Bars in North Carolina welcomed back customers indoors over the weekend after almost a year of outdoor only cocktail service. On Friday, the Governor Roy Cooper’s new executive order took effect , allowing indoor service at bars with 30% capacity, lifting the 10 p.m. curfew and easing capacity restrictions for a number of businesses and venues. During Wednesday’s briefing the governor stressed that the new order was part of his continued “dimmer switch approach” noting that key indicators used

Even in his early days making paintings, Joseph Pearson understood there was no place in and around Gulfport, Miss., for Black artists. “There were no artists that I knew in the neighborhood who were doing anything,” Pearson recalled. “If there were, of course, they would have been white artists and we wouldn’t have had contact because of segregation.”

It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon along the Reed Creek Greenway in north Asheville. As joggers and people walking dogs pass by, actors are running through a new play, performed in vignettes over a mile-long stretch of the trail. “Something I Cared About” is the first in what the Magnetic Theatre’s leaders are hoping will become a “Walking with Magnetic” series of outdoor shows. “Something I Cared About” runs Saturday and Sunday afternoons through March 14. It’s just the latest in a string of

Claire Elizabeth Barratt once drove alone from Asheville to Albuquerque, N.M.—26 straight hours—without stopping except for gas. “I’m actually thinking of maybe doing a cross-country trip as a durational performance,” she said. “Just doing the whole I-40 coast to coast and calling that the performance.”

Coming off a devastating year for the creative sector, new federal tax laws could help self-employed people, including independent artists and other freelance creatives. Hannah Cole, an Asheville painter who also runs a tax preparation service , points to sick and family leave credits. These are designed to help those who lost work and were forced to quarantine, tend to someone with Covid or care for kids whose schools were closed. “I calculated it for myself,” she said. “My children who go to

When Lara Nguyen first learned of her rare cancer—uterine leiomyosarcoma—she had just come home from teaching in Prague and was just starting work on a major mural in Grand Rapids, Mich. She had a full hysterectomy in 2018, when the cancer was still in its early stages. “It was a wonderful distraction,” Ngyuen said of her work on the mural. “There was still some hope there, catching it early. But then in January 2020 it came back, it metastasized into my left lung. Then a day after Father’s Day,

Virtual theater is commonplace during the pandemic—that is, if there’s any theater at all, people are watching it streamed on screen. Mike and Brenda Lilly are a married couple in Asheville taking virtual theater one step further. They estimate spending about $4,000 of their own to adapt a stage play into a short film . “The Man in the Bright Nightgown,” based on a one-man stage play of the same title by Greensboro playwright Tom Huey, is a 40-minute film screening through February under the

These things usually work in reverse. Luke Whitlatch already had some success as an artist in Los Angeles when he and his wife chose to move to Asheville. “I play bass for a band called Rocky Mountain Roller ,” he said. “I met the two guitarists for Rocky Mountain Roller two weeks after I got here.” So, two weeks into his Asheville life, Whitlatch found a band. It took him another three years, through the Tracey Morgan Gallery , to land his first local show as a visual artist. The exhibition is

Last March, when the public still grasped the reality of a pandemic, Katie Jones looked at the calendar and thought the Asheville Fringe Festival , which she directs, might have to do things differently in 2021. “Our initial thoughts were actually that we might just cancel altogether,” Jones said.

While coming of age in London, Farhad Kanuga felt pulled in two directions: Taking part in the political and social protests pervading the city and documenting those protests with his camera. “I felt I was a photographer as well as being part of the demonstration, which as I grew older, I learned it goes one or the other—don’t go as both,” he said. “Just missing moments when you’re cheering or what have you, doing something other than keeping your eye on what’s going on, being ready for that