Ash Devine was giving an online ukulele lesson to a 10-year-old boy Wednesday afternoon when news about the turmoil at the nation’s capitol scrolled on her Facebook newsfeed. Devine finished the lesson and immediately went on Facebook Live herself . “I was seeing so much stress and fear and panic in people’s posts and knew I had something to offer to redirect that into a more unified, positive direction,” she said. “I thought, let’s do an intervention with song, that we can get through this

Robert Johnson is one of the most exhibited and collected painters in Western North Carolina. At age 76, he says he’s at peace with a grim health prognosis. He recently talked with BPR's Matt Peiken about his path as an artist—from the psychedelia of 1960s San Francisco to landscapes around the world and back to the mountains outside his door.

Carly Taich didn’t post anything on social media, light a candle in mourning or plan a post-pandemic farewell tour. She had devoted her young adult life to her own fearless folk pop, as she calls it. She had made two full albums over the previous eight years, And sometime in the middle of 2018, at age 27, she’d prepared herself to say goodbye to music altogether. ‘I was very uncomfortable with the industry of music. It just got to be a toxic relationship,” Taich said. “The toxicity comes from

Like many artists, the Asheville painter Julyan Davis didn’t feel much like painting this past spring, at the dawn of the pandemic. “I actually got quite depressed because I felt there was this extraordinary chance for the world to think, and I certainly didn’t want to paint about it,” he said. So Davis thought a bit, read the news a lot and, around June, began connecting the dots between what he wants to say on canvas and the times we’re in. Davis’ COVID paintings, as he calls them, are

Live concerts with live audiences seem so long ago—no masks, no social distancing and, also, no concern for volume. But for the first time in 20 years, Asheville officials want to update the city’s vague noise ordinance to reflect concerns and complaints from a growing residential population. And that has raised alarms in a music community nearly muted by the pandemic.

In her debut collection of short stories, Waynesville author Leah Hampton makes sure to grab readers from her first sentences. The story “Parkway” begins with, “We find bodies all the time. Lots of folks come up here to die or kill or get killed." The story “Saint” opens this way: “Your brother is going to die in twelve years.” And in “F*ckface,” the title story opening the book, Hampton begins with “Nothing’ll ever fix what’s broken in this town, but it would be nice if they’d at least get the

In the 1950s and ‘60s, the Rabbit Motel in Asheville’s South Slope drew touring black musicians to the four tiny rooms out back and the soul food restaurant facing McDowell Street. On Saturday, the motel launched its new life as SoundSpace , with the four motel rooms converted to rehearsal studios for bands to rent by the hour or month, with plans to refurbish and reopen the soul food restaurant in about a year. "Every single side, all faces and all square areas, are going to be covered with

The holidays are traditionally box office bonanzas for theaters, musical artists and anyone who can stage a version of “The Nutcracker.” But with the pandemic sidelining almost everyone’s plans, two Western North Carolina productions are finding unique ways to carry on.

Artists often clean their studios before visitors arrive. But inside her Swannanoa home, Jenny Pickens ’ painting studio is always immaculate. The first clue that this is so: Pickens’ studio is carpeted—a rarity among painters—and you won’t find a drop of other color on the plush butterscotch. “Growing up, I had limited space. My grandmother, oh gosh, she would fuss at me all the time—‘you wake up with a crayon, you go to bed with a crayon,’” she recalled. “I had to be clean with whatever I used

It’s a Saturday afternoon at Asheville’s Arthur Edington Center, inside what was once an elementary school classroom converted into the well-lived-in home for the black and brown teens of Word on the Street . Keitra Black-Warfield, a 15-year-old who attends Erwin High School, is among eight others at tables or on the floor, are painting, drawing and adding textiles destined for murals to hang from the walls here. “It changed me for real,” Black-Warfield said of the program. “It taught me about