Area performance and visual artists ready new work that wrestles with one year of quarantine, while a new AAAC survey reveals dire times for many local creators.
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Area performance and visual artists ready new work that wrestles with one year of quarantine, while a new AAAC survey reveals dire times for many local creators.
Local artist Cleaster Cotton confronts COVID-19 on the canvas.
From theater and live music to art exhibitions and literature, 2019 produces great works across genres.
“Many artists, creatives, musicians and performers are leaving due to the rapidly increasing cost of living, putting Asheville’s culture at risk,” says Stephanie Moore of the Center for Craft, Creativity and Design. Despite a flurry of concern and initiative, local leaders and developers are finding that providing affordable living and working space for the area’s working artists remains a difficult challenge as property values and rents continue to climb in the city.
Cleaster Cotton’s latest art project, Going to Market, celebrates the history of The Block.
While this city still has a long way to go to when it comes to equity and representation of diversity within the local art scene, 2018 showed strides in that direction.
“Asheville Through Brown Eyes,” with work by Joseph Pearson, Jenny Pickens, Valeria Watson, Noel Jefferson, James Love, Viola Spells and Cleaster Cotton, opens Friday, Dec. 7, in the Asheville Area Art Gallery’s Thom Robinson and Ray Griffin Exhibition Space.
The exhibition, which opens on Friday, Sept. 28, not only examines the work of one of the most widely-regarded modern artists of the 20th century, but celebrates the relocation of BMCM+AC its new 120 College St. home.
But even as the artist’s active imagination leaps from idea to idea, there is a through line to her work. Cubist forms, tactile qualities and bold hues inhabit each piece is varying configurations.