Midnight Musings after Hurricane Helene

I’m sure everyone has had their fill of disaster news, so here I am in the middle of the night ten days after the events of Sept 26th, 2024, reflecting on many things, but especially our damaged arts community and our WNC history in the arts. It is a long and amazing legacy, and it really started thousands of years ago.

Of course, the history of art here starts with the Cherokee, who for thousands of years created their own expressions in both functional and decorative arts. Pottery is what their traditions are best known for, and their art links their spiritual beliefs with the connection between humans and the earth in profound ways (Pollock from another background said “I Am Nature”). I wonder how those resourceful people interpreted events like this into their world views hundreds and thousands of years ago.

Mountain crafts are a very important part of art history here and are still a strong force today. Almost 100 years ago the Southern Highlands Craft Guild was created in response to the great depression in order to support folks and preserve the unique crafts of the region. When I moved to Asheville in 1981, crafts were the dominating force in the arts, and the area was best known for all the types of functional mountain crafts from pottery to weaving, broom making to blacksmithing, metal smithing, quilting, musical instrument making, book making, and so much more. Back then there was debate about art vs craft, and painters, especially abstract painters, were more the outsiders. But not anymore. Some of the artists at 310 ART have made the crossover and are members of the Southern Highlands Craft Guild, blurring the divide between fine arts and fine crafts today.

For us in the fine arts and crafts vocation today, and especially in the River Arts District, we might say we were at the beginning and the sudden ebb of an era. The very few untouched buildings will not be the same without this strong and unique community of hundreds of artists displaced and so many buildings lost.

The scene grew organically and independently with no master plan and no city projects being conceived or fulfilled. It was an incredible grassroots adventure. It’s not over but has changed dramatically overnight. I remind myself that buildings crumble and fall, but community and the art traditions here can and will continue.

Think of this.

Following and overlapping the Cherokee and craft traditions that are still going strong today, the Tryon Impressionist group made a mark in American art late 19th and early to mid-20th century. One of my collectors, Michael McCue, wrote two books about it and those painters were a lot like us in the River Arts District, an eclectic group of artists more like a colony without a specific style.  McCue said, “It's only in later times it has been recognized as an important part of American art history. The Tryon artists' colony was quite fluid and diverse. That's why this community did not develop into a recognized esthetic 'school' such as the later, better-known one at Black Mountain College." During that time there were two world wars and many upheavals in our country and society and in the arts, and this movement persevered with artists coming and going and some going on to become famous. This unorthodox community was overlapped by the next one to come that McCue mentioned.

Black mountain college, founded in 1933, is far better known in the annals of art history and its impact on American art is profound. There, artists, thinkers and creatives in many fields congregated and spread out and changed the face of American visual arts, bringing us to the forefront of the Avant Guard globally. We’ve stayed there since. In the visual arts and crafts teaching there, Joseph Albers and his wife Annie Albers focused on merging fine art with function from Bauhaus education models in Germany. They landed in the mountains, fleeing from the Nazi regime in 1933 and then went on to Yale in 1949 to change the whole way art was taught in higher education. From these beginnings art education was transformed for students in America and it spread like wildfire. My very first college art teacher modeled Albers composition and color theory curriculum in uncanny ways. For example, in design class we used a match box as our prompt/subject in the same way they did in 1919 in Germany. Imagine my shock a few years after getting my BFA when I delved deeply into this study and realized how these same teaching legacies were handed down and still thrived in universities. The model of short once a week critiques and independent work by students was necessitated by extreme conditions after WW1. Heating fuel was scarce. Students had to fend for themselves by breaking up furniture for heat when the school couldn’t supply any for long drawn-out classes. The traditional models of many long hours at school, working with the Master overseeing the students was the norm prior to that time. It had an unexpected effect in allowing for innovation and new movements when aspiring artists were left to their own devices and proved to be important to new styles to come.

Many college art teachers don’t even realize how extremely related our current curriculum models mirror Bauhaus traditional teaching methods. The color theories and curriculum of Johannes Itten that Albers elaborated on and brought to the mountains are alive and well today. This history in detail is much more obscure and takes a lot of digging to learn. And it all started in the United States here in these mountains where we are. Any artist with university training studied these methods and it trickled into teaching methods used in more informal workshops and those we’ve taught at 310 ART for non-university students. We have carried these legacies on ourselves. Think about that. I was fortunate to take a class from and meet Fred Horowitz who wrote the book on Albers teachings that modeled the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College to Yale tradition. It was through the Black Mountain College Museum and was an amazing experience.

When I moved to Asheville, there was a unique and strong culture in arts of all types, artists had set up studios in the mostly abandoned upstairs spaces downtown where rents were cheap. Artists passed through Asheville and never left. The Asheville Mall was opened around 1972 and businesses downtown moved to the mall area. Downtown had many empty storefronts; artists, small counterculture shops, interesting galleries and performance spaces took the place of big retail. Rent was cheap, spaces were large, rough and it was perfect for emerging and local established artists to work. Gradually new and different businesses began to reclaim downtown, and rents went up. Artists started looking elsewhere for studio space.

This most recent and more concentrated art movement here in the mountains happened along the French Broad River, where artists found cheap studio space again. It began about 1985 and grew swiftly.  Since there were many abandoned industrial buildings along the river, there was plenty of unused space; some artists even had mattresses on the floor and lived in these spaces, and no one cared. It was a rough part of town back then. I was involved in some dance and art show events and it was fun, different, outrageous and provocative. One early event was a multimedia, performance, dance and visual arts show and one attendee I will never forget was a woman wearing a clear shower curtain and nothing else! This took place in the early 90’s upstairs in Riverview Station which at the time was pretty run-down and unrestored. This was the building where I later set up a studio in 2006 that became 310 ART. Little did I know at the time what was to come for me and my friends.

Slowly and steadily both artists and building owners in collaboration began to restore and renovate spaces, improve the grounds, and bring things up to code. More and more artists set up studio spaces, collectives, galleries, schools in the arts and other creative spaces.

When things really started to get busy, places to eat and drink popped up and more artists moved in too. Of course, rents went back up as renovation efforts happened, but we had become such an art destination our commerce could support rising costs on everything, and the community created was unlike anywhere else in the United States in size and dedication to the arts. I have heard this from people repeatedly. The River Link organisation and the city had long range plans and built a beautiful greenway, bike lanes, jogging paths and more all along the river.

So many have been privileged to be part of it at the height of things, and I’m confident it too will go down in the history of American art just like those that came before us, with a very interesting mix of the influence of global communication. Much was lost, but not everything, and there is a strong wish to rebuild and continue this tradition.

It’s magical that this area for some reason has been the place of creativity, cultural evolution and growth in the continuing history of art in America. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told that there is no other place like this in the entire country. We can’t really evaluate and critique things while living through it, that is for the folks that write the books.  And what a dramatic sudden ending and hope for new beginnings when we do reflect on our history! Artists are already making new plans and dreaming new dreams. Hurricane Helene was the climax in this chapter, with the next chapter to come. It is being written now by us as we flow with this change to a new iteration of the art movement here in the Appalachian Mountains.

I’m choosing to believe that while there must be closure about a group of buildings that will crumble and fall, the community and creative spirit will not be lost, it will just change shape in the mountains. I am eager to see what comes next.

Don’t give up, look forward. Let’s reinvent our own histories, it can be an exciting time.

I love you all.

Fleta Monaghan, Owner and Education Director, 310ART

( Note: Some of this was verified by a later check on the internet, like dates and the quote from Michael McCue, some from my own memory of living here since 1981, and the part about Bauhaus teaching is from rather obscure books I owned that are now swept away by Hurricane Helene’s wrath. It is info that really stuck with me when I got into Bauhaus curriculum history, so you will have to take my word for it, or do the research on your own.)