Until it’s safe to travel together for our popular Art Travels day, overnight, national, and international trips, we’re thrilled to launch virtual trips for armchair travelers each first Thursday evening! This month, we travel to The Columbus Museum in Columbus, GA.

Founded in 1953, The Columbus Museum is one of the largest museums in the Southeast and is unique for its dual concentration on American art and regional history displayed in its permanent collection, temporary exhibitions, and educational programs. When noted Columbus industrialist W.C. Bradley died in 1947, his family donated his 13-acre estate to the city of Columbus to be used as the Columbus Museum of Arts and Crafts, a new center of culture and education. As the institution grew, its collecting focus changed from exhibitions of fine art and American Indian archaeological artifacts to include American art in a variety of media including drawings, decorative arts, paintings, sculpture, photography, and artifacts that tell the story of human habitation in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley.

For this virtual visit, Jonathan F. Walz, PhD, The Columbus Museum’s curator of American art, introduces the museum, its collection, and building, then discuss What’s Going Around: Lou Stovall and the Community Poster, 1967–1976. Community posters are graphic broadsides of grassroots origin that usually address issues of public concern with a do-it-yourself aesthetic and distribution strategy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Washington, DC’s community posters were simultaneously vehicles for social, political, and cultural organizations, as well as objects of art. A native of Athens, GA, Lou Stovall and his workshops became the heart of community poster printmaking in Washington during the long 1960s. His collaborations spanned the artistic, the musical, and the political, creating a broad visual statement for a city and country undergoing changes on a massive scale. Stovall’s posters are in the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the British Museum among other public collections, and institutions such as the National Gallery of Art and the Peace Corps commissioned his distinctive works. What’s Going Around traces the early development of a master printmaker and his process, and trains the spotlight on a turbulent era of US history not unlike the contemporary moment. Following Dr. Walz’s exhibition talk, Rachel Vogt, The Columbus Museum’s academic programs manager, shares highlights of their permanent art collection.

Join me for this 4-week intensive program where you will dive into intuitive drawings, aura drawings and auragraphs.

Intuitive Art
Doodling your Feelings. Intuitive drawings can begin as simple doodle that will become more eloquent as you practice. You can use ballpoint pens, markers, gel pens or pastels. Draw for the surprise and joy of the process, without knowing in advance how each drawing will turn out.

Aura Drawings
Your energy field contains massive information about your life. The oval field surrounding you can reveal the energetic memory of your life before conception and to present day.

Auragraphs
An auragraph is a beautiful way of giving a psychic reading. It is a representation of a person’s life story, their past, present and potential future. A Psychic or Medium will tune into the auric field and draw a symbolic representation.

Each week we will discuss a different type of soul work. Each student will draw, read another student and receive a reading. Each reading is unique and contains information that your sitter is ready to hear, and the information Spirit wants you to have.

Be sure to bring paper and colored pencils or crayons (or anything that you would like to use to draw with).

This workshop will take place Thursday evenings at 7:30PM – for 4 weeks and 2 hours each. January 7 – 28, 2021
$90/person payable via paypal.me/mediumrobyn or Venmo (@Robyn-Wolf-11).

Create, share, and discover with Buncombe County Public Library’s newest resource, Biblioboard.

BiblioBoard Library is an easy-to-use platform of high-quality digital content. Biblioboard offers books, articles, documents, images, audios, and videos. BiblioBoard Library is host to content from traditional publishers, indie authors, cultural institutions, and local thought leaders. Users can access BiblioBoard Library through the library’s website or on the device of their choice.

Some features of Biblioboard:

• No waitlists or holds
• Streaming audio and video are available on a wide variety of topics
• Check out curated collections of the best indie authors.
• Available for desktop, iOS, and Android devices

Local authors can submit their work for inclusion in the library catalog or publish books with Press Books. You can submit and share your work locally or nationally.

Interested? Check it out, and access Biblioboard today by clicking here.

Wake, Mel Chin’s giant animatronic sculpture, installed in New York City’s Times Square last summer, will be on view in Asheville through March 15, 2021, at 44 Collier Avenue. Chin, a WNC based conceptual artist, was named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2019.

Wake was commissioned as part of Mel Chin: All Over the Place, a multi-site survey of his works from across many decades that took place in several New York City locations. A collaborative group, led by UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio and The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, formed to plan and raise funds for the sculpture to be seen locally.

Wake – 60 feet long, 34 feet wide and 24 feet high, conceived and designed by the artist – was engineered, sculpted and fabricated by an interdisciplinary team of UNC Asheville students, faculty, staff and community artists led by Chin. The sculpture is interactive and features decks and places to sit and contemplate.

Wake evokes the hull of a shipwreck crossed with the skeletal remains of a marine mammal. The structure is linked with a carved, 21-foot-tall animatronic sculpture, accurately derived from a figurehead of the opera star Jenny Lind that was once mounted on the 19th century clipper ship, USS Nightingale. Jenny Lind moves subtly as she breathes and scans the sky.

Visitors can experience Wake daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. at 44 Collier Avenue. For more details and a schedule of programming, visit ashevillearts.com.

January is National Mentoring Month, and this year, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Western North Carolina is celebrating it by recruiting more adult and high school volunteers, as well as children and youth who need an extra someone on their side.

“One truth I know,” said Lelia Duncan, Executive Director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Western North
Carolina, “is that we are all called to take care of one another, to encourage, to uplift, to hold a space for
others to be listened to and valued. There is nothing more important, nothing closer to the divine, than
to be present and to take a moment to nurture those around us, especially children and youth.”

Big Brothers Big Sisters of WNC is especially effective in helping young people feel valued and heard.
Surveys of school personnel in the 2018-2019 school year show that, among BBBSWNC Littles in
community- and school/site-based programs

National Mentoring Month is the time of year where engagement from community members interested
in becoming a mentor is highest. This year, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Western North Carolina is
encouraging the public to go beyond just digital engagement – and become involved in real life.
Mentoring relationships are at their best when connections are made between a caring adult and a
young person who knows that someone is there to help guide them through real-life decisions.

To learn more about becoming a Big Brother or a Big Sister in Henderson County, contact Program
Coordinator Morgan Harris at (828) 507-6644 or email [email protected]. You can learn more
about serving across the 18 county region by visiting www.bbbswnc.org.

Brunch B’Yahad is now available through Zoom meeting here.   

Join new and old friends for light brunch, socialization and lively discussion.  Featured guest speakers, and relevant cultural and timely topics will fill our minds.

The Asheville Art Museum presents Fantastical Forms: Ceramics as Sculpture on view at the Museum November 4, 2020 through April 5, 2021. The 25 works in this exhibition—curated by associate curator Whitney Richardson—highlight the Museum’s Collection of sculptural ceramics from the last two decades of the 20th century to the present. Each work illustrates the artist’s ability to push beyond the utilitarian and transition ceramics into the world of sculpture.

North and South Carolina artists featured include Elma McBride Johnson, Neil Noland, Norm Schulman, Virginia Scotchie, Cynthia Bringle, Jane Palmer, Michael Sherrill, and Akira Satake. Works by American artists Don Reitz, Robert Chapman Turner, Karen Karnes, Toshiko Takaezu, Bill Griffith, and Xavier Toubes are also featured in the exhibition.

This virtual program takes place via Zoom. Space is limited; registration is required. To register, click here.

Join Doris Potash, master docent and Hope Warshaw, touring docent, for an interactive conversation about three artworks in our special exhibition Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Before the discussion, find a quiet space. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Now open your eyes, and engage with the artworks in the image gallery; click on the thumbnail for a larger image, and spend about 15 minutes looking slowly at each.

• What’s going on in this photograph? What do you see that makes you say that?
• How would you describe the human interactions and/or relationships of the people in the photographs?