Visual Arts

  Deborah Lewis-Smith grew up in Asheville, and the first thought she had upon meeting John Cram, in 1971, was he wasn’t going to stay in town very long.

“John was bigger than Asheville,” Lewis-Stein recalled. “It was like, ‘Oh, he’s going to get bored and leave.’ Instead, he brought the party to Asheville.”

That party is continuing strong in the wake of Cram’s death Monday after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He was 72.

Molly Sawyer used to sculpt stylized horses and human figures from clay. That changed after her battle with breast cancer.

“The work became a response to my own direct experience with life, death,” she said. “I guess the issue of mortality has always been present in my deeper thought process.”

Today, Sawyer’s work is a mashup of found objects such as driftwood, stone and metal rods with braided or balled-up wool, twine, ash and fur. She usually works large, with some installations at once clumped on the floor, leaning against a wall and hanging from the ceiling.  

The dimensions and materials make this body of work difficult to place in galleries focused on sales, but Sawyer is riding a wave of exposure in area museums and art centers. She’s among the 50 artists invited into the Asheville Art Museum’s “Appalachia Now!” exhibition, and Sawyer is soon opening solo shows at Revolve in Asheville and at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee.

Margaret Curtis and her husband, their two sons and a joyful chihuahua-dachsund mix named Sally live on a quiet, curvy street on a hill above downtown Tryon. From the surface, it’s the quintessential American picture.

Curtis doesn’t paint such pictures.

Like the artform it’s dedicated to, Asheville Bookworks is hidden. You could stand right in front of its building in West Asheville and patronize four other storefronts without ever knowing—because there’s no sign to tell you—the entrance is tucked onto the side.

That’s worked just fine for the screenprinters, papermakers and mixed-media book artists who, since 2004, have regarded Asheville Bookworks as their town square.