Photo Essay: Asheville's River Arts District

For artists and art lovers, Asheville is gold panned from a mountain stream. The city itself is sculpture, with art deco and neoclassical designs by Douglas Ellington, built on the oldest mountains in the world. Once called the Paris of the South, Asheville sports a healthy gallery culture, with posh, well-lit venues—and the accompanying snobbery.

But across the tracks lies the emerging River Arts District, Asheville’s grassroots art community. It is raw, gritty, authentic, and something about it suggests a bold refusal to bow to art’s high-brow conventions. Situated between the French Broad River and the downtown skyline, the District has evolved from an industrial wasteland into a hive of galleries and studios, brimming with color, rust, and inspiration.

The buildings here seem envious of one another. Like trailers after a storm, some are rubble, and some have been spared by the tornado of Art. The Wedge Gallery sits below the Riverlink bridge, which spans the river and the tracks of Norfolk Southern Railroad. Its neighbor is the abandoned Ice House, a hulking monument to urban decay whose smokestack dominates the District’s skyline.

But on the other side of the tracks are the Phil Mechanic Studios, the unsung Mecca of Asheville’s art scene and home to an emerging bio-diesel business. Owner Jolene Mechanic is eager to talk about the District’s beginnings.

“We opened studio space in 2001, and the Flood Gallery two years ago,” she says. Named in part for the floods that hit the District in 2004, the Flood Fine Arts Center is the area’s most active venue, hosting exhibitions, classes, concerts, and poetry readings.

“We’re also looking into offering philosophy classes for kids,” says Mechanic, who is pursing a degree in philosophy. “Young people don’t get the philosophical education they should. I want to try teaching Plato to sixth graders.”

Ambition like Mechanic’s is rampant in the District. Dozens of artists have found a home here, and galleries have sprung up to accommodate them. There’s even a barbeque joint—the 12 Bones Smokehouse—where the line stretches out the door and into the District’s graffiti’d heart. Eating lunch with another photographer, I run into Josh Copus, an up-and-coming ceramicist..

“Have you guys heard about the new openings?” Copus has given up his place in line to sit at our table.

“Tonight?” I ask, through a mouthful of the best barbeque in the state.

“No, not show openings. Two new studios!”

Such growth is amazingly commonplace. Twice a year, the studios open to the public, and Asheville’s art fans descend. The Studio Stroll draws tourists from Asheville’s more polished gallery scene, as well as collectors from around the world. Camera in hand, I follow a group into the studios, and meet artists like John Murphy, who makes plush creations he calls Stupid Creatures (“They’re cheaper than taxidermy, and nothing has to die”) and Jenny Bowen, a photographer making portraits of Asheville’s citizens.

The opportunity to interact with artists in their own space sets the District apart from downtown’s sleek galleries. The District’s website even sorts artists by the days they can be found in their studios. A walk through the area on a breezy spring day will allow glimpses of blowtorches firing, potters’ wheels spinning, and photographers’ strobes flashing, all through the artists’ open doors. On just such a walk, I met an apprentice who happens to be grinding stone on the street. I mention that I’m shooting pictures of the District, and within seconds, I’ve been invited into a glass blowing studio where artists probe 2,000 degree furnaces with glass-tipped pikes. Such hospitality—a willingness to connect with people, even if the artist is elbow-deep in a fiery project—is what gives the District its authenticity.

And here in the District, even the topography is artful. Every visual space is part of an overwhelming mural of graffiti, from the trains rolling by, to the base of the Ice House’s smokestack. It’s a post-modern photographer’s dream. Shooting photos, I wander into a group of industrial buildings and find a large wooden cross leaning against a warehouse door. It is an artifact, left by some anonymous artist, here where the landscape itself is dedicated to art.

I look up from the cross and realize I’m being watched by a large, brown horse. It stares, as if wondering which artist sculpted me, and then slowly walks away. When it’s gone, I wonder if I really saw it, or if some agent of creativity floats through this valley, bringing visions.