Calendar of Events

Call for Artists for a New Art Deco Masterpiece –
Part of the Urban Trail

Issue Date: Tuesday, April 16, 2024
Deadline: Monday, May 13, 2024 by 5:00 p.m. 

Call Summary:

• The City of Asheville and Public Art and Culture Commission (PACC) seek a qualified artist(s) or designer(s) to submit their qualifications for a piece of public artwork that reimagines and replaces Station #7, the Art Deco Masterpiece, part of Asheville’s Urban Trail.
• Responses to this Call for Artists (CFA) will be reviewed by an Artist Selection Panel and up to three semi-finalists will be asked to submit proposals. Semi-finalists will be paid a $500 honorarium.
• Artwork will be integrated into the existing Outdoor Dining Area in front of the historic S&W Building, located at 56 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC.
• The budget is $80,000 to engage with community stakeholders, design, fabricate and install the piece.

To Apply:

• More information and the Call for Artists can be found on the City of Asheville’s Bid page at ashevillenc.gov/bids under “Other”.
  • Project Number: 298-CFA-ArtDecoRedesign-24

Baker Exhibit Center

In an age of complex environmental challenges, why not look to the ingenuity of nature for solutions? The forms, patterns, and processes found in the natural world—refined by 3.8 billion years of evolution—can inspire our design of everything from clothing to skyscrapers. This approach to innovation, called biomimicry, is becoming increasingly popular.

Nature’s Blueprints is supported in part by The North Carolina Arboretum Society, The Laurel of Asheville, RomanticAsheville.com Travel Guide, and Smoky Mountain Living Magazine.

Historians estimate that skilled Black artisans outnumbered their white counterparts in the antebellum South by a margin of five to one. However, despite their presence and prevalence in all corners of the pre-industrial trade and craft fields, the stories of these skilled workers go largely unacknowledged.

Borrowing its title from a Black culture and politics magazine of the same name, Hammer and Hope celebrates the life and labor of Black chairmakers in early America. Featuring the work of two contemporary furniture makers – Robell Awake and Charlie Ryland – the pieces in this exhibition are based on the artists’ research into ladderback chairs created by the Poynors, a multigenerational family of free and enslaved craftspeople working in central Tennessee between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Through the objects featured in Hammer and Hope, Awake and Ryland explore, reinterpret, and reimagine what the field of furniture-making today would look like had the history and legacy of the Poynors – and countless others that have been subject to a similar pattern of erasure – been celebrated rather than hidden. Hammer and Hope represents Awake and Ryland’s attempts, in their own words,  “at fighting erasure by making objects that engage with these long-suppressed stories.”‍

Robell Awake and Charlie Ryland are recipients of the Center for Craft’s 2022 Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship. This substantial mid-career grant is awarded to two artists to support research projects that advance, expand, and support the creation of new research and knowledge through craft practice.

Short Stories, Linda Gritta Solo Exhibition Exhibition Dates April 6 – April 30, 2024 Opening Reception April 6th, 5-8pm Bender Gallery is excited to announce our first exhibition of 2024, Short Stories, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Linda Gritta. We will have the opening reception for Short Stories on April 6th from 5-8pm. Gritta has been hard at work on many new large paintings. All the paintings are an exploration of color with the desire to create a world that allows the viewer a short refuge from reality. These large works are immersive and begging to be explored. Above image: Improv Three, mixed media on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Mark your calendars for the 12th Annual Face Jug Show at American Folk Art & Framing! And join us all month long as we celebrate a storied regional tradition: the wild, weird, and culturally iconic Face Jug!

The face jug began to appear in these parts in the very early 1800s. In those days, self-sufficiency ruled and handmade, locally-crafted clayware was common. Our regional soils contain all the elements needed to make hardy clay and our forests plenty of wood for the fueling of kilns. Over the years, popularity of these face vessels has waxed and waned, but the tradition has managed to survive and even thrive. Today, face jugs are an eagerly sought after & widely collected part of our mountain heritage. Wood-fired kilns remain the popular favorite, but there are some who experiment with gas- or electric-fired kilns, either for convenience, curiosity, or to achieve bright colors.

At the heart of our Annual Face Jug Show are traditional creators like Walter Fleming, who at 86 claims the title of the oldest working potter in the state of North Carolina and still hand-digs his clay off his property in the foothills. Wayne Hewell, a 5th generation potter in the mountains of Georgia, creates expressive jugs complete with corn cob stoppers from his own farm. His family’s pottery, still in operation today, began in 1850 and nearly every member of the Hewell clan has worked there for a time.

But what would a show celebrating the Face Jug be without variety? Texan Carl Block takes the Appalachian face jug in a very different direction and incorporates influences from Mexican folk art and his own free-spirited irreverence. 7th generation North Carolina potter Michael Gates creates both historically informed vessels inspired by his ancestors and wildly colorful ‘tattooed’ face jugs that express more of his personal style. Wisconsin potter Joel Huntley puts his own spin on what have commonly been referred to as ‘ugly jugs’ by creating beautifully-refined and delicately-featured face vessels in softly colorful glazes.

“For us, this is the most wonderful time of the year,” says gallery owner Julia L. Mills. “All month long, we get to share this unique pottery tradition with folks that have never encountered it before, and we get to reconnect with many of our most loyal collectors. Opening day is also just an incredible rush; it’s the only day of the year we open the gallery late, because we already know the phone will be ringing off the hook once the clock strikes noon.”

12 potters will be featured in the 2024 Face Jug show, including: Wayne Hewell • Mike Ball • Ben J. North • Michael Gates • Tim Whitten • Carl Block • Vicki Miller • Stacy Lambert • Walter Fleming • Steve Abee • Joel Huntley • Stephen Harrison

Whether you can visit the gallery in person or only online, please join us as we celebrate this storied pottery tradition at American Folk Art. The 12th Annual Face Jug Show will debut on the gallery website: WWW.AMERIFOLK.COM at 11 AM, Wednesday April 10th. For a full hour, the entire show will be available for previewing before phone sales begin promptly at noon. Remaining face jugs will be on view in the gallery from Friday, April 12th through Wednesday, May 1st, 2024

Images: Left: Minna Wright Citron, Squid Under Pier, 1948, color etching, soft-ground, and engraving on paper, edition 42/50, 15 x 17 7/8 inches, 2010 Collections Circle purchase, Asheville Art Museum. © Estate of Minna Citron/Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York. Right: Dorothy Dehner, Woman #2, 1954, watercolor and ink on paper, 22 3/4 x 18”, courtesy of Dolan Maxwell.

The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition American Art in the Atomic Age: 1940–1960, which explores the groundbreaking contributions of artists who worked at the experimental printmaking studio Atelier 17 in the wake of World War II. Co-curated by Marilyn Laufer and Tom Butler, American Art in the Atomic Age which draws from the holdings of Dolan/Maxwell, the Asheville Art Museum Collection, and private collections will be on view from November 10, 2023–April 29, 2024.

Atelier 17 operated in New York for fifteen years, between 1940 and 1955. The studio’s founder, Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) established the workshop in Paris but relocated to New York just as the Nazi occupation of Paris began in 1940. Hayter’s new studio attracted European emigrants like André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miró, as well as American artists like Dorothy Dehner, Judith Rothschild, and Karl Schrag, allowing for an exchange of artistic ideas and processes between European and American artists.

The Asheville Art Museum will present over 100 works that exemplify the cross-cultural exchange and profound social and political impact of Atelier 17 on American art. Prints made at Atelier 17—including those by Stanley William Hayter, Louise Nevelson, and Perle Fine—will be in conversation with works by European Surrealists who were working at the studio in the 1940s and 1950s. The exhibition will also feature a selection of domestic mid-century objects that exemplify how the ideas and aesthetics of post-war abstraction became a part of everyday life.

In the early 1900s, travel by train and automobile became more accessible in the United States, leading to an increase in tourism and a revitalized interest in landscape painting. The relative ease of transportation, as well as the creation of National Parks, allowed people to experience the breathtaking landscapes of the United States in new ways. Artists traveled along popular routes, recording the terrain they encountered.

This exhibition explores the sublime natural landscapes of the Smokey Mountains of Western North Carolina and Tennessee. While there were several regional schools of painting around this time, this group is largely from the Midwest and many of the artists trained at the Art Institute of Chicago or in New York City. Through their travels, they captured waterfalls, sunsets, thunderstorms, autumn foliage, lush green summers, and snow-covered mountains—elements that were novel for viewers from cities and rural areas. Though some of these paintings include people, they are usually used for scale and painted with little to no detail, highlighting the magnificence of nature.

Rudolph F. Ingerle, Mirrored Mountain, not dated, oil on canvas, 28 × 32 inches. Courtesy of Allen & Barry Huffman, Asheville Art Museum.

Bender Gallery Artists Featured in Asheville Art Museum Exhibition The New Salon: A Contemporary View The Asheville Art Museum will be opening their exhibit, The New Salon: A Contemporary View, on March 8 and it will run until August 19, 2024. The New Salon offers a modern take on the prestigious tradition of the Parisian Salon with the diversity and innovation of today’s art world. Guest-curated by Gabriel Shaffer, the show will include works from Pop Surrealism, Outsider Art, Street Art, and Graffiti genres.   Bender Gallery has been collaborating with the Asheville Art Museum to loan four paintings from three of our artists. The artists are Laine Bachman, Kukula, and Yui Sakamoto. Be sure to check out this special exhibition in downtown Asheville. Learn More Kukula, Impossible Voyage, oil on board, 48 x 24 inches Kukula (b. 1980, Israel) Nataly Abramovitch, better known in the art world as, Kukula, paints imagined worlds filled with elaborately dressed women in fanciful settings. The artist does extensive research on the layouts of paintings from the Renaissance and Rococo periods. Kukula subverts these images by depicting women characters in place of traditionally male positions and settings. Her characters are powerful, commanding, and have an air of indifference. Available Work Yui Sakamoto, Self Portrait, oil on canvas, 63 x 63 inches Yui Sakamoto (b. 1981, Japan) Our surrealist artist, Yui Sakamoto, will have two paintings featured including My Soul and Self Portrait. Self Portrait is still available from his recent solo exhibition at Bender Gallery. Standing in front of Self Portrait, one is immersed in the dual-worlds of Sakamoto’s Japanese and Mexican cultures. There is a sense of calm reflected in the repeating rose pattern, mixed with the uneasy realization that the coral, fungi, and otherworldly forms are what makeup the figure. Available Work Laine Bachman, Night Bloomers, acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches Laine Bachman (b. 1974, USA) Our prolific Magical Realism artist, Laine Bachman, makes a feature in the exhibition with her painting, Night Bloomers. She has been hard at work making 17 new pieces for her solo exhibition at the Canton Art Museum in Canton, Ohio. The Canton show opens on April 28 and continues through to July 28, 2024. Available Work

Exhibition and Public Programming

Vera B. Williams, an award-winning author and illustrator of children’s books, started making pictures almost as soon as she could walk. She studied at Black Mountain College in a time where summer institutes were held with classes taught by John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Williams studied under the Bauhaus luminary Josef Albers and went on to make art for the rest of her life. At the time of her death, The New York Times wrote: “Her illustrations, known for bold colors and a style reminiscent of folk art, were praised by reviewers for their great tenderness and crackling vitality.” Despite numerous awards and recognition for her children’s books, much of her wider life and work remains unexplored. This retrospective will showcase the complete range of Williams’ life and work. It will highlight her time at Black Mountain College, her political activism, and her establishment, with Paul Williams, of an influential yet little-known artist community, in addition to her work as an author and illustrator.

Author and illustrator of 17 children’s books, including Caldecott medal winner, A Chair for My Mother, Vera B. Williams always had a passion for the arts. Williams grew up in the Bronx, NY, and in 1936, when she was nine years old, one of her paintings, called Yentas, opens a new window, was included in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. While Williams is widely known for her children’s books today, this exhibition’s expansive scope highlights unexplored aspects of her artistic practice and eight decades of life. From groundbreaking, powerful covers for Liberation Magazine, to Peace calendar collaborations with writer activist Grace Paley, to scenic sketches for Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theater, to hundreds of late life “Aging and Illness” cartoons sketches and doodles, Vera never sat still.

Williams arrived at Black Mountain College in 1945. While there, she embraced all aspects of living, working, and learning in the intensely creative college community. She was at BMC during a particularly fertile period, which allowed her to study with faculty members Buckminster Fuller and Josef Albers, and to participate in the famed summer sessions with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, M.C. Richards, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 1948, she graduated with Josef Albers as her advisor and sculptor Richard Lippold as her outside examiner. Forever one of the College’s shining stars, Vera graduated from BMC with just six semesters of coursework, at only twenty-one years old. She continued to visit BMC for years afterward, staying deeply involved with the artistic community that BMC incubated.

Anticipating the eventual closure of BMC, Williams, alongside her husband Paul Williams and a group of influential former BMC figures, founded The Gate Hill Cooperative Artists community located 30 miles north of NYC on the outskirts of Stony Point, NY. The Gate Hill Cooperative, also known as The Land, became an outcropping of Black Mountain College’s experimental ethos. Students and faculty including John Cage, M.C. Richards, David Tudor, Karen Karnes, David Weinrib, Stan VanDerBeek, and Patsy Lynch Wood shaped Gate Hill as founding members of the community. Vera B. Williams raised her three children at Gate Hill while continuing to make work.

The early Gate Hill era represented an especially creative phase for the BMC group. For Williams, this period saw the creation of 76 covers for Liberation Magazine, a radical, groundbreaking publication. This exhibition will feature some of Williams’ most powerful Liberation covers including a design for the June 1963 edition, which contained the first full publication of MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Williams’ activism work continued throughout her life. As president of PEN’s Children Committee and member of The War Resisters league, she created a wide range of political and educational posters and journal covers. Williams protested the war in Vietnam and nuclear proliferation while supporting women’s causes and racial equality. In 1981, Williams was arrested and spent a month in a federal prison on charges stemming from her political activism.

In her late 40’s, Williams embarked in earnest on her career as a children’s book author and illustrator, a career which garnered the NY Public Library’s recognition of A Chair for My Mother as one of the greatest 100 children’s books of all time. Infinitely curious and always a wanderer at heart, Williams’ personal life was as expansive as her art. In addition to her prolific picture making, Williams started and helped run a Summerhill-based alternative school, canoed the Yukon, and lived alone on a houseboat in Vancouver Harbor. She helped to organize and attended dozens of political demonstrations throughout her adult life.

Her books won many awards including the Caldecott Medal Honor Book for A Chair for My Mother in 1983, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award– Fiction category– for Scooter in 1994, the Jane Addams Honor for Amber Was Brave, Essie Was Smart in 2002, and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature in 2009. Her books reflected her values, emphasizing love, compassion, kindness, joy, strength, individuality, and courage.

Images:

Cover of Vera B. Williams’ A Chair for My Mother, published in 1982.

Vera B. Williams, Cover for Liberation Magazine, November 1958.

Make a new craft each month using your Cricut!
$20 per session, pay instructor at each class
For more information, call 828-350-2058 or email [email protected]

Cricut Kickstart Workshop
Session A: January 10, advance registration at AVLREC.com required by January 3
Session B: April 10, advance registration at AVLREC.com required by April 3
Get your feet wet in the world of all things Cricut as we chat about different machines and their best uses, and tackle the basics of the software, with lots of time for questions. You’ll create your own vinyl design to transfer on to a provided coffee mug.

Valentine’s Day Cards
February 7, advance registration at AVLREC.com required by January 31
Learn how to use your Cricut to make personalized cards. Even if you’re new, you’ll leave with an awesome card in hand.

Easter Banners
March 6, advance registration at AVLREC.com required by February 28
Dive into crafting a cute seasonal banner using the trusty Cricut, twine, and good ol’ clothing pins. We’ll cut out sweet egg shapes and string them up with twine, giving you the perfect excuse to showcase your handmade charm.

Crafting in Progress Sign
May 8, advance registration at AVLREC.com required by May 1
Craft a personalized sign proudly declaring that you’re “Crafting in Progress!” A cute loading bar adds a touch of whimsy as a fun nod to the crafting journey.