This is a monumental week for Asheville’s arts scene. The Asheville Art Museum reopens this Thursday and, two days later, the Center for Craft reopens. Both are emerging from major renovations.

Michael Yannette took over six years ago as director of choir and musical theater at Cherokee Central Schools . From the beginning, he faced a challenge he never encountered in his previous 25 years of teaching. “I remember the first day I got here and I met the old choir director,” he recalled. “I remember going into the cabinets and seeing these little plastic elbow pipes, and he said, ‘Well, we use it so the kids can hear themselves sing.’ They hold one up to their mouth and the other to

Kate Steinbeck’s eyes light up when she talks about the music that inspired her to play the flute. “I’m raised on rock ‘n’ roll. You remember Heart? I saw them at the Asheville Civic Center in 1979. I loved Ann Wilson, she was playing on a black flute,” Steinbeck recalled “I mean, I played along with records. I love Traffic. I love Stevie Winwood. Marshall Tucker had a lot of flute.” The market for rock ‘n’ roll flutists hasn’t been hot since, say, the 1980s. But Steinbeck has brought a rock ‘n’

Tyler Jackson shares a West Asheville home where, on a sunny and warm midday afternoon, every window is open and so is the front door, all without screens. Jackson tends to about eight houseplants in his bedroom and it’s all very chill. The environment contrasts his musical alter ego, whom he calls Musashi Xero (pronounced moo-SAH-shee ZEE-row), and the lyrical content of his new record, titled “Self-Hate as a Viable Currency.” Jackson said the album comes from a place of personal desolation.

Noted banjo picker and Western North Carolina native Raymond Fairchild has died, following a heart attack. He was 80. Fairchild performed at the Grand Ole’ Opry on numerous occasions and was inducted into Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Hall of Fame in 2015. Last month, Fairchild appeared in BPR’s “Exploring Southern Appalachia” series. Fairchild’s final arrangements haven’t yet been announced. In addition to his storied banjo career, he and his wife Shirley ran the Maggie Valley Opry for more than 30

Judy Calabrese’s upbringing would make for a riveting memoir. There’s a cheating father and a mother who disowned her, fundamentalist Catholicism and the wherewithal as an 18-year-old to pay for and put herself into therapy. But beyond her own journals, Calabrese found the notion of making art from her own history foreign and terrifying. She went to college to become an actress. “I wanted to be a fiction writer, and I was terrified when people said my writing was dramatic,” she said. “People

The rock singer and Hendersonville native Raphael Morales only recently changed his name to Beaui Roca. He said never identified with his birth name or easily navigated what he called the minefield of gender expression that came with it. Roca articulates other points of angst in his lyrics for the local rock band Strange Avenues . “I’m very angry about a lot of things right now,” Roca said. “The first record was very personal and a lot of that content was about me, specifically. I was writing

Katey Schultz went to college to study philosophy and become a memoirist. Then one day, out of nowhere, one short sentence popped into her mind. Jet was bull tired, hound dog tired. And that sent her down a rabbit hole, one sentence, one story at a time, into the world of fiction. “Nonfiction is always there for me. It’s how I make sense of the world, through journaling or writing personal essays that might never leave my own desk,” Schultz said. “But fiction was enthralling because I could ask

Aaron Lipsky is a 16-year-old junior at Asheville’s A.C. Reynolds High School. But by many measures, Lipsky is far beyond his years. Lipsky is a clarinetist, rehearsing here with another clarinetist and a pianist for a concert he put together. Lipsky estimates his business, called Clarinet and Friends, drums up eight or nine performances every month at churches, house concerts and retirement communities throughout Western North Carolina. “It’s kinda based on this idea the clarinet can play so

Julyan Davis is a British native who moved to the American southeast 30 years ago on a hunch, that he would find the paintings he wanted to make in the people of these hills and hollers. “Where I grew up, it’s very manicured. I was always sort of drawn to a more gritty landscape, and the South particularly interested me,” Davis said. “The south has a great tradition of photography, but in painting, there wasn’t really that, so I felt my work filled a niche. It was sort of discovering the beauty