foothillsThe Digest FolkIssue Spring 2026Display until 4/26 $10.95
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4foothills Digest 3838 Cleary RdLaurel Springs, NC 28644Issue #302025Phone: 828.475.1323E-mail [email protected] Website foothillsdigest.comStock by Adobe Stock Created using Adobe SuiteEdited with the assistance of Open AIPRINTED IN USAPARTNER COMPANY: ECKARD PHOTOGRAPHICCARMEN ECKARD Editor-in-ChiefAuthor JON ECKARD Photographer JOEY OSBORNE Partner SPECIAL THANKS Tracey TrimbleCONTRIBUTOR Anna FarielloRichard Eller\"Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.\" -Joseph Pulitzer
5Dear Readers,There are certain issues of Foothills Digest that feel especially alive while they’re coming together, and this one is certainly among them.Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the rare privilege of spending time in the presence of people making things with their hands. Real things. Clay turning on a wheel, wire bending into form, chainsaws shaping wood, baskets slowly growing row by row. Watching artists work is one of the quiet joys of this job. There is a rhythm to it — a patience and focus — that feels deeply rooted in this region. The traditions of Appalachian craft are not just about objects. They are about knowledge passed from one set of hands to another.At the same time, I also found myself in a very different kind of place: standing in a warehouse surrounded by thousands of pieces of folk art. Pottery, carvings, paintings, baskets, signs — each one carrying a story, a personality, a moment of inspiration from the person who made it. Being in a space like that is almost overwhelming in the best way. You realize quickly that folk art isn’t a small corner of Southern culture. It is a vast and living landscape.What struck me most throughout the making of this issue is the incredible range of expression that exists under the umbrella of “folk art.” Some pieces are deeply traditional, rooted in generations of technique. Others are wildly imaginative, personal, even strange in the most wonderful way. Yet all of it grows from the same place: people making things because they feel compelled to create.And now, as this issue reaches your hands, we’re stepping into one of the most exciting times of the year for anyone who loves this world — festival season.In the coming weeks, fields, town squares, and mountain venues across our region will fill with artists, musicians, collectors, and curious wanderers. We hope you’ll join us out there. If you find yourself at MerleFest, stop by and say hello — we’ll be there sharing magazines and celebrating the music that connects so deeply with the traditions of this place.And not long after, we hope to see many of you at the Foothills Folk Art Festival, where the makers themselves take center stage and the creativity of our region is on full display.Until then, we hope this issue gives you a glimpse into the beauty, humor, imagination, and deep cultural roots that make Appalachian folk art so extraordinary.As always, thank you for reading Foothills Digest and for supporting the artists and traditions that keep this region vibrant.With gratitude,Carmen EckardEditor-in-ChiefFoothills Digest
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5 Letter from the Editor8Table of ContentsScan for information about our Advertisers. Foothills Digest is a proud sponsor of MerleFest, the Catawba Valley Pottery Festival, and the Smoky Mountain Blue Grass Festival.
Folk art isn’t something learned in a classroom. Most often, it’s self-taught or passed down — picked up by watching, by trying, by doing it wrong a few times and doing it anyway.It’s almost always handmade. Not perfect. Not identical. You can see the person in it — the pause, the hurry, the personality. The thumbprint in clay. The uneven stitch. The tool mark left in wood. It carries evidence of the maker.But in Appalachia, folk art is something even deeper than that. It is rooted in place.It reflects the land someone lives on — the clay under their boots, the trees they cut, the sheep they shear, the rivers they cross. It reflects the weather they know, the roads they travel, the stories they’ve heard all their life. You can often tell where it comes from without ever being told.And here, many of those roots run first through Cherokee hands. Long before the word “Appalachian” was ever used to describe this region, Cherokee artists were shaping river cane into baskets, digging native clay for pottery, carving wood, weaving, beadworking, and creating functional beauty from the land itself. Much of what we now think of as “traditional mountain craft” grew from those foundations — from knowledge of materials, from relationship with land, from an understanding that beauty and utility were never separate things. Many Cherokee artists continue that work today, creating pottery, baskets, carvings, beadwork, and contemporary pieces that remain deeply tied to heritage and homeland.Appalachian folk art grew from that soil and expanded as Scots-Irish, German, African, and other settler traditions blended with Indigenous knowledge. Over time, what emerged was not one style, but a conversation.Folk Art: an Appalachian Definition
What \"Counts\" as Appalachian Folk Art?In this region, folk art includes both what was necessary and what was expressive. It includes:Pottery — face jugs, storage crocks, alkaline-glazed stoneware, and contemporary interpretations that still feel grounded in earth and fire.Basketry — river cane, white oak, honeysuckle, splint baskets woven tight enough to last generations.Textiles — quilts, coverlets, woven tapestries, hooked rugs, embroidery stitched by lamplight.Blacksmithing and ironsmithing — hinges, latches, gates, tools made beautiful simply by being well made.Woodworking — carved walking sticks, dulcimers, furniture, toys, whittled figures.Painted and sculpted work — carved animals, visionary environments, memory paintings, pieces that tell stories no one asked for but everyone recognizes.Some of it was made to survive winter.Some of it was made to pass time.Some of it was made to remember.Some of it was made because the hands couldn’t sit still.It is often spiritual, sometimes playful.In Appalachia, faith, imagination, humor, and hope have always lived side by side. Some pieces carry prayers or warnings. Others carry a wink. Many carry both.And above all, folk art is personal.It isn’t made for critics. It wasn’t born in galleries. It’s made because someone felt the need to make it — to remember something, to believe something, to use something, or simply to leave proof that they were here.
The Craft Revival & A Turning PointBy the early 1900s, industrialization was reshaping mountain life. Railroads brought factory goods. Handmade objects were increasingly replaced by machine-made ones. What had once been necessity was suddenly labeled “backward.”In the 1920s, the Appalachian Craft Revival began pushing back against that narrative.Reformers, educators, and local craftspeople began preserving and elevating regional craft traditions — not as relics of poverty, but as art forms worthy of respect. Out of that movement came institutions that changed the region.One of the most influential was John C. Campbell Folk School, founded in 1925 in Brasstown, North Carolina. Inspired by Danish folk school models, it was built on the idea that adults learn best in community — through doing, through sharing, through making alongside one another.The Folk School didn’t invent mountain craft. It protected it. It created space for weaving, blacksmithing, pottery, woodcarving, music, and dance to be honored rather than dismissed. It helped transform craft from something hidden in kitchens and barns into something recognized as cultural inheritance.And that mattered. It shifted how Appalachia saw itself — and how the outside world saw Appalachia.
Willingham Theater, Downtown Yadkinville, N.C.Sounds Mountains oftheBlueRidgeMusicCenter.orgBalsam RangeSat., january 177:30 pm | $40Blue Ridge Mountain BluegrassDashawn & wendy hickman+ murphy, laurelyn, & rileySat., january 247:30 pm | $25Rhythm, Blues & Soul, and Acoustic FolkMusic as Folk ArtIn Appalachia, music is not separate from craft.It is craft.Fiddles were carved from local wood. Banjos evolved from African instruments and mountain ingenuity. Dulcimers were shaped on kitchen tables. Songs were passed from porch to porch, from church to cornfield, from one generation to the next.Getting together to play music and dance was not entertainment in the modern sense — it was community glue. Barn dances, front-porch picking, shape-note singing, church hymns, ballads carried across ridgelines — these were acts of survival and belonging.Music here holds memory.It holds grief.It holds courtship and humor and rebellion.It is as much a part of Appalachian folk art as a quilt or a face jug.
A Living TraditionAppalachian folk art is not frozen in time.It is not nostalgia.It is a living conversation between past and present — between Cherokee tradition and settler craft, between necessity and imagination, between land and hand.And it is not surviving by accident.Collectors like Barry Huffman spent decades recognizing the brilliance in Southern and Appalachian self-taught artists long before the wider art world caught up. Writers and documentarians like Matt Ledbetter — who began knocking on doors and picking music at nine years old under the tutelage of his father, Wade Ledbetter — have dedicated themselves to telling the stories of the makers themselves. Through podcasts, books, exhibitions, and quiet conversations, they help people see that this work is not “primitive” or quaint — it is complex, rooted, culturally rich, and deeply American.They remind us that folk art is not just something to admire.It is something to understand.It changes because we change.But it remains rooted in place.You can still see the person in it.You can still see the mountains.And if you look closely enough, you can still see the first hands that shaped this region — working clay by riverbanks, weaving cane in the shade, making beauty from what the land offered.That is Appalachian folk art.It is handmade.It is local.It is inherited.And it is still being made.
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Where Hands RememberYou can tell when a place expects you to slow down.Not because anyone tells you to—but because your body does it on its own. Your voice drops. Your steps soften on gravel. You start to notice small sounds: the tap of a hammer on iron, the low hum of a wheel turning clay, the whisper of reeds sliding into place under someone’s fingers. Even the laughter here carries differently. It doesn’t echo. It settles.The John C. Campbell Folk School sits tucked into a fold of southern Appalachia, surrounded by woods and quiet and the kind of green that feels like it’s always been there. People arrive with packed schedules still buzzing in their heads. They leave a few days later with red clay under their nails, a new object cooling on a table, and the faint disorientation that comes from remembering how it feels to work with your hands for hours at a time.This is not a museum of old ways. It is not a retreat center in disguise. It is a working campus—alive with motion, mistakes, laughter, sweat, and the steady practice of learning for the sake of learning.Across roughly 270 acres, studios are scattered among historic buildings, gardens, and footpaths that seem to gently encourage wandering. There is no straight line from one place to another here. People drift between the blacksmithing shop and the pottery studio. They linger on porches. They pause to watch someone else work. They eat together. They get pulled into a dance they didn’t plan to attend.
Time loosens its grip in places like this.You might begin the morning with coffee in the dining hall, tools waiting on your workbench across campus. By afternoon, you’ve lost track of the clock entirely—measuring your day not in hours, but in how many times you reshaped the same curve of wood before it finally made sense in your hands.At the center of campus, the Olive Dame Campbell Building holds more than meals and a craft shop. It holds the daily rhythm of the place. People gather here between classes, muddy boots under tables, project ideas sketched on napkins, strangers becoming familiar faces over soup and bread. Nearby, the History Center quietly tells the story of how this place came to be—not as a monument, but as context. A reminder that the Folk School did not appear fully formed. It grew, adapted, endured.Keith House anchors the administrative heart of the campus, but the true pulse of the Folk School lives in the studios: spaces shaped by use. The blacksmithing shop, shown above and to the right, carries the heat of constant fire. The pottery studio smells faintly of wet earth. Basketry rooms hold the dry sweetness of plant fibers. Woodturning hums with motion and patience. Each building holds a different texture of attention.The campus itself is designed to make community unavoidable. Paths cross. Doors stay open. Meals are shared. Music drifts across open windows. Even when you come here intending to keep to yourself, the place has a way of gently undoing that plan.Why This Place Matters Right NowThis year marks the John C. Campbell Folk School’s 100th anniversary—one hundred years of continuing to exist in a rural corner of southern Appalachia where things do not survive by accident. The longevity itself is a quiet statement. Weather takes its toll here. Time takes its toll. Economies rise and fall. Roads change how people move through a place.
Generations leave. Generations return, or don’t.Reaching a century is not just something to celebrate. It comes with the weight of stewardship—of asking how a place like this continues to matter in a world that no longer moves at the pace it was built for.Today, many of the people who arrive on campus are not here to master a craft for a career. They come because their lives are crowded with screens and speed, with work that rarely leaves anything tangible behind at the end of the day. They come because they want to feel capable in their bodies again. Because they want to make something that cannot be emailed, copied, automated, or optimized.There is a quiet rebellion in choosing to spend a week learning how to shape clay, weave willow, turn wood, or coax iron into form. These are not efficient skills in the modern sense. They require attention. They require failure. They require the slow alignment of mind, muscle, and intention.At the Folk School, that alignment is not treated as quaint nostalgia. It is treated as necessary. The model here has never been about competition or credentials. There are no grades, no certificates, no pressure to “produce” in any marketable sense. Learning happens for the joy of learning. People come with different skill levels, different backgrounds, different reasons for being here. The only real expectation is presence—showing up to the studio, to the table, to each other.
That presence takes on a particular resonance in a moment when so much creative work is becoming increasingly abstracted—typed, generated, filtered through machines. At the Folk School, the work resists that flattening. The bowl holds the marks of the hand that shaped it. The basket remembers the tension of each reed. The forged hook carries the memory of heat and strain.What people leave with is not just an object.It is the recalibration of attention.They return home with a quieter nervous system, a renewed sense of agency, and the embodied reminder that their hands still know how to learn.Inside the Studios: Where the Work LivesIn the woodturning studio, time announces itself in rings.Each bowl begins with a block of wood that once stood somewhere else—on a hillside, at the edge of a field, in a yard where someone once sat in its shade. When it’s mounted on the lathe, that former life becomes visible again. Grain tightens and loosens in slow spirals. Knots interrupt the smoothness of the cut. The wood remembers weather.The students learn to listen for that memory.A tool catches if rushed. The lathe hum deepens when pressure shifts. Fine dust lifts into the light and settles on sleeves and eyelashes. The work demands attention—not just to the form you want to make, but to the material you are working with. The tree has opinions. You adjust.There is a particular quiet that settles over a room when people are turning wood. Not silence—movement and sound fill the space—but a shared focus. Bodies lean forward in the same posture. Breath syncs to the rhythm of the machine. People who arrived as strangers end Fine FurnitureConsignment831 Old Lenoir RdHickory, NC 28601 @thehickorytree (828) 324-1655www.shophickorytree.com
up standing shoulder to shoulder, watching one another’s progress, offering small advice, sharing the strange joy of discovering that something useful can come from something raw.In the pottery studio, the pace shifts but the listening remains. Clay wobbles under hands still learning its temperament. Bowls collapse. Rims go soft. Someone laughs at the mess of it and starts again. The wheel becomes a teacher of humility—nothing holds its shape until you learn how to hold yourself steady first.Basketry carries a different rhythm—slow, patient, almost conversational. Reeds slide into place with a dry whisper. Patterns emerge one repetition at a time. The basket does not hurry. It becomes what the hands allow it to become.In the blacksmithing shop, the language is heat and sound. Fire breathes. Metal rings. Sweat runs. What begins as brute force refines into precision. The hammer learns restraint. Power learns patience.Even in the kaleidoscope studio—where small pieces of glass are arranged into repeating worlds—the work is about attention. Tiny adjustments alter the whole pattern. The lesson repeats across every studio: nothing meaningful appears fully formed. Everything worth making requires your presence.Across disciplines, the studios hold a shared truth: these are not tasks you can multitask your way through. The work claims the body. The mind follows.People leave the studios marked by their labor—dust on their clothes, clay in their cuticles, the faint ache of muscles rediscovering themselves. The objects they carry away matter. But what stays with them longer is the feeling of being wholly inside a process again.
21A Folk School at 100: How This Place Came to BeThe John C. Campbell Folk School did not begin as a destination. It began as an idea about how people might live and learn together.When Olive Dame Campbell and her colleague Marguerite Butler helped establish the school in 1925, they were not imagining a campus full of studios and visiting artists from across the country. They were responding to a very real concern in the mountains of southern Appalachia: young people were leaving, farms were struggling, and traditional knowledge—how to grow food, make what you needed, care for a place—was slipping away.Olive, whose late husband John C. Campbell had spent years studying social and educational conditions in the region, believed that learning should be rooted in community and daily life. Along with Butler, she looked to Scandinavian folk school models—schools built not around credentials, but around adult learning, shared work, shared meals, and shared culture. The goal was not to create specialists. It was to strengthen people where they lived.In its earliest years, the Folk School functioned as a working farm. Students learned agricultural techniques, dairying, homesteading skills. Weaving, sewing, and other handcrafts were part of the picture, but they were not yet the center. The center was survival—how to make a sustainable life in a rural place.Over time, the needs of the community changed. Government agricultural programs took on much of the technical training the Folk School had once provided. Roads came. Work shifted. The region opened to the outside world in ways that were both promising and destabilizing. What the Folk School became, slowly and deliberately, was something else: a place for people—local and visiting—to come together around making, music, dance, and shared cultural life.Craft moved to the center not because tradition needed to be preserved behind glass, but because it remained useful as a way of learning how to be in relationship—with materials, with place, with one another. Music and dance stayed because they have always been how people build community in these mountains. The school evolved into a kind of cultural hearth, warming generations of visitors who came to learn skills, but left with something harder to name.A century later, that hearth is still burning. The buildings have been repaired and reimagined, but they are not precious in the way museum spaces often are. They bear the marks of use. The studios smell like what happens inside them. The dining hall holds
the residue of thousands of conversations. The paths across campus have been walked into being by people who came here looking for something they could not find at home.What has endured is not a single curriculum, but a philosophy: learning happens best when people live alongside one another, when knowledge is shared across skill levels and generations, and when making is treated not as product, but as practice.That philosophy has carried this place through a hundred years of change.From Ground to Hand: Where the Materials BeginOne of the quiet shifts happening at the Folk School right now is a return to origin.Not just where techniques come from, but where materials come from.It’s easy, in modern craft spaces, to begin with a bundle of purchased supplies: reeds already dried, yarn already dyed, wood already milled, clay already bagged and uniform. The Folk School is leaning into something slower and more honest—inviting students to consider what exists before the studio.In the gardens, willow grows in dense stands. Students harvest it, strip it, sort it by thickness, learn how different varieties bend or resist. The basket you see taking shape in a studio once stood rooted in soil nearby. The curve of a handle carries the memory of weather.Nearby, dye plants push their way up through the ground. Leaves, flowers, and roots become color—extracted slowly, coaxed into vats, transformed into ink or dye. Yarn passes through
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24those colors, deepening into blues, rusts, golds. When a woven piece dries on a line, the color it holds is not just pigment. It is place.Broom corn dries in bundles, waiting to be bound into something both useful and ornamental. Herbs find their way into soaps and kitchens. Even decorative corn grown for seasonal gatherings becomes part of the visual language of the campus—proof that what grows here shapes how the place looks and feels.There is a growing effort, too, to steward materials that carry deep cultural meaning in this region. River cane, once abundant along creeks and rivers, has been reduced by development, floods, and environmental change. The Folk School is working to let patches of it recover along their own waterways—learning how to care for it so that it can be harvested responsibly and shared in partnership with Cherokee artists and cultural institutions. Basketry made from river cane is not just craft. It is continuity.Clay, too, has been brought back into the conversation. In recent years, students and instructors have dug local clay, tested it, prepared it by hand, and learned the subtle differences between soils across North Carolina. When a bowl is thrown from earth that came from nearby ground, the object carries a different weight. It becomes less anonymous. The land becomes part of the lineage of the work.Tracing materials back to their source changes how people touch them. When you know where something comes from, you tend to waste less of it. You work more slowly. You listen to what the material can offer instead of forcing it into a shape it resists.In a culture that often treats resources as endless and interchangeable, this attention to origin feels quietly radical.It reminds people that making is not just about skill. It is about relationship—with land, with history, with the people who carried these practices forward long before this campus existed.
25Who Comes Here (And Why They Stay)The people who arrive at the Folk School do not arrive with a single story.Some come newly retired, carrying decades of responsibility that have finally loosened their grip. They arrive with lists of classes they’ve wanted to take for years but never had time for. They stay late in the studios, unbothered by the slow pace, relieved to be bad at something again without consequence.Some come burned out from careers that once promised meaning and now offer mostly noise. They arrive wired, shoulders high, phones still lighting up in their pockets. By midweek, those phones are forgotten in drawers. Hands take over where keyboards used to be. The nervous system relearns what sustained attention feels like.Some come younger than expected. They arrive with a practiced fluency in screens and a hunger for something that resists them a little. They want to touch the real world again—to feel weight and resistance, to fail in visible ways, to leave with proof that they were here in their bodies.Some come local. They fit the Folk School into their working lives through shorter classes at Olive’s Porch in downtown Murphy—halfday introductions to basketry or knitting, cooking or foraging. They test the water first. Later, some of them take the longer leap onto campus, discovering that the place they’ve driven past for years can hold them, too.
26And then there are the people who come back.They know where the best light hits the paths in late afternoon. They know which porch catches the breeze. They greet instructors by name. They recognize the sound of the dinner bell. For them, the Folk School is not a novelty. It is a return.Staying on campus folds people into a temporary village. Meals are shared. Conversations extend past class hours. Someone you met over breakfast ends up beside you at a lathe that afternoon. You borrow sandpaper from a stranger. You sit next to the same person at dinner three nights in a row and learn the shape of their life without trying to.Community forms not through grand gestures, but through repetition: walking the same paths, eating the same soup, working through the same small frustrations of learning something new. The Folk School does not promise transformation. It offers conditions where transformation becomes possible.People leave with objects tucked into boxes and bags. But what they carry longer is the memory of having belonged, briefly but genuinely, to a place shaped by shared effort.A Century of Staying HumanA hundred years is a long time for any institution to remain intact. It is especially long in a rural place that has weathered economic shifts, cultural change, and the slow erosion of traditions that once defined daily life.
27The John C. Campbell Folk School has not survived by refusing to change. It has survived by changing carefully—by holding fast to a set of values even as the world around it accelerated. Joy. Kindness. Stewardship. Non-competition. These are not slogans here. They are practiced in small, daily ways: in how classes are taught, in how people are welcomed, in how land and materials are tended, in how difference is held without turning into spectacle.At one hundred years old, the Folk School stands as proof that continuity does not require stagnation. Tradition is not a fixed shape. It is a current that carries forward, altered by each set of hands that enters the water.In a time when speed is rewarded and attention is fractured, the Folk School’s insistence on slowness reads less like nostalgia and more like resistance. The campus offers no shortcuts. You cannot rush a bowl into roundness. You cannot hurry a basket into balance. You cannot compress community into an app.What endures here is not just craft. It is the practice of staying human in the presence of others.What People Carry HomeOn the last day of class, the studios empty slowly.Projects are wrapped. Tools are returned. Dust is brushed from sleeves. Projects are shown off. Someone takes a final photo of their work before placing it carefully into a box. Goodbyes stretch longer than planned. Plans to return are spoken aloud, half in hope, half in promise.People leave with objects that will find places in their homes—a bowl on a shelf, a broom by the door, a basket that holds something small and useful. Those objects will age. They will gather stories. They will remind their makers of a week when their hands were occupied with something simple and true.But the deeper thing they carry home is harder to display.It is the memory of attention. The memory of learning without urgency. The memory of being part of a place that asked them to show up—fully, imperfectly—and offered them space to do so.Long after the clay dust is washed from their hands, that memory stays.
A Home for Mountain MakingWalking into the Folk Art Center just off the Blue Ridge Parkway feels less like entering a museum and more like stepping into a long conversation — one that has been unfolding in these mountains for generations.Inside, the work speaks softly but confidently. Handwoven baskets, carved wood, pottery, textiles, furniture, and paintings sit not as relics of the past, but as evidence of something still very much alive. These are objects shaped by hands that understand repetition, patience, and purpose.The center itself sits at Milepost 382 of the Blue Ridge Parkway and serves as a cooperative project between the National Park Service and the Southern Highland Craft Guild, one of the most important organizations supporting craft traditions in Southern Appalachia.The Guild’s roots stretch back to 1930, when a group of mountain artisans in Tennessee formed the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild. The Great Depression was devastating for rural communities across Appalachia, but the Guild helped its members survive by creating opportunities to market their work while preserving the region’s traditional skills.Folk Art Center
Nearly a century later — and after two name changes — the Southern Highland Craft Guild remains a vital force in the Appalachian arts community. Its mission centers on cultivating the crafts and makers of the Southern Highlands through shared resources, education, marketing opportunities, and the preservation of traditional techniques.Guild membership is drawn from across the Appalachian region, including Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and Alabama. Becoming a member is no small accomplishment. The application process is rigorous and juried, with only about ten percent of applicants accepted — a mark of both artistic skill and dedication to craft.The Folk Art Center serves as the public face of this community. Inside, visitors will find a large craft shop featuring the work of Guild members, a library, three exhibition spaces, an auditorium for events, and a National Park Service bookstore and information desk. within the collection, representing generations of Southern Appalachian craft traditions. Because the collection rotates regularly, each visit offers something new to discover — from traditional woodcarving and pottery to textiles, basketry, furniture, and handmade dolls.Much of this collection traces back to Frances Louisa Goodrich, a remarkable figure in the history of Appalachian craft. Goodrich moved to the Asheville area in 1890 and quickly noticed something many outsiders overlooked: the mountain communities surrounding her possessed extraordinary traditional skills.Woodcarving, weaving, basket making, pottery — these were not hobbies but everyday practices, passed down through families.Goodrich believed there was a wider market for this work. She founded Allanstand Craft Shop, one of the first roadside craft shops devoted to Appalachian handmade goods. Her instinct proved correct. The shop helped introduce the craftsmanship of mountain artisans to audiences far beyond the region.
Her work became part of the broader Southern Appalachian Handicraft Revival, a cultural movement spanning the late 1800s through the early twentieth century that sought to preserve traditional craft skills while providing economic opportunities for rural communities. That same movement helped inspire institutions like Penland School of Craft and the John C. Campbell Folk School.When the Southern Mountain Handicraft Guild was formally established, Goodrich was already 75 years old. Confident in the Guild’s mission, she donated both her Allanstand Cottage Industries business and a large collection of traditional crafts to help form its foundation.Today, that legacy continues inside the Folk Art Center.Visitors move slowly through the building, often lingering longer than they expected. It’s easy to find yourself leaning closer to examine tool marks in a carved bowl or the subtle rhythm of a handwoven basket. The work rewards attention.The Guild’s mission has always extended beyond preservation. Connecting artists with the marketplace remains one of its core goals.Each year the organization hosts two major Craft Fairs in downtown Asheville at Harrah’s Cherokee Center, held in July and October. These weekend-long events bring together more than 200 makers and attract over 10,000 visitors who come to see — and purchase — some of the finest handmade craft in the region.But even on a quiet weekday, the Folk Art Center carries the same spirit.Visitors drift through the galleries. Conversations happen softly between display cases. The building feels welcoming rather than formal, as if the craft itself is guiding the pace.For readers across the foothills, the Folk Art Center is also remarkably accessible — an easy day trip along the Blue Ridge Parkway that rewards curiosity. You might stop in for an hour or spend an entire afternoon wandering through the galleries.Either way, you leave reminded of something important.Appalachian craft was never just about objects. It was about skill, usefulness, beauty, and pride — values that have lived in these mountains for generations.Inside the Folk Art Center, those values are still being practiced every day.
32F o ot h i l l s F o l k A r t F e st iva lThere’s a particular kind of joy in watching a place grow into itself.Not by trying to become something it isn’t, but by deciding—again and again—that what it already has is worth tending. That’s what’s happening in Newton. And that’s what the Folk Art Festival has become: not just an event that lands on the calendar once a year, but something the town has chosen to carry forward.I remember when this festival felt smaller and more tucked-away, like something you found if you were already part of the art world. It didn’t feel like a “townwide” thing yet. It felt like a little secret. And when I mentioned that memory, the organizers smiled, because it lined up with the festival’s beginnings.“When it originally started in 2006,” Mary Yount told me, “it was down in the Denver, Lake Norman area. And it was literally out in a field.”An actual field. Dirt underfoot. Weather deciding whether the day would be kind or not. Thirty or so vendors. The kind of early-stage gathering that feels intimate and hopeful—but also fragile. The kind of thing that can disappear quietly if the wrong combination of fatigue, logistics, and life changes stack up.
33And for a while, it nearly did.The people who first built it were older, part of a collaborative. The art museum and volunteers were involved. Over time, attrition set in. Folks got tired. The labor got heavier. The joy got harder to sustain.“We just can’t do this anymore,” was the point it reached.Originally, the festival lived in the fall. After COVID reshaped everything about how communities move through time and events, there was talk about shifting it to spring. The museum participated in that transition once—and then stepped back. As they explained, the museum was in the middle of big changes: renovations, expansion, strategic decisions about where their energy needed to be centered.
Since 19902613 N Center St, Hickory(828) 323-8477kellyandcompanysalon.comUse this QR code to book your appointment!If your hair’s not ready, you’re not ready. Let Kelly’s finish the look.If the festival wasn’t on their property and wasn’t centered in Hickory, they couldn’t keep carrying it the same way. Their board wanted those resources focused inward.What happened next is the part that matters most to me.Newton didn’t let the festival disappear.“The city said, we can’t lose it,” she told me. And downtown businesses agreed. They know what it means when people come into town because something good is happening in the street. They know what it means for a place to feel alive for a day. They stepped up alongside the city to make sure this didn’t quietly fade out of existence.That’s how this became a Newton thing—not by default, but by decision.Now, in 2026, they’re calling this the 10th anniversary year in Newton, since the festival came here in 2016. The timeline is a little strange because of the COVID years, and she laughed about how communities everywhere are still trying to explain to future generations why anniversaries feel “off” by a couple of years. The truth is, those gaps are part of the story now, too.What’s changed over time isn’t just the location—it’s the philosophy.The festival has always been juried, but the energy around that has shifted. The goal isn’t to be precious about what counts as “real” folk art. The goal is quality, sustainability, and experience.“We have plenty of capacity for more artists,” she said, “but our goal is quality, not quantity. Our sweet spot is somewhere around 100 to 120 vendors of good quality folk art.”They’ve also gotten more thoughtful about what folk art even means in a living,
breathing culture. The definitions they share with artists and jurors reflect that wider understanding.Heritage folk art focuses on the preservation of traditional methods and styles—skills carried forward through generations.Traditional folk art reflects adaptations made for function or community purpose, where techniques evolve naturally as people continue to use them in everyday life.Contemporary folk art represents the modern evolution of those traditions—work that maintains its roots while allowing room for individual expression. The changes are often subtle, sometimes driven simply by the need to make something function better in the present day.
And the throughline is simple: it’s not about credentials. It’s about the work.“Nobody sat and taught him how to do that,” she said about one of their wood carvers. “He just started doing it. And now you can look at it and say, ‘Oh yeah—that’s a bear.’”That’s folk art. That’s the spirit of it.They’ve widened the lens just enough to stay alive—opening space for certain fine artists when the work fits the feel of folk art, expanding mediums to include fiber, glass, iron forging, wood carving, and repurposed materials. They’ve also had to reckon with the reality that many artists are aging, and hauling tents and tables weekend after weekend takes a toll.“They don’t want to come and sit for four hours and lug stuff and put it up and take it down and take it somewhere else and do it all over again the next weekend.”So sustainability isn’t just about the festival surviving—it’s about the artists being able to keep showing up.This year, they’re making changes that reflect that care. Booths are arranged back-to-back in the middle of the street to protect the work and improve flow. Food vendors are curated so downtown restaurants aren’t undercut. Restaurants are offering delivery to vendors, because nobody should have to choose between eating and keeping their booth open.And then there’s the youth art feature.
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39They’re inviting 7th and 8th graders to create small 3x3 canvases that will be displayed during the festival. When they started talking about the numbers of students involved, she laughed and admitted, “My mouth hit the floor.” The scale is bigger than they expected. But they’re doing it anyway, because they understand what it brings with it: families. Grandparents. First-time visitors. A generation seeing their work treated as something worth displaying in public.That’s not just cute. That’s cultural continuity.From what they can tell, this is the largest folk art festival in western North Carolina. There are others—smaller, more elite, more niche. But this one has become expansive. Rooted. A street-level experience of what art looks like when it belongs to a town, not just to a gallery.And Newton itself is changing in ways that feel aligned with that spirit.There’s a creative energy here right now—new art spaces, collaboration between businesses, people choosing to build something together instead of competing for the same sliver of attention. It doesn’t feel like Newton is trying to become Asheville or anything else. It feels like it’s becoming Newton on purpose.Mary Yount said it best: the attitude here is that everybody is welcome, and there’s enough for everybody. If we all pull from our own circles, there’s room for the whole thing to grow.That’s what this festival represents to me now.Not nostalgia for what folk art used to be—but continuity. A living practice. A town deciding that handmade things, shared space, and creative work in public still matter.And in a world that moves fast and forgets faster, that choice feels quietly radical.
40Where the Old Things are Stored: The Museum of Cherokee PeopleBefore these mountains were called Appalachia, they were home.Long before roads cut through the ridges or towns gathered in the valleys, the Cherokee people lived, made, and created here. The land shaped their art, just as it shaped their lives — through river cane gathered by hand, clay pulled from the earth, wood carved with purpose, and symbols carried in story rather than written word.Today, that living history is preserved and shared on the Qualla Boundary in Cherokee, North Carolina — on the sovereign land of the Eastern Ba nd of Cherokee Indians — at the Museum of the Cherokee People, one of the longestoperating tribal museums in the country. Established in 1948, the museum has long existed to preserve and perpetuate Cherokee history and culture. But in recent years, it has done something more: it has reintroduced itself.Last fall, the institution formally embraced its Cherokee name:ᏣᎳᎩ ᎢᏗᏴᏫᏯᎯ ᎢᎦᏤᎵ ᎤᏪᏘ ᎠᏍᏆᏂᎪᏙᏗTsalagi idiyvwiyahi igatseli uweti asquanigododi —“All of us are Cherokee people. It is all of ours, where the old things are stored.”There is something grounding about that phrasing. All of us. Not an archive separated from the community it belongs to. Not a collection interpreted from the outside. But a shared inheritance — stewarded, protected, and spoken for by Cherokee people themselves.Walking through the museum is a different kind of experience. It doesn’t feel like stepping backward in time. It feels like stepping into a conversation that never ended.And that conversation matters deeply to those of us who care about Appalachian folk art.
41Much of what we now call “mountain craft” — hand-built pottery, river cane basketry, carved tools, beadwork, woodwork rooted in necessity — has its roots in Cherokee making. Before settlers shaped clay in these valleys, Cherokee potters were coiling vessels by hand, firing them low and slow, impressing paddles into wet earth to leave both texture and story. Before woven forms appeared in mountain cabins, Cherokee artists were splitting river cane, dyeing it with natural pigments, and weaving baskets strong enough to gather, store, and carry life itself.The museum makes this lineage visible.Traditional forms are displayed not as relics, but as foundations. Visitors can trace design, material, and technique — and begin to see how deeply Cherokee art influenced what later became known as Appalachian folk craft. The story of making in these mountains does not begin in the 1800s. It begins much earlier, in hands that understood this land first.And those hands are still working.Many Cherokee artists today continue to create pottery, baskets, carvings, beadwork, and contemporary works that carry forward old knowledge while speaking in modern forms. The museum centers these living makers alongside historical objects, showing clearly that Cherokee art is not frozen behind glass. It is practiced. It is taught. It evolves. It sustains families and community.The museum is also preparing thoughtfully for the future. Plans are underway for a large offsite collections facility to properly steward cultural materials, and a multi-year renovation and reinterpretation of the permanent exhibition — last updated in 1998 — is in motion. Community voices, interdisciplinary perspectives, and scholarship from a new generation of Cherokee historians and Indigenous professionals are shaping what comes next.
This is not a static institution. It is living, just like the culture it represents.The museum also tells the harder story — one that cannot be separated from the beauty. The forced removal of the Cherokee people from their homeland, known as the Trail of Tears, is acknowledged with honesty and care. Loss is named. Survival is honored. Resilience is not romanticized. The continued presence of the Eastern Band on the Qualla Boundary is itself a testament to sovereignty and endurance.What makes the Museum of the Cherokee People so powerful is its steadiness. It does not ask visitors to perform guilt. It does not soften history for comfort. Instead, it offers understanding — and with it, respect.For readers across Western North Carolina, this is an essential visit — not just for education, but for perspective.The folk art of Appalachia grew from many influences, many hardships, and many hands. But to understand it fully, we must begin with those who were here first — and recognize that their influence is not past tense.In honoring Cherokee art and culture, we are not adding something separate to the story of these mountains.We are acknowledging its beginning — and its continuation.
44Sam The Dot Man:Faith, Repetition, and DevotionSam McMillan — known across the South as Sam The Dot Man — is one of the most instantly recognizable figures in American folk art. His work doesn’t shout. It prays.Born in 1926 in North Carolina, McMillan began covering surfaces with dots after a profound religious experience in the 1970s. What followed wasn’t a phase or an artistic experiment, but a calling. From that moment on, his life’s work became an act of devotion — each dot placed with intention, repetition becoming ritual.Using paint pens, markers, and simple materials, McMillan filled paper, cardboard, and found objects with dense fields of color. Faces emerge. Angels appear. Scripture hums beneath the surface. His compositions feel ordered and meditative, built through patience rather than training.Though his work is deeply spiritual, it has often been misunderstood — mistaken for obsession or dismissed as naïve. But within Southern folk tradition, repetition has long been a form of prayer. Quilting. Beadwork. Gospel refrains. The doing becomes the believing.McMillan’s art reflects that lineage. It carries faith without polish — not filtered through institutions or aesthetics, but lived honestly and visibly. There is no irony here. No performance. Only belief made tangible.Today, his work is held in major collections and museums, recognized not because it conforms to fine art standards, but because it refuses to. Sam “The Dot Man” McMillan represents something rare: a visual language shaped entirely by conviction.His dots are not decoration.They are devotion, one mark at a time.
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Charlie and Susan Frye Foothills Roots, Coastal LightFor years, Charlie Frye’s work felt stitched right into Lenoir itself. His bright colors, playful figures, and unmistakable style showed up in the places people gathered — on walls where art wasn’t separate from daily life, but part of it.Charlie is a self-taught folk artist whose work is instantly recognizable. Owls, musicians, animals, mountain scenes, and familiar characters appear again and again, painted with bold lines and fearless color. There’s a looseness to his work — a sense that it was made with joy rather than hesitation — and that joy has always been part of its appeal.Much of Charlie’s art is created on found or unconventional surfaces: old wood, salvaged materials, pieces that already carry a story before the paint ever touches them. It’s a way of working that feels deeply Appalachian — using what’s close at hand and letting the material help guide the outcome.His wife, Susan, is an artist as well, and her work offers a beautiful balance to Charlie’s. Where his paintings feel spontaneous and energetic, hers often carry a quieter precision. Through layered paper collage and carefully constructed imagery, Susan creates pieces that feel thoughtful and intimate — full of personality, memory, and gentle humor.Though the Fryes now live on the North Carolina coast, their foothills roots remain visible in everything they make. The subjects, the spirit, even the color choices still echo the mountains where their artistic voices took shape. The scenery may have shifted, but the heart of the work has not.Together, Charlie and Susan continue to create art that feels accessible, honest, and deeply human — the kind of work that doesn’t ask to be decoded, only felt. Their story is a reminder that folk art isn’t bound to a single place. Once it’s rooted, it travels with you.
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Sparky — The Gourd LadyArt Grown from the Ground UpFor many people across the foothills, the sight of a painted gourd brings one name immediately to mind: Sparky.Known affectionately as the Gourd Lady, Sparky spent decades turning simple, homegrown gourds into works of folk art filled with color, humor, and unmistakable personality. Birds, animals, patterns, and playful faces emerged from her hands — each piece slightly different, each one carrying the warmth of the person who made it.Gourds have long been part of Appalachian life. Before they were ever decoration, they were tools — used as dippers, containers, and everyday household items. Sparky honored that tradition by keeping the gourd itself at the center of her work, allowing its natural shape to guide what it would become.What made her art so beloved wasn’t just the finished piece, but the spirit behind it. Sparky’s work felt joyful and approachable, never precious or overly serious. Her gourds didn’t ask to be studied — they invited you to smile.She became a familiar presence at festivals and craft shows across North Carolina, where people sought her out year after year. Many families still own a gourd they bought from Sparky decades ago, displayed proudly on a shelf or porch — a small, colorful reminder of a moment shared.Even after her passing, Sparky’s influence remains visible throughout the foothills. Gourds continue to appear at festivals, in gardens, and in folk art collections, carrying forward the idea that art doesn’t need expensive materials or formal training — only imagination and heart.Sparky’s legacy reminds us that some of the most meaningful art begins exactly where it grows — right in the dirt beneath our feet.
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Whirligigs & Wind Art: When Motion Becomes JoyLong before anyone called it art, people in North Carolina were making things move.Tin cut into blades. Bicycle parts repurposed. Old fans, spoons, and scraps wired together until they caught the breeze and came alive. What couldn’t be thrown away could still spin.In eastern North Carolina, one man helped turn that impulse into something unforgettable. Using salvaged metal, road signs, and machinery parts, Vollis Simpson began building massive wind-powered sculptures that towered above the fields around Lucama. They weren’t made for galleries or audiences — they were made because he liked to see things move.His son once described the simplicity behind it all:“If he goes to the junkyard and finds 25 fans, he comes home and makes 25 whirligigs,” Leonard Simpson said. “He just did it for enjoyment. People would come from Wilson and stop and point. He came to enjoy the social aspect of it, and people started coming from further and further away. Next thing you knew, people were coming from Atlanta and Richmond.”What began as mechanical curiosity became something joyful, mesmerizing, and impossible to ignore.His whirligigs reminded people of something they already knew deep down: motion can be art.