Calendar of Events

The Asheville Holiday Parade, presented by Bojangles, rolls, dances and marches through downtown Asheville on  Saturday, November 20 beginning at 11am. The parade features more than a variety of entries including marching bands, dance and cheer squads, youth sports, nonprofits and businesses. We will be consulting with local public health officials and follow any guidelines in place at the time. Entries will be limited to allow for spacing and we’ll incorporate other safety measures. Find the 2021 rules for parade applicants here. It’s imperative that you carefully read the rules and regulations prior to filling out your application. Find the 2021 parade application here. Please be creative, parade entries must be entertaining and family friendly, not all entries will be accepted. Thanks to Bojangles, Explore Asheville, Ingles Markets, Winter Lights at the NC Arboretum, Apple Tree Honda, WLOS, Star 104.3, 99.9 Kiss Country, Go Minis, Kimpton Hotel Arras, Aloft Asheville Downtown and Asheville Color & Imaging.

The City of Asheville will accept proposals from government agencies and nonprofits for community projects funded through the American Rescue Plan. At their September 14 meeting, Asheville City Council voted to fund projects in the following categories: Affordable housing Care for aging residents City infrastructure Climate change Community communication Domestic violence prevention and assistance Food systems Homelessness services Small business recovery Workforce development Projects must serve City residents and fall under one of the categories above. For more information, including the timeline for the process

With the convenience of being open year-round, 7 days a week, the WNC Farmers Market offers a selection of farm-fresh produce at the lowest prices in Western N.C. Our popular retail buildings, providing a selection of non-perishables, fruits, vegetables, crafts and more, are open daily.

Fun Day Out: Youth
$5/child/day + field trip fees.
8:30am-6pm
Enjoy a day of games, crafts, special events
and field trips when youth are out of school for
teacher workdays. Must bring lunch and drink.
Monday, Oct. 4 County Schools
Location: Shiloh
Thursday, Oct. 7 City Schools
Location: Grant, Montford
Monday, Oct. 25 City Schools
Location: Grant, Montford
Monday, Nov. 1 County Schools
Location: Shiloh
Thursday, Nov. 11 City & County Schools
Location: Grant, Montford
Wednesday, Nov. 24 City & County Schools
Location: Grant, Montford
NOTE: No charge for Fun Day Out for
participants enrolled in Youth Afterschool or
Teen Leadership programs but registration
is required.

Artist Michael Fowler creates evocative abstract landscape paintings by incorporating vibrant colors with subtle, complex details. His semi-large-scale approach invites viewers to step into his work and build a sense of wonder and contemplation surrounding the natural world. Fowler’s artistic response in contemplating nature is to capture something of a landscape’s pleasantness, which is often unexpected harmonies of color and shape. In his latest exhibit, Arbor Huescapes, Fowler highlights the distinctive vegetation – primarily trees – and topography of North and South Carolina’s midlands and piedmont regions.

Fowler received his Bachelor of Arts from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas with a focus in Advertising Design. He then attended the University of Nebraska where he received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Art History. From there, he attended the University of Memphis where he earned a Doctorate in Higher Education. Based in North Augusta, South Carolina, Fowler is currently an associate professor of design and computer graphics and serves as the Mary Durban Toole Chair of Art at the University of South Carolina in Aiken. His paintings are in a number of public and private collections nationally, and he actively exhibits in regional and national shows.

Please note: Arbor Huescapes has been rescheduled due to the COVID-19 crisis and will now open in fall 2021. The exhibit is on display daily September 18, 2021 – January 9, 2022, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside the Baker Exhibit Center. All works are available for purchase and a portion of sales will be donated to The North Carolina Arboretum Society.

Do you have kids’ books you’d like to donate to our little libraries? Please contact [email protected].

The U.S. Small Business Administration announced the opening of a Business Recovery Center at the Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College Enka campus to assist all businesses and residents with one-on-one assistance in submitting a disaster loan application for remnants of Tropical Storm Fred on Aug. 16-18.

Physical disaster loans are available to businesses of all sizes, nonprofit organizations, homeowners and renters in the primary counties of Buncombe, Haywood, and Transylvania counties in North Carolina.

Economic injury disaster loans are available to small businesses and most nonprofit organizations in the primary counties and in the following adjacent counties: Henderson, Jackson, Madison, McDowell, Rutherford, Swain and Yancey in North Carolina; Greenville, Oconee and Pickens in South Carolina and Cocke and Sevier in Tennessee.

Location and office hours

SBA Business Recovery Center, Asheville Buncombe Technical Community College, 1465 Sand Hill Road, Suite 1054, Candler, NC  28715

Opens: Noon to 6 p.m. Thursday, September 16

Normal hours:  9 a.m. – 6 p.m. Monday – Friday; 10 a.m. – 2 p.m. Saturdays; closed on Sundays.

The CDC’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended certain populations receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 Vaccine at least six months after the completion of their 2-dose Pfizer vaccine series. In addition, the CDC Director recommended a booster dose for those in high-risk occupational and institutional settings.

The CDC recommends:

• People 65 years and older and residents in long-term care settings should receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their 2nd dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine;
• People aged 50 to 64 with certain underlying medical conditions should receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their 2nd dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine;
• People 18 to 49 who are at high risk for severe COVID-19 due to certain underlying medical conditions may receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their 2nd dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, based on their individual benefits and risks; and
• People aged 18-64 years who are at increased risk for COVID-19 exposure and transmission because of occupational or institutional setting may receive a booster shot of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine at least 6 months after their 2nd dose of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, based on their individual benefits and risks.
• According to the CDC, many of the people who are now eligible to receive a Pfizer booster shot will benefit from additional protection. While the more contagious Delta variant remains the predominant strain and in this time of high transmission, a booster shot will help strengthen protection against severe disease in those populations who are at high risk for exposure to COVID-19 or the complications from severe disease.

Individuals who received the 2-dose Pfizer vaccine series and meet the criteria above for the recommended booster of Pfizer may receive their booster at any area Pfizer vaccine provider. Many local pharmacies, grocery stores, medical providers, and local health departments in the area can provide your booster. You can visit www.yourspotyourshot.nc.gov to find a Pfizer booster provider near you.

Buncombe County HHS will begin providing Pfizer boosters to individuals included in the CDC recommendations beginning September 27 at 10 a.m. at Biltmore Church-Arden Campus. The booster drive-through site will be open Monday – Friday from 10 am – 6 pm. In the event of adverse weather, Buncombe County will use all available communication platforms and partners to notify the community.  Please bring your proof of vaccination, preferably your vaccine card that lists your previous vaccinations. Only Pfizer boosters will be available at the Biltmore Church Arden drive-through site. Moderna and J&J boosters are not recommended at this time.

As a reminder, Buncombe County has extended the countywide Face Covering requirement in all indoor spaces during this time of high COVID-19 transmission. Even after the booster, individuals must comply with the local face covering requirement unless experiencing a medical exemption. Additionally, it is recommended that all individuals continue following other infection prevention measures, such as waiting six feet apart from others you do not live with and washing hands frequently.

For more information on Buncombe County’s vaccination efforts, visit www.buncombeready.org.

“Shine and Dine” on the railway! We cordially invite you to hop on board The Carolina Shine, GSMR’s All-Adult First Class Moonshine Car! We will be proudly serving hand crafted, triple-distilled, craft moonshine. Some of the smoothest tasting moonshine in the Carolinas!

Offered on the Nantahala Gorge excursion, this shine and dine experience begins in a renovated First Class train fleet car, The Carolina Shine. The interior features copper lined walls filled with the history of moonshining in North Carolina. Learn about the proud tradition that the Appalachians established when bootlegging was an acceptable way of life and local home brews were the best in town. Read about Swain County’s very own Major Redmond, the most famous mountain moonshine outlaw of the 19th century.

Nancy Graves, Parable of Nostalgia from the Tango portfolio, 1991, intaglio on cotton rag paper, edition 12/26, publisher: Iris Editions, New York, image: 26 × 17 5/8 inches, sheet: 35 3/4 × 26 inches. Asheville Art Museum. © Nancy Graves Foundation, Inc. / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

A Dance of Images and Words: The Nancy Graves/Pedro Cuperman Tango Portfolio features a series of eight intaglio prints that depict plants and animals alongside eleven sheets of prose that explore the steps of the Argentinian dance, the tango. Organized by the Asheville Art Museum from the Museum’s Collection and curated by Hilary Schroeder, assistant curator, this exhibition will be on view in The Van Winkle Law Firm Gallery at the Museum from September 29, 2021 through January 10, 2022.

The common idiom “it takes two to tango” is immediately called into question in both the imagery and words of the Tango portfolio. The portfolio is an expression of artist Nancy Graves (Pittsfield, MA 1939–1995 New York, NY) writer Pedro Cuperman’s (1936–2016 Buenos Aires, Argentina) meditations on the dance. Their imagery and words become paired in an illustrated book though their explorations take different formats and directions. Both Graves and Cuperman look towards humankind and nature as a place where beings come together in the experience of living. This exhibition presents Graves’s eight prints alongside the portfolio frontispiece and a page of Cuperman’s text to immerse visitors in the collaborative dance of the tango.

Contemporary art, interdisciplinary research communities, and the inspiration of Appalachia converge in Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience. This exhibition showcases a selection of collaborative creative works that emerged from nearly four decades of the Mountain Lake Workshop series, a program sited in rural southwestern Virginia.

Founded by artist and scholar Ray Kass in 1980 and co-organized with influential art critics Dr. Donald B. Kuspit and Dr. Howard Risatti, as well as the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), the Mountain Lake Workshops integrated the arts and sciences in a dynamic experimental creative process that pushed past the traditional boundaries of art, dance, and performance.

Community-centered from its inception, the Mountain Lake Workshop demonstrated the relevance of the arts across disciplines, as well as social and participatory learning. This exhibition offers a focused look at art that investigated new conceptual limits, born of the region in southwestern Virginia, just a few hundred miles north of Asheville, NC. Works range from large-scale watercolors and photographic installation to relics of performances and other experimentations in artmaking.

Highlights include composer and conceptual artist John Cage’s New River Rocks and Washes(1990). A significant late-career work by Cage, this rarely exhibited watercolor extends nearly 30 feet in length, produced using methods of chance to trace stones gathered from the workshop’s natural surroundings.

This exhibition was organized by the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts at Longwood University. Generous funding was provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Artist Walter B. Stephen (Clinton, IA 1875–1961 Asheville, NC) contributed to Western North Carolina’s identity as a flourishing site for pottery production and craftsmanship in the early 20th century. Walter B. Stephen Pottery: Cameo to Crystalline features art pottery and functional vessels from each stage of Stephen’s career, from his origins discovering the medium alongside his mother Nellie C. Randall Stephen in Shelby County, TN from 1901 through 1910 to his multi-decade production just outside of Asheville. This exhibition will be on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Debra McClinton Gallery July 28, 2021 through January 17, 2022.

In 1926, Stephen founded his third and last pottery studio, Pisgah Forest, in Arden, NC, which he operated until his death in 1961. It was at this studio that the artist perfected the “cameo” decoration technique for which he became best known. His hand-painted images, achieved with layers of white translucent clay, often feature American folk imagery, from covered wagons and livestock to cabins and spinning wheels. A selection of works from the Museum’s Collection showcase his innovation in form and in decorative surface details, including experimentation with crystalline glazing.

Join us for Animoday! Every Monday all day. Listen to anime music, play anime games, watch anime, and talk anime!

OAKS Afterschool Program
Pre-registration required. FREE for the 2021-2022 school year
September 7-December 17, 2021 | Monday-Friday | 2:30-5:30pm
An inclusive recreation program designed to support rising 1st5th graders and their families. OAKS will provide homework
assistance and opportunities to play through a variety of activities
and field trips. Participants will benefit from lower child to
staff ratios, continuation of scholastic goals (as applicable),
and individualized treatment plans (facilitated by LRT/CTRS
and program staff). Participants who cannot meet eligibility
requirements may attend with a 1:1 worker.
Location: Oakley