During the past year, DeSoto Lounge had an entire exhibition of taxidermied African beasts. The exhibit redrew, if only for a moment, the boundaries of fine craft and the decorative arts. Warren Wilson College featured a video performance installation by Chicago-based artist Jefferson Pinder that brought about a serious dialogue on individual upward mobility and […]
The renowned glass artist, ceramist and the pioneer founder of the American studio glass movement, who was based in Spruce Pine, passed away last week. Image courtesy of Fritz Dreisbach, photo by Gloria Schulman.
“A Girl and A Gun: Asheville Artists Cope With Love and Death,” a group exhibition, curated by Taiyo La Paix, opens today from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Asheville Area Arts Council.
If every art gallery in Asheville had synchronized first-Friday art openings, we’d never get to half of the shows. Fortunately, there’s room to breath. Two exhibitions opening in the River Arts District this Friday, Dec. 13, help to round out the 2013 arts calendar with an unlikely ceramics/street art combination at Ananda West Salon, and a sampling of 40 of Asheville’s finest painters, printers and makers packed into the Asheville Area Arts Council.
Cool Craft Holiday Market — Join 40 of the Asheville area’s finest craft artists, jewelers and potters at HandMade in America’s second Cool Craft Holiday Market. This year, the market adds food artisans to that list. HandMade partners with Blue Ridge Food Ventures to bring artisanal bites, along with jams and other treats in jars […]
The next two weeks offer a couple of unconventional opportunities to connect with local culture and influence. From an art exhibit featuring folk-heritage takes on seasonal spirit to a film focused on the German-born Bauhaus movement in America (and, specifically, Western North Carolina), it’s an insider’s perspective on regional art and craft. The spirit of […]
The five-piece iteration of the band took to the stage shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday night and opened with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” It’s a song often reserved for the end of the night. But in this case, it set forth the evening’s familial tone as front man Rawlings lead the newest lineup of his ever-evolving Machine through a two-and-a-half-hour old-time music marathon. Photo from the band’s Facebook page.
The exhibition is up through Nov. 17. Pinder will give a talk on Thursday, Nov. 7 at Warren Wilson College’s Canon Lounge. Images courtesy of the WWC and the artist.
Jefferson Pinder: Work A video installation at Warren Wilson College has left the Elizabeth Holden Gallery shrouded in total darkness. That darkness, though, is intermittently broken by Jefferson Pinder: Work, a series of flickering and quick-witted performance-videos that illuminate an artist’s physical-turned-social struggle against a working-class backdrop. In each piece, Pinder, an artist and associate […]
There are roughly 200 connections between Asheville and the Iranian Revolution. Really. It just so happens that one of the largest privately held collections of posters from the revolution, nearly 200 in number, resides here. For the next two months, 146 of these posters are on view as part of In Search of Lost Causes: […]
It would seem that shipping containers are becoming a staple in the River Arts District. The Lego-like, steel behemoths, often temporary, are finding permanency in the neighborhood — for extra square-footage, storage and even forthcoming restaurants. Fortunately, they’ve also become a canvas to reflect RAD’s creative pulse. Randy Shull, who co-owns Pink Dog Creative with […]
Black Mountain College is known best as an innovative, experimental liberal arts institution that attracted such luminaries as John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, among others. Craft and design are not on that short list, but the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center intends to strengthen the craft connection with […]
Craft is a loaded term, as far as the arts are concerned. It carries descriptive weight, yet deceptive weight that is all-encompassing and still means so little. And the term “craft” is frequently used to describe products and producers the same way that it describes art and artists. “There’s a lot of reverence for the […]
A performing duo from Asheville’s Bright Star Touring Theatre will soon be packing up and checking in with the American Embassy in Moscow. But for the sake of theater — not political asylum. David Ostergaard, founder of Asheville-based Bright Star Touring Theatre, and Erin Schmidt, the company’s theater manager, will travel to Moscow to perform […]
[Editor’s note: This is the third in an ongoing series of articles about the Center for Craft Creativity and Design (CCCD), a WNC-based craft research organization.] The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design recently announced the recipients of a collective $95,000 in grants from its annual Craft Research Fund. On a quieter note, they also […]
Swiss-born and San Francisco-based muralist Mona Caron spent a week here in mid-August. It was her first trip to Asheville, but she wasted no time getting acquainted with our arts and mural scenes and getting some work of her own on the city’s facade. Caron spent one of those afternoons sketching and hand-painting a roughly […]
Artist Mona Caron brings a resilient type of art to the side of Collapseable Studios.
Note: This article addresses works from the current AAM exhibition "Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection," which was previously covered by Xpress writer Steph Guinan in her July 9 piece "Big Names, Little Town." After seeing the exhibition I felt the need to address one specific artist's presence and importance. “Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau […]
The Odditorium will host a massive benefit to help the Asheville Darkroom continue its mission.
The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design has bought the Lark Books building on Broadway Street. What will the move mean for the local arts scene? (Photo by Max Cooper)
Asheville receives no shortage of media and artistic attention for our cultural oddities, art and fashion. But in A Documentary of Sorts, a new photo exhibition opening Friday, Aug. 2, at Izzy’s Coffee Den, distances itself from this type of portrayal. Asheville photographer Anthony Bellemare has instead looked to the peripheries of Asheville’s cultural stratosphere […]
