Here’s how tight Nikki Lee’s family is: She convinced her mother and three adult children to move last fall from a lifetime in Cincinnati to the unknown of Asheville. “One of my clients years ago had always told me that I’d connect well in Asheville because I seemed like the hippie type, and I am,” Lee recalled. “We just visited and we fell in love with the mountains.” Like many who move to this area, Lee arrived without much of a plan. What she did have was her faith—her unwavering compass

A 10-minute walk and a half-century of histories separate Asheville’s YMI Cultural Center from the First Congregational UCC Church . “This church is very white,” said Mandy Kjellstrom, a church member and an organizer for social justice art exhibits at the church’s Oak Street Gallery. “I’d say we only have three or four people in our congregation who are black (out of) 150, 175.” The Young Men’s Institute, on the other hand, has been a center of Black culture since the early 20th century. Now,

Sherrill Roland’s convictions in a courtroom, on four misdemeanors, were later overturned at a retrial. But they focused Roland’s personal conviction —to use art that both helps him process and heal from his experiences while engaging an unwitting public about certain fears and stereotypes about the convicted. “My body needed to be a part of it, I needed to be involved in the engagement,” Roland said. With what he calls the Jumpsuit Project , Roland chose to wear an orange jumpsuit, like the

Artists color our communities, bring creative thinking to challenges and issues and expand our understanding of the world. But quantifying that impact—showing the value artists contribute—is often difficult beyond economics and hard numbers. Many in the arts struggle to sell their work or simply work in ways that isn’t sellable. Because of that, even before the pandemic, economic instability was an everyday reality for many with careers in the arts. In this episode of The Porch, from BPR News,

Even through their masks, you could sense the smiles across the faces of John and Judy Nelson, of Asheville, as they waited to get into Friday night’s concert at Isis Music Hall. “I am ready to sit back, have some good food and listen to some good music,” John Nelson said. “It’s gonna be a great night.” And it’s the kind of night few in this region have been able to experience over the past 13 months—live music inside a club. But as North Carolina has relaxed some conditions for indoor

When she gave birth 2½ years ago, Rose Wind Jerome didn’t know she was having twins. The first child is her daughter, Evie. The second is the photography project for her master’s degree thesis. “I got interested in these dynamics and these gender roles when I became a parent and started photographing in my home,” Jerome said. More than a dozen photographs originally intended for an MFA exhibition derailed by the pandemic at the Savannah College of Art and Design are showing through April 3 at

Even before opening Momentum Gallery , on Asheville’s Lexington Avenue, Jordan Ahlers had his sights elsewhere—a larger space on a familiar street. More than two years after beginning a complete renovation, Momentum has moved and reopened a block east, on Broadway. Before opening Momentum, Ahlers spent many years as the director at John Cram’s Blue Spiral Gallery, several blocks south on Broadway. “It’s a far superior space for a number of reasons,” Ahlers said. “It’s much more visibility. It’s

One year into our shutdown, the impact on our region’s artists stretches beyond economics. Some artists say the psychological effects have been as devastating as the financial ones. On our March episode of "The Porch," we devote the hour to artists of this region coping with their mental health through a year of turmoil. BPR News is airing the program 9am March 19 and 3pm March 20. For this online version, we've divided the episode into six separate interview segments below. You can listen in

The people who call themselves Nye and Terran met two years ago at a goth picnic in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery. “We decided we should have a meeting to see whether or not we were psychopaths,” Terran said. “So we picked a neutral location that now lives forever as the Waffle House of Friendship, so that we could get to know each other and decide whether we wanted to be friends, and it was like a fire started.” That fire, as Terran put it, has resulted in an artistic achievement astonishing

Every college student has experienced academic and social turmoil over the past year. Few have had the encouragement, as Tristan Rice has, to put it into song. Rice and a couple dozen other UNC-Asheville students answered an open call in the fall to write music, poetry and plays, make dances and create digital art inspired by the past year of the pandemic and social justice movements. Stephanie Hickling-Beckman, the founder of Asheville’s Different Strokes Performing Arts Collective, rehearsed