• Looks like Neighborhood Housing Services has hit on a real winner with its Doors of Asheville benefit. This year, the group will auction off 10 full-sized doors and 21 other works. They’re offering a free preview — as well as wine and hors d’oeuvres — at the Grove Arcade on Thursday at 5:30 p.m.
• Bella Vista Gallery, down on the river, looks classy with Paul Owen’s eerie photographs hanging near the front of the gallery. The images are of cars and roads at night. They have an anticipatory feel — something important is about to happen. Owen, who started the photography program at New York University, still lives and teaches part time in New York but has a home in Asheville.
• Friends of Mountain History has kicked off a yearlong themed exhibit program for small regional museums. More than 50 cultural organizations will mount exhibits on the theme of “Oh Lord, Remember Me!: People of Faiths: Rites and Rituals in the Blue Ridge Mountains” Unless another museum is doing snake handling, it looks like the most interesting of the yearlong shows will be the one about funerals at the Mountain Gateway Museum in Old Fort. It will feature Cooling tables that were carried into the home of the deceased and set up over buckets of ice, a wicker coffin and other “tools of the trade” gleaned from the basement of a local funeral home.
• If you missed the extraordinary photographs of David Spear at the Captain’s Bookshelf, you can still get a signed copy of his book Visible Spirits.
• Flood Gallery is keeping its edge. Three young artists, two from New York and one from Sarasota, have work on display through October, and there will be a March benefit to complete work on the gallery. The benefit, featuring local musicians’ tributes to Neil Young, will be held at the Grey Eagle.
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