Galleries, artists engage visitors in the work of art
Toe River Arts’ second of its biannual Studio Tours was launched with a customary reception Friday night at the Kokol Gallery in downtown Spruce Pine. Nearly 200 people crowded the preview of work by local Mitchell and Yancey County artists, whose studios would be open to the public over the weekend.
As with the recent Spruce Pine Potters Market and Penland’s annual summer auction, art collectors and enthusiasts from around the South and East Coast came to see the recent work of local craftspeople.
Many artists and businesses participate in the Studio Tours. In downtown Bakersville, local galleries In Tandem and Mica displayed work by participating Studio Tour artists. Heading north to Toecane Road, Sally Morgan Guérard’s studio was packed with sheaves of broomcorn, the straw necessary for her to construct her fanciful brooms built using traditional methods.
Her most visibly unique piece was a large tool that was part broom and part scythe.
“Oh, that’s my Grim Sweeper,” Guérard told a room full of curious visitors.
Heading south to Wing Road, painter Carmen Grier was entertaining a group of art collectors from Charlotte, who make the Studio Tour part of their calendar each year. Farther down the road at Penland, visitors caught the Bringle sisters, Cynthia and Edwina, at their shared gallery, where Edwina’s textile work is intermingled with Cynthia’s pottery. The studio also displays Cynthia’s landscape paintings.
“People are always surprised to learn that I paint,” Cynthia said. “But I actually started my artistic life as a painter.”
A new addition to the studio tours was the husband and wife team of Richard and Cheryl Prisco, who recently built their new home (complete with separate studios and a shared gallery space) in Bakersville. Both native New Englanders, the Priscos have called the South home for over 30 years, first in Savannah, Ga., and for the last 14 years in Western North Carolina, where Richard has been the professor of industrial design at Appalachian State University in Boone.
While Richard is an interior design artist with a primary focus on furniture, Cheryl is a creator of assemblages. But both share an aesthetic of mixing material in architectural ways.
Richard’s contemporary benches and lamps blend wood, glass, steel and concrete together, while Cheryl assembles salvaged wood, which she paints with acrylics, within metal frames, creating work that is both painterly and sculptural.