In Wake of Helene, Western North Carolina Artists Find Their Livelihoods Devastated

Last Friday, when Hurricane Helene hit the mountains of Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River exploded its banks, submerging the Asheville studio of marble sculptor Peter Glenn Oakley under 23 feet of water.

The day before, Oakley had removed his tools and much of his art, but his most important piece—a life-sized, Carrara marble, stand-up Hoover vacuum cleaner—was too big and too heavy to move safely on short notice, so he’d tried to protect it as best he could. He “quadruple bagged it, built a box for it out of plywood, bolted it to the floor, and weighed it down with 200 pounds of barbells,” he told me.

When the deadly waters receded and he was able to get to his studio, the building was destroyed, but the makeshift box was amazingly intact; inside, his white marble sculpture stood unscathed, even unstained.

Many—even most—artists of Western North Carolina have not been so lucky. Entire communities of magnificent creativity like those in Marshall, Spruce Pine, and of course those in and around Asheville have been decimated. Eight days later, power is still out in many places, water is unavailable, roads are still impassable, and communities are still dangerously shut off.

The River Arts District in Asheville, home to as many as 300 artists, took a direct hit. The Asheville Arts Council estimates that 80 percent of its buildings were damaged. Painter Hannah Cole is one of many Asheville artists who lost her life’s work and the studio that held it.

“That’s one of the most minor tragedies that is happening around me right now,” she says. “My concern is for my neighbors.”

Twenty miles up the French Broad River, in artist-centered Marshall, entire buildings have been washed away. Water there crested at a historic high of 27 feet, says potter Josh Copus, whose renovated Old Marshall Jail was submerged in the current.

“The town of Marshall as we know it is gone,” he says. “We lost the town.”

Marshall High Studios, home to 26 artist studios on Blannahassett Island in the middle of the French Broad, was terribly damaged. Painter Frank Lombardo’s is among them. He is one of many artists using their previously art-filled Instagram accounts to post photos and videos of the devastation and cleanup efforts and to ask for help for their communities.

In hard-hit Tryon, Margaret Curtis has a true artist’s ability to see the crisis for the human tragedy that it is even as she makes meaning of it in real-time.

“Our communal disaster adrenaline wore off two days ago,” she wrote to me on October 5. “There’s a deep sadness settling into our area.”

“It sounds dramatic I know,” she continued, “but the mountains have been resculpted, almost like witnessing a geological process that normally would have taken centuries unfold in minutes.”

Creativity, Generosity as Survival Skills

Curtis, like so many around her, is now rallying to help her community, volunteering with her food bank and helping her neighbors. Cole, too, is spending her time and energy helping those around her, becoming a one-woman news source and resource for people who want to help. Copus, Lombardo, and others in Marshall are already well on their way to digging their beloved town out of the mud.

All of them are doing these things with extremely limited resources, and they’re doing them with the skills that fuel their work as artists: Creativity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and determination. Also: a massive dose of generosity, the same one that impels them to create art and share it with the world.

That’s certainly true in Spruce Pine, where artist Anne Lemanski and her husband Matthew Anders knew they were lucky to emerge unhurt from the storm. They haven’t had power, water, or cell service, but they know how to use what they do have to help their neighbors and themselves.

Anders has spent days chainsawing felled trees off of the many small roads in their area, making it possible for people to get in and out, and for him to get more fuel to do more work. Now he’s hiring other artists to help him help those in need in their community.

A few miles down the road, sculptor Hoss Haley turned a portable welder into a generator and has also cleared the roads around him.

“We didn’t see DOT or FEMA for days,” he told me. “You’re on your own. Luckily, people up here are really resourceful.” And they take care of each other. “We’ve definitely bonded with the neighbors,” he says. “It’s kind of sweet and kind of sad.”

Haley, Lemanski, and other artists sprinkled through the Spruce Pine woods have been congregating—if they can get there—at nearby Penland School of Craft, which was damaged by the storm but has a Starlink satellite for phone calls and meals in the dining hall.  

Just being there, around other people, helps, they say. The same is true around the region.

And in places that did not suffer badly, like Cherokee, which had only minor flooding and damage, the focus is on helping those around them. The Cherokee casino has been given over to FEMA to use as a headquarters, the Cherokee artist Joshua Adams told me.

In Asheville, Hannah Cole says the community is coming together in extraordinary ways. “I am getting to witness a world where neighbors come out and ask each other how they are, and what they can offer, and gather together on lawns to listen to the 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. radio updates. Where no one is looking at a phone screen, and everyone wants to check in. Where a neighbor with electricity offers you to charge up and eat something hot. Where the restaurants cook up all their perishable food and give it away in impromptu gatherings.”

“This is a frightening place to be right now,” Cole says. “I will not lie to you, I am scared. But even so, there is beauty in it.”

The love these artists have for where they live and what they do, and the bonds they share will keep many of them going, at least for a while, Haley says.

But once their basic needs are met, what they require more than ever is to know that their art matters, he says, that it has meaning, and that their livelihood won’t die with the storm.

He mentioned a scene he witnessed earlier in the week when one member of the Penland community bought a work of art from another artist hard-hit by the storm.

“I watched that happen and it was heartening,” he says. The artist whose work was purchased “needed to know that what she’s doing has value, and it was a nod towards some kind of normalcy. A sign that there could be a future.”

Oakley, the Asheville sculptor, agrees.

“Artists have lost their ability to make a living right now,” he says. “We want to stay here. This is home. Rebuilding is going to take a long time. So yes, if you can, please buy art.”

Though he has gone temporarily to South Carolina to stay, he wants to come back. “I’d like to be part of the effort to remake this, to rebuild it for the future.”

This story is republished with permission from “Dispatches from the Art of the State,” a newsletter written by Liza Roberts. Comment on this story [email protected].