Until now, renting the 500-seat Diana Wortham Theater was impractical and unaffordable for smaller-budgeted arts organizations. But a renovation and rebranding has opened two smaller, black box spaces at the renamed Wortham Center for the Performing Arts , and the Different Strokes Performing Arts Collective is the center’s first formally recognized resident company.

From his warehouse in West Asheville, Brian Boggs designs and builds wooden chairs with tools and machines you just can’t find at a Home Depot. Every carving tool that fits in your hand and every machine to cut and shape boards, Boggs built them himself. “The way it saws makes a huge difference in how you work the material,” Boggs said. “It gives us an edge that most woodworkers just don’t have.” Up close, the contraptions look like high school shop class projects. But they’re at the center of

The members of the Asheville band Secret Shame never really address the roots of their name. But when guitarist Nikki Gish talks about the music on the band’s new album, “Dark Synthetics,” Gish reveals a personal secret that could have broken up the band. “I have a major mental illness and I think that played a part in a lot of what shaped that album,” Gish said, citing a bipolar disorder that causes simultaneous mania and depression. “During that time being untreated and then having this mental

The Asheville Art Museum 's long-awaited reopening is awaiting longer than anyone hoped or anticipated. Just a few months ago, museum officials gave area media a first look from inside the renovated galleries and announced an opening sometime in the summer. Now that summer has passed, leaders now are saying the museum won’t welcome visitors again at least until October -- three years after the museum closed for its $24 million renovation.

Al Murray and Liz Williams met less than a year ago, but their pairing as artists in a new exhibition is two lifetimes in the making. The exhibition “Up/Rooted” is at Revolve Gallery , in Asheville’s RAMP Studios building, through Sept. 3. The Campaign for Southern Equality supported the creation of this work and is presenting the exhibition. “I’ve always been drawn to metalwork as an expression of a working-class masculinity that I’ve never known how to embody,” Murray said.

It’s difficult to tell which is more unsettling, the memory Edwin Salas carries of his rape 30 years ago inside a Costa Rican museum or that the rape shaped him as an artist. “The man closed the door in a little room with a collection of insect and began to hit me,” Salas recalled. “From there come from my first performance, in Italy, about a pedophilic relationship.” Even more disturbing: That might not be the most traumatic episode in Salas’ life. Born in Mexico, Salas said he was just 3 years

Every day, more than 17,000 cars pass through the intersection of Broadway and Woodfin, on the northern edge of downtown Asheville. T here’s a new effort to steer them south and to steer motorists’ to think of this as a cultural corridor. “The gateway entrance to the north end of downtown seemed to lack definition,” said Chris Joyell, director of the Asheville Design Center and on the core committee behind what’s called the Broadway Cultural Gateway planning project.

Three decades ago, as the principal cellist of the Asheville Symphony , Judith Glixon performed pieces from Bach, Benjamin Britten and other composers for the sheer love of the music. But over the years, long after moving away from the southeast, Glixon’s commitment to social activism has grown and rivaled her devotion to music. “I call myself a Type A personality with a Type B constitution,” she said. “I was wearing myself out with various kinds of activism, working as a freelance cellist,

Author Megan Shepherd and her family live on an old farm on six acres in the town of Etowah, near her native Brevard. They keep bees. Chickens roam the backyard. There’s a wooden shack that once stored corn, and there’s a small, rustic guesthouse where Shepherd — accompanied by her 6-year-old Terrier mix, Bascom — does much of her writing. “As a writer, I spend so much time in my head and I struggle with actually physically connecting to the world,” Shepherd said. “So to get out there and have

Here’s the recipe behind Jamie Mason ’s brand of storytelling: Mix one part nurture with one part nature, then simmer over a low flame for 30 years. Let’s start with the nurture—growing up with a pentecostal preacher as a father. “It was intense,” Mason recalled. “I mean, it was sort of one eye on the sky for the rapture. It was everyday life.”