Deborah Lewis-Smith grew up in Asheville, and the first thought she had upon meeting John Cram, in 1971, was he wasn’t going to stay in town very long. “John was bigger than Asheville,” Lewis-Stein recalled. “It was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to get bored and leave.’ Instead, he brought the party to Asheville.” That party is continuing strong in the wake of Cram’s death Monday after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was 72. A year after moving to Asheville from Wisconsin, Cram opened New

Public art often invites public debate, but a new sculpture in downtown Asheville has drawn a surprising group of critics—the people the sculpture was created to honor. This past week, Hotel Arras unveiled a 14-foot-tall steel sculpture at the northeast corner of Patton and Lexington avenues. It was conceived and designed as an homage to street performers. Rather than feeling honored, some street performers suspect the sculpture was actually designed to push them out of one of downtown’s prime

There were four full-time staff and one part-timer, when Katie Cornell took over just a year ago as executive director of the Asheville Area Arts Council . Today, Cornell is the entire staff. The council gave up its South Slope offices, gallery and rental studios, inside the Refinery Building, and now has no physical space beyond Cornell’s home office.

Eighty-one years ago, when Asheville had two daily newspapers, the new art deco building that housed them across from the Grove Arcade featured tall ceilings, glass block windows, frosted light sconces and vast, marble floors with custom inlays. On the third story, long ago hidden beneath asbestos tiling, there was another unique floor. “And you see all these pock marks?” Gar Ragland said, pointing down. “These are cello stands, these are mic stands, I mean, who knows?” When Ragland learned this

Lexi DeYeso remembers the pride and passion she felt early this summer as Black Lives Matter protests unfolded in downtown Asheville. “I do stand with the movement and peaceful protesting,” DeYeso said. But when people disrupted the protests by smashing store windows, DeYeso’s boutique, Hazel Twenty, was among the first hit. “I was screaming, I was shaking,” she recalled. “I was powerless and angry, really.”

Eleanor Underhill’s new record is called “Land of the Living,” and listening straight through can be a little dizzying. Her songs skip from ‘90s alt-rock (“Strange Chemistry”) and synth pop (“Run with the Wolves”) to banjo-inflected techno (“Middle of Life”), straight-up R&B (“Easier Than This”) and the rootsy Americana at the foundation of Underhill’s musical history. And then there’s the intimate storytelling, some of it from a third-person distance, some from first-person vulnerability.

Earlier this year, just as Covid-19 shut down the nation, Jared MacEachern moved with his girlfriend into the home he just bought in the mountains of Santa Cruz, Calif. As the wildfires there forced them to evacuate just a few days ago, MacEachern sounded surprisingly calm as he spoke from a friend’s house in San Francisco. “The air at the house, there are times when it’s clear and we can’t even tell, and there are other times it’s really smoky, it stinks, my throat gets really scratchy,”

In the late 1990s, so few students from Smoky Mountain High School in Sylva moved on to Ivy League colleges that even the school’s secretary seemed baffled to learn Annette Clapsaddle earned acceptance to one. That’s how Clapsaddle remembers it, after taking a phone call in the front office from her mom, telling her about the news. “I got off the phone and the secretary looked at me and said ‘What was that about?’ and I told her and she said ‘Are you playing basketball there?’ and I said ‘No,’

Around 9:30 this past Friday night, Asheville’s Pack Square sounded eerily familiar. There were no protestors or counter-protesters surrounding the Vance Monument, no police on bikes or in riot gear. A busker serenaded people—almost all of them white—waiting in a tightly packed line outside French Broad Chocolate. If it weren’t for the relatively few wearing masks, you’d swear this was so 2019. But if you rounded the corner onto Broadway and looked up at the facade of the Asheville Art Museum,

Everything we think about high-risk activities has shifted in the time of the Coronavirus. If you heed the warnings of leading epidemiologists, just about the last artform to emerge from the pandemic is live choral music. Think about it. Dozens of vocalists stand shoulder-to-shoulder on risers, singing with gusto and, in the process, launching microdroplets all over an enclosed airspace. It’s enough to drive infectious disease experts crazy, and it has choral directors all over the country