, 20 minutes from Asheville. It is part art event, part fundraiser, and part community instigator, providing a platform for contemporary artists to share their responses to the vital legacy of Black Mountain College by activating the buildings and grounds of the BMC campus with installations, new media, music, and performance projects.

General admission brings in hundreds of visitors annually. In addition to providing a forum for regional artists and an accessible, immersive, educational experience for attendees, every year the event is a community collaboration between local businesses and arts organizations.

TRANSPORTATION:

FREE – Shuttle

$15 – Parking Pass

Carpooling and shuttling are highly encouraged. Free parking will be available at the Lower Lot of the Asheville Chamber of Commerce (36 Montford Ave), allowing visitors to kick back and enjoy the ride with Gray Line Trolleys to Lake Eden. This FREE Dymaxion Shuttle, sponsored by Gray Line Trolley, will run between the Asheville Chamber of Commerce lower lot (36 Montford Avenue) and Camp Rockmont. Please allow for a few minutes’ wait.

Shuttle Schedule*

Pick up at Chamber of Commerce, Downtown Asheville:

3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Pick up at Camp Rockmont for return to Asheville:

3:30, 4:30, 5:30, 7, 9, 10

Uber and Lyft are not guaranteed in Black Mountain but are a great option to connect with the Trolley in Downtown AVL.

Purchase tickets online at www.blackmountaincollege.org or at Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center (120 College Street in Downtown Asheville).

Food and Beverage

{Re}HAPPENING will feature local food trucks including Cecilia’s Kitchen and The Smoking Onion, with beverages provided by the Bridge & Tunnel Coffee Truck and Wedge Brewing.

Creative Minds Care is proud to present Unearthing Treasures at Odyssey Clayworks, a transformative pottery workshop series specifically crafted for individuals in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. This initiative offers participants the opportunity to engage in a free workshop within the warm and inviting atmosphere of Odyssey Clayworks, fostering therapeutic and enriching experiences through the art of pottery. Unearthing Treasures aims to provide a creative haven, allowing individuals and their caregivers to share in the joy of crafting memories together. To learn more or register for these meaningful workshops, visit www.OdysseryClayworks.com and unearth the beauty of every memory as a masterpiece.
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A 2020 NIH study suggests pottery could be a beneficial activity for people with dementia, fostering enjoyment, creativity, psychological well-being, and self-esteem. Additionally, recent research published in the American Academy of Neurology Journal discovered that people who engaged in artistic activities in both middle and old age were 73% less likely to have memory and thinking problems, such as mild cognitive impairment, that lead to dementia. The study also revealed that people engaged in craft-based activities such as sewing, woodworking and ceramics in midlife and old age, are 45% less likely to encounter cognitive issues.
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All skill levels welcome
Suggested age 60+
Free enrollment for folks in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and their dedicated caregivers courtesy of Creative Minds Care.
One caregiver / support person per participant. Caregiver must sign up separately to be able to participate in the class.

Call for Artists for a New Art Deco Masterpiece –
Part of the Urban Trail

Issue Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Deadline: Monday, May 13, 2024 by 5:00 p.m. 

Call Summary:

• The City of Asheville and Public Art and Culture Commission (PACC) seek a qualified artist(s) or designer(s) to submit their qualifications for a piece of public artwork that reimagines and replaces Station #7, the Art Deco Masterpiece, part of Asheville’s Urban Trail.
• Responses to this Call for Artists (CFA) will be reviewed by an Artist Selection Panel and up to three semi-finalists will be asked to submit proposals. Semi-finalists will be paid a $500 honorarium.
• Artwork will be integrated into the existing Outdoor Dining Area in front of the historic S&W Building, located at 56 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC.
• The budget is $80,000 to engage with community stakeholders, design, fabricate and install the piece.

To Apply:

• More information and the Call for Artists can be found on the City of Asheville’s Bid page at ashevillenc.gov/bids under “Other”.
  • Project Number: 298-CFA-ArtDecoRedesign-24

Baker Exhibit Center

In an age of complex environmental challenges, why not look to the ingenuity of nature for solutions? The forms, patterns, and processes found in the natural world—refined by 3.8 billion years of evolution—can inspire our design of everything from clothing to skyscrapers. This approach to innovation, called biomimicry, is becoming increasingly popular.

Nature’s Blueprints is supported in part by The North Carolina Arboretum Society, The Laurel of Asheville, RomanticAsheville.com Travel Guide, and Smoky Mountain Living Magazine.