Some 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., were damaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene.
Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Arts District, Decades in the Making, in Ruins After Helene

The hurricane damaged an estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., and upended the lives of artists who had recast the city as a cultural force.

by · NY Times

The French Broad River provided a scenic backdrop as an industrial neighborhood in Asheville transformed over the past 40 years into the River Arts District, a vibrant creative hub for art studios and galleries.

More than 300 artists called the district home and its riverside vitality helped cement Asheville’s reputation as a cultural outpost, one worth settling near or venturing to as old warehouses and mills were converted into centers for both creative expression and economic growth.

“There is nothing like the River Arts District in the United States and maybe even the world,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, president of River Arts District Artists, a support group. “It’s spaces where artists are in control of their businesses, their lives.”

But much of the district was washed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene. Buildings were swept away. Some galleries no longer exist. Creative works — some birthed decades ago — have been damaged and destroyed. Mud reigns.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Judi Jetson, founder and chair of Local Cloth, a nonprofit network of fiber artists, educators and enthusiasts. “We have three or four inches of mud inside the building and on most of our items. We’re trying to rescue whatever we can and people will take it home and wash them. The problem is a lot of us don’t have water, even at home, and nobody has electricity.”

Worrying about a city’s cultural vitality can seem secondary when so many people have lost their homes and lives. But culture has been an economic engine for this part of North Carolina as well as a point of pride. And the many artists and craftspeople who live in this region have been among the hardest hit. Their recovery is likely to be an important anchor as the community rebuilds.

Olivia Cooner, an acrylic painter, said she and her boyfriend, Eli Shipman, spent five days stranded in her Burnsville home, about 30 miles outside Asheville. The Cane River rose 30 feet in five hours. They watched the waters sweep away both the corner store and a man who was trapped in his car.

“It is the most harrowing thing that I have ever experienced in my whole life,” she said.

Her art supplies in the basement were destroyed by the flood, but she said some finished works in Asheville may have survived. “I lost a lot,” she said. “Some people have lost decades of work, and that is heartbreaking and devastating.”

The flooding damaged arts offerings throughout the area. The famed Biltmore Estate, home to some 92,000 art items, will be closed until at least Oct. 15. Asheville’s Biltmore Village, a tourist destination dotted with galleries and shops, is caked with a layer of mud. The Wortham Center for the Performing Arts and Asheville Community Theater, both longtime cultural pillars in the town, announced that performances and classes are temporarily canceled.

The Asheville Art Museum has no water, which has affected its HVAC system — making it difficult to protect its collection of American art from the 20th and 21st centuries. “We spent the last several days stabilizing the equipment,” said Pamela Myers, the executive director. “We’ve been scrambling to try to protect this asset that we hold in the public trust.”

But the River Arts District appears to have suffered the most because of its proximity to the water.

Katie Cornell, the executive director of ArtsAVL (formerly the Asheville Area Arts Council), estimated that 80 percent of the buildings have been damaged. The district, which runs between the river and the railroad — and used to house stockyards, tanneries, cotton mills and furniture factories — now features breweries, bakeries and trolley rides.

Burroughs described the current scene as “near apocalyptic,” adding that “two-thirds of the district has been either washed away or is in rubble.”

Artists have been painfully reminded of the famous “Great Flood” of 1916, which overflowed rivers in the area, took out bridges and cost lives.

“I know the lore very well — tropical storms and dams breaking,” said Daniel McClendon, who has a studio in an old warehouse on Depot Street. “The first thing I said to my wife when I came back to get my pickup truck was the River Arts District may be dead.”

Leigh Hilbert, a textile artist, said she thinks Helene was worse. “It went higher,” she said of the water.

Tarah Singh, an artist whose daughter, Alexandra Stilber, is also an artist, said she doesn’t know the fate of the paintings she had in a show at Southern Appalachian Brewery in nearby Hendersonville. “My daughter has one tub of her art in the car and I have a few paintings that were on my back porch that I was working on,” Singh said in a telephone call from Georgia, where she’d taken refuge.

“Asheville is very much a crafts town. We’ve been making strides to make a more artistic statement,” she added. “I don’t how long it would take to rebuild.”

Dawn McCarthy, a creative director in advertising who is also a potter and photographer in East Asheville, has tried to help some artist friends, including McClendon, by posting on Facebook and Instagram. “Want to help an Asheville River Arts District artist?” she posted recently. “@daniel_mcclendon bought this century-old (1907), abandoned biscuit factory, renovated it, keeping all the original wood floors, and built his painting studio. He paints commissioned paintings or check out his available work. He was able to save most of them up on the second floor, which you see the floodwaters from here.”

CURVE studios & garden ended up under water, having once been a boxy brick structure that seemed unshakable. Angelique Tassistro, a potter who is facing the prospect of remaking the studio she has there, said she has likely had enough in a recent Instagram post. “We are okay. The studio on the other hand is not,” she wrote. “We will not be rebuilding. My heart is broken for my self and our community.”

Burroughs, who owns a jewelry shop in the district, is trying to organize a cleanup and reconstruction effort. So is Mira Gerard, an art professor who owns Tyger Tyger Gallery in Asheville.

Gerard on Instagram asked people to come to the district on Friday. “Artists need your help! The gallery is trying to secure storage for a number of things. A dry garage or three would be ideal. And help with a truck or van. Please let me know if you have space and I’ll explain what will go there. If I find a storage unit I’ll use that.”

Her gallery has personal meaning for her, having been the painting studio of her father, Jonas Gerard, before he died in 2020. There is a huge mural of his on the side of the building that survived the storm because it was made of automotive paint to withstand the elements. “It’s surreal, as if he’s looking over the whole place,” Gerard said. “There is this huge tree pulled up, debris everywhere, and then there is Dad’s colorful mural.”

While the Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center in downtown Asheville was spared, its historic Black Mountain College site remains inaccessible, with roads washed out or blocked by landslides.

“Asheville was historically a retreat center, a sanctuary in the mountains,” Jeff Arnal, the center’s executive director, said in a phone interview from Raleigh where he had relocated. “The artists that work in this region are working outside of city commerce centers, where they’re able to work at their own pace and experiment.”

The center, which grew out of the important avant-garde Black Mountain College, has postponed the opening of its current exhibition and fall residency program, and is preparing to delay other upcoming events. The museum will remain closed until water service is restored, Arnal said, and its staff is trying to work remotely.

Pink Dog Creative, which has about 30 artist tenants, was spared the worst because it is not on the river side of the railroad. One of its tenants, Heather Divoky, said she moved to Asheville in 2020, in part to get away from hurricanes, having grown up in Wilmington and Florida.

“I never thought I would be going through this again,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve worked through the grief and the shock yet.

“Whatever happens, I’m really hopeful there is some semblance in the future of what the River Arts District was, because it was really beautiful and special,” she added. “If we’re careful and smart, we can build something back.”

Emmy Brazier contributed reporting from Asheville.

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