Credit Matt Peiken | BPR News
Even through their masks, you could sense the smiles across the faces of John and Judy Nelson, of Asheville, as they waited to get into Friday night’s concert at Isis Music Hall.
“I am ready to sit back, have some good food and listen to some good music,” John Nelson said. “It’s gonna be a great night.”
And it’s the kind of night few in this region have been able to experience over the past 13 months live music inside a club. But as North Carolina has relaxed some conditions for indoor gatherings, local venues have started booking indoor shows with capacity restrictions and masking protocols in place.
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Collaborators Nye (left) and Terran first met at a goth picnic in Asheville s Riverside Cemetery.
The people who call themselves Nye and Terran met two years ago at a goth picnic in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery.
“We decided we should have a meeting to see whether or not we were psychopaths,” Terran said. “So we picked a neutral location that now lives forever as the Waffle House of Friendship, so that we could get to know each other and decide whether we wanted to be friends, and it was like a fire started.”
That fire, as Terran put it, has resulted in an artistic achievement astonishing in its breadth and ambition. “Vacant Arcadia” is a musical theater opus airing online, in sound only, over 10 episodes spanning about 5½ hours. The show premieres March 18 through an online company called Holophonic Theatre.
Credit Matt Peiken | BPR News
Even in his early days making paintings, Joseph Pearson understood there was no place in and around Gulfport, Miss., for Black artists.
“There were no artists that I knew in the neighborhood who were doing anything,” Pearson recalled. “If there were, of course, they would have been white artists and we wouldn’t have had contact because of segregation.”
Pearson emerged from the 1960s of the Deep South with two compulsions: Learn from Black artists and make paintings addressing racial injustice.
“Every book I could get my hands on, I’d look for artists who primarily looked like me,” he said.
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Claire Elizabeth Barratt performing at the 2018 (Re)Happening through Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center.
Credit Matt Peiken | BPR News
Claire Elizabeth Barratt once drove alone from Asheville to Albuquerque, N.M. 26 straight hours without stopping except for gas.
“I’m actually thinking of maybe doing a cross-country trip as a durational performance,” she said. “Just doing the whole I-40 coast to coast and calling that the performance.”
That view of her art at times defying conventional boundaries of time, space and even audience is among the traits stamping Barratt as a solo performance artist unlike any other in this region. She’s a dancer without a company, a sculpture without a pedestal. She might wrap herself in paper, plastic or holiday lighting or project images or video onto her body.