There are likely enough singer-songwriters in Asheville to fill every coffeeshop and street corner in the city. But amid the region’s bluegrass, Americana and jam music, there’s a new effort to turn people onto the Asheville’s indie rock and punk scene. The Asheville Rock Collective is a series of club shows featuring 16 local punk and heavy rock bands performing through February at Pisgah Brewing and Fleetwood’s, in Asheville. John Kennedy, a cofounder of the collective and a documentary

Every other Thursday during the school year, a dozen or so teenagers of color meet in a repurposed classroom at Asheville’s Arthur Edington Center . With a few adult advisors guiding their paths, they write stories and poetry, take photos and produce video--and it all goes into an online magazine called Word on the Street . “We feel like we should be heard more,” said Quantasia Williams, an 18-year-old who graduated last spring from Asheville High School. “There’s a lot of talented members in

In 1967, school board members from a Brooklyn neighborhood were headed to England. They wanted to study how administrators there handled segregation and racial representation in the classroom. Cleaster Cotton wanted to go too. Officials told her she couldn’t, but Cotton refused to accept that. So, at 12 years old, she got the OK from her mother, nailed down a chaperone and off she went, as her middle school’s student representative. This period of confrontation, between white teachers and black

Unless you’re wearing a hardhat in the vicinity of Pack Square, the construction sounds filling every workday are reminders how far away the Asheville Art Museum is from reopening. “We thought we would be functioning on this site throughout the construction project,” said Pam Myers, the museum’s director for the past 22 years. “I think I said ‘Oh really, we’re really going to need to move, and move the entirety of the collection?’ It was fast and furious.” You have to pass through an active

Chelsea LaBate has two voices. In song, you hear the tone and vibrato of Fiona Apple, maybe even a little Billie Holiday. Then there’s LaBate’s inner voice, of resilience and sunny determination, to live and work as an artist. “I think I have waves of feeling like I’m getting there, and then we all have whammies,” LaBate said. “For me this past year, it was my father died and I tool in my teenage brother, and I’m just now pulling out of that.” Labate and her poetic folk songs have been fixtures

In a land of Americana music and art imbued with the mountains, you can forget you’re in Asheville while you’re inside Revolve . It’s a gallery and performance space in the RAMP Studios , an unmarked industrial building near UNC-Asheville. Revolve is dedicated to contemporary, experimental work -- meaning, it’s 180 degrees from the music and art you’ll generally find along the region’s paths of tourism. “Its location is a little outside the River Arts District in a traditional sense, and that’s

City government, tax and planning commissions and nonprofit board meetings. Those settings naturally conjure ... mystery and romance? They do if you’re Renee Kumor . “I’ve been on nonprofit boards for years. I’ve dealt with staff members who’ve embezzled -- that happens constantly,” Kumor said. “The issues of conflict of interest. Just having a crisis of direction on the board, and I just decided those crisis discussions can end in murder, what the heck?” Kumor is a grandmother of four in

CULLOWHEE -- Picture in your mind a traditional Cherokee Indian basket. You can see its shape, the bands of bundled pine needles or rivercane wicker, the painted patterns drawn from tribal imagery. But when you these baskets, do you reflect on treaty violations, the appropriation of Native names and imagery or forced removal from ancestral homelands? You might if the baskets were made by Shan Goshorn. She’s Eastern Cherokee and among the many artists with work in “ Return from Exile:

In John Hall’s classroom at ArtSpace Charter School , in Swannanoa, there’s an equation stamped in dark capital letters high up one green wall: Vision + perseverance = impact. Hall teaches social studies, not math, so perhaps that’s why he’s found this equation elusive in his own life. He’s pursued some things and persevered in others. They just haven’t always aligned. “I knew I enjoyed performing. I didn’t know I wanted to try to make a living at it,” he said. “I really had no plan. I was quite

By many measures, including his own, David Hopes is a successful poet and playwright. He’s certainly an influential one, at least to those who have studied with him over the years at UNC-Asheville. But by other measures, including his own, Hopes hasn’t achieved the notoriety one might expect of someone with so many works published and produced. “I get satisfied when the thing is done and then I leave it sit,” he said. “I had been happy just writing and missed all the things I should have done as