Art Bets: Julyan Davis at Blue Spiral

The Chick-fil-A cow visible from Blue Spiral 1’s window on Biltmore Avenue bears only a stylistic similarity to what’s inside. In other words, there’s no politics in Julyan Davis’s work, which hangs in the Showcase Gallery of Blue Spiral One. British-born Davis, now an Asheville resident, has more than a dozen paintings, mostly landscapes of […]

ART BETS

The Chick-fil-A cow visible from Blue Spiral 1’s window on Biltmore Avenue bears only a stylistic similarity to what’s inside. In other words, there’s no politics in Julyan Davis’s work, which hangs in the Showcase Gallery of Blue Spiral One. British-born Davis, now an Asheville resident, has more than a dozen paintings, mostly landscapes of […]

A cry for help

The 11th annual Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival started with a pub crawl and ended with a plea. On Sept. 5, three days after the one-night, one-day festival closed, festival producer Arts2People posted a message on Facebook asking for money. The note thanked everyone for supporting LAAFF before broaching financial problems. “I have to […]

Rebirth cotillion

For every 10 artists, it seems there’s a committee trying to represent them. Western North Carolina has dozens of such organizations. While some function well, others struggle to remain solvent and stable — let alone relevant and exciting. Witness the apparent recent dissolution of the Fine Arts League of the Carolinas, or the call for […]

Art Bets: Anna Jensen at the Artery

You won’t see such a vibrantly colored, art-historical, personal and superficially joyous exhibition again soon. ’…If I’m Good in Bed,’ the Artery’s current and short-lived exhibition by Asheville painter Anna Jensen, handles more aesthetic and social facets than your average 16-painting show. It incorporates a fair share of advertising. It nods to historical players like […]

Divine fillet

In Gus Cutty’s new mural at Forever Tattoo on Lexington Avenue, Chick-fil-A’s Dan Cathy appears more than a little gussied up, caked in makeup modeled after the famed American drag queen (and John Waters muse), Divine. (Photo courtesy of Gus Cutty)

Meet the new murals

In the last two weeks of July, new murals have gone up on the main thoroughfares of north and West Asheville. (Pictured: A detail of Nigel Esser’s insomnia-inspired mural at Standard Pizza on Haywood Road.) Photo by Max Cooper.

Paint by number

Art for art’s sake? According to the 2010 Arts and Economic Prosperity IV study, the benefits to the city and county are much greater — $43.7 million greater.

Conducted by Americans for the Arts, Asheville’s Cultural Affairs department and 38 area arts nonprofits, the study provides numerical evidence of the impact of nonprofit cultural organizations on the local, state and national levels. (Image from the Arts and Economic Prosperity IV brochure.)

Best of the best

Depending on whom you ask, anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 music, art and street-festival seekers are about to descend on our city. The streets will once again cram with temporary tenements selling everything from jewelry to kabobs. And among the myriad visitors and locals in attendance are dozens of visiting and local artists exhibiting work […]

Ishmael paints Ananda, with help from his friends

Ananda Hair Studio has dramatically made itself over again. The salon has for a while now been showing work from local artists of all sorts. The owners have once again turned the space over to muralist /street artist Ishmael. With artists Ben Betsalel, Vincent Luca and Dustin Spagnola, a vibrant new mural is going up inside the 22 Broadway St. location.

ART BETS

Think of Black Mountain College, and it’s likely that John Cage, Merce Cunningham and postmodern 1950s evenings come to mind. But beyond these were dozens of artists that existed before, with and after the former group, including the BMC+AC’s current exhibition artist, David Weinrib. Weinrib arrived in Black Mountain in the summer of 1952 as […]

Have a RAD time

Thousands of art enthusiasts will descend on Asheville this weekend to peruse paintings, pots and mugs, drawings, clothing and sculptures offered by the array of artists, galleries and businesses in the River Arts District. This June’s walk marks the 17th year for the biannual Studio Stroll, which claims the distinction of “first, largest and most […]

Art walk with us

Almost every fathomable form of art exists in this city of artistic milk and honey. And it certainly diversifies the works on display at each of the Asheville Downtown Gallery Associations’ art walks. But it’s the photography enthusiast that will find this season’s second art walk on Friday, June 1, particularly satiating.  Coop Gallery (25 […]