Asheville School students engage with the local arts community

Press release from Asheville School:

Nestled near the heart of west Asheville, Asheville School has access to a unique and thriving community of artists who work across a diverse array of mediums.

Students at Asheville School have long had the opportunity to experience arts on campus. Now, Asheville School plans to work with Asheville’s vibrant arts community to inspire students and create opportunities for them to learn through hands-on experience.

“This community arts initiative takes full advantage of our location,” said Associate Head of School Jay Bonner. “This program provides a different perspective for our students—one that operates within real-world arts and arts organizations.”

Asheville School plans to work with the Asheville Art Museum and the Black Mountain College Museum. Programming has begun to take shape and will evolve over the course of the year.

This fall, several students have the opportunity to participate in a service project at the Asheville Art Museum. In addition, groups of students will have the chance to perform in off-campus venues.

One such event took place October 7 at the Asheville Art Museum, where students performed an original piece, “Community: Spoken Word Performance.”

The students wrote the work as a response to Sharon Louden’s “Community,” an installation at the museum. The performance wove music, spoken word poetry, and gestural sketching into a collaborative piece that represented ties between people both past and present.

The show took place amidst Louden’s work. The Asheville Art Museum describes the installation as “a continued conversation based on a series of work that [Louden] started in 2013 that traces its path through installation, animation, painting and drawing. In each genre, her gestures create an implication of dance—movement and energy—transposed against the resistance of fixed squares and rectangles of color.”

While she was unable to attend the event, Sharon Louden spoke about it on social media, calling the students’ performance “the best kind of collaboration.”

Bonner is excited that students have the opportunity to work with and among professional artists in Asheville.

“Our students work with practicing artists at Asheville School in dance, fine arts, music, and writing, but when they learn something from a visiting artist at the Black Mountain College Museum or from a curator at the Asheville Art Museum, the words carry even more weight,” said Bonner. “The lesson sticks a little deeper. That’s a gift to our students that will play out in their lives long after they leave Asheville School.”