Susan Alta Martin | October 1-14, 202

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During her time at Lamplight, Susan Alta Martin will, over two weeks, transform Lamplight into a stage for a durational performance that uses the idea of a waiting room as a metaphor for the current power structure. With the help of local artists, we will transform the space and shift the metaphor so that the locus of power is the community.


Susan’s Community Events:

October 1-6, 11am-7pm,
“Waiting,”
walk by and watch us wait!
The front window of the residency space will become the stage and inside artists will be “waiting.”


October 3rd, 5pm-8pm,
“The Funeral,”
Featuring Performances and a Parade
The evening will kick off with a toy theater performance by Stacey Davidson. That will be followed by a eulogy led by Anna Helgeson where people will have a chance to mourn what they feel has been lost during this unprecedented time of attack on social justice issues. Finally, there will be a parade around Haywood Road led by Nancy Asch and Beth Heinberg in support of the long history of social justice causes and the root values that we carry forward.


October 6-9, 11am-7pm,
“Transformation,”
walk by and watch us transform the waiting room
The space will again become a sort of stage and people can come by and watch as Tom Ashcraft and Susan will lead the transformation of the space from a waiting room to an art installation. Area artists will also be bringing in things they have transformed from broken objects.


October 10th, 5-8pm,
“Transform, Not Fix,”

For the second intermission, the public is invited to an opening reception for the art exhibition “Transform, Not Fix.” Based on the idea that the system is too broken to fix, we need to make something new out of what we have.



October 11-13th, 11am-7pm,
“Community,”
A workshop where you can bring your broken objects to the space and the artists will help you transform them!

Other collaborators include:
Dawn Roe, Jeannie Regan, Ursula Gullow. Kirsten Stolle, Nava Lubelski, Kate Chassner, Frances Bukovsky, Nora Hartlaub, Erik Mace, Staj Noell, Lynne Hudson, and more.

 

Artist Statement:
I am a photo-based artist. I work most often in three dimensions, making sculptures out of photographs. I am interested in how socio-economics and power are constructed and how they appear in the landscape (in the expanded sense). Photography’s connection to reality allows me to show those constructions through analogy. I take photographs and form them in ways that reveal the constructed nature of what has been normalized by the powerful. I recently made a miniature waiting room for the Mall R.A.T.S. prompt “Where do we come together?” In doing research for the piece I came across the quote, from the sociologist, Helmut Huff. He wrote: “To wait for someone for prolonged periods is to physically experience their importance through scarcity of access.” It struck me that this is how I feel most of the time – as if I am waiting, waiting for the next horrific news to drop. Recent events have brought issues of governmental power to the foreground and all kinds of crazy ideas have been normalized. I want to use the waiting room as a metaphor for our current power structure but the miniature wouldn’t hold what I wanted to say so for the Lamplight residency and I am changing scale. I am making a full-scale stage set of a waiting room where I — with the help of some local artists — will act out waiting and then transform the metaphor.

Impractical Instruments Interactive Art Exhibit at Lamplight Studios

Impractical Instruments Interactive Art Exhibit
hosted by Lamplight AVL

The Community Garden is a touchable, interactive environment that explores the systems that empower (or disempower) our communities. Engage with these systems through play, movement, music, and peeking into windows. What you water thrives.

September 6th, exhibit opening 2:30pm to 5:30pm

September 12th, exhibit open from 3-5:30pm with musical performance at 5:30pm – Shana Tucker

September 13th, exhibit open 12pm-2pm

September 17th, Game Design Workshop 6:30pm to 8:30pm

September 19th, Diorama Workshop 12pm to 3pm

Elizabeth Ivey | September 1-28, 2026

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During her time in the residency, Elizabeth will complete a series of 16×20 framed fabric collages and develop “Sunday Dinner at Grandma’s House”—a new body of work honoring the kitchen table as sacred space where Black women hold wisdom, stories, nourishment, and intergenerational presence. Working across handmade collage, fabric, embroidery, and found materials, each piece interrogates memory, legacy, and the quiet power of family ritual.

I create as mixed media artist working in collage, textiles, and found materials. My practice centers Black interior life, memory, and generational inheritance through layered narratives. At Lamplight, I will complete intimate-scale framed fabric collages and develop a new body of work exploring the sacred space of family gathering.

 

Elizabeth’s Community events:
Elizabeth will work in the studio throughout her September residency, inviting the community to witness her creative process in real time. Visitors can drop by to see work in progress, ask questions, and experience the studio as a living workspace. No performance or instruction-just authentic creative work on view. This honors the tradition of artists sharing their practice directly with community.

Every Saturday in September, 11 AM – 3 PM

 


Artist Statement:

Through collage and mixed media, I examine the intimate spaces where Black people gather and decide what to hold—the kitchen table, the quiet moment between generations where wisdom moves forward. These are where survival becomes strategy. Where memory becomes legacy. My practice honors Black interior life: how we love, teach, protect, and imagine futures. I layer fabric, photographs, found text, and stitched gesture to hold contradiction—what was inherited and what we reject, what we survive and what we thrive in. I am interested in long-game thinking. What does it mean to make art that honors both the immediate and the ancestral? My work asks this through lived experience—faith, memory, family, the small rituals that hold us. I work intuitively and deliberately at once. Contradiction is not a problem to solve—it is the landscape. Each piece invites you to recognize that Black interior life is not small. It is everything.

Headshot Image by: Amos Moses

ankita sharma | August 24-29, 2026

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During their residency, ankita will be working on “Human, Vermin” – a 48-hour long live-and-livestreamed, interactive, solo endurance performance that investigates surveillance, mistreatment, and interspecies relationships along the human/animal divide. As human, animal, and environmental rights are systematically dismantled, they ask “How are humans treated “like animals?” How are the politics of disgust mapped on to human and animals alike?” “What does it mean to be a human that’s considered a pest?”
This dance-theater theater experiment uses immersive world-building design, audience interaction, maskwork, and animalistic improvisations to tell a satirical pseudoscience narrative about the evolution of humanity. During the residency, ankita and their collaborator, Soren Kodak, will be setting the space up like an indoor terrarium and creating a list of 48 hour-long improvisational scores to follow, during which they evolve from animal to human and back again.
In-person audiences will be invited into the space to observe and interact with ankita’s animal body according to set tasks, if they choose. There will also be surrounding visual and informational pieces about “Human, Vermin” and its concepts in the space. The full performance will also be available via livestream (sign up here!).

Artist Statement:

ankita is a Brooklyn-based experimental choreographer and writer invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectations. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their performances are grungy, cheeky, character-based works of primal spirit, with movement practices rooted in Contemporary Dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora. ankita enjoys intense physical transformation, scintillating humor, and getting audience members to laugh or cry (sometimes both!).

ankita’s Community Events:

“Human, Vermin”
48-hour-long research performance:
Thursday, Aug 27th, 11AM-9PM

Friday, August 29th, 11AM-7PM

Sign up for the livestream

Artist Talkback with ankita sharma post “Human, Vermin”:
Friday, August 28th, 7PM

“March of Progress” Movement Workshop
Saturday, August 29th, 1-4PM
Sign up: spots are limited!

J Seger & Nathanael Roney | July 27-August 23, 2026

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Welcome J Seger and Nathanael Roney of Age Cowboy to Lamplight’s Residency at 821! During their residency J and Nathanael will build, install and present a baseball museum-like exhibition. The production aims to study realities around art show, historical education, sports entertainment, and artifact.In the final weekend of their residency, the museum installation will open to the public, and will usher visitors through an orchestrated and produced setting that blends atmospheres of art shows, museums, and baseball parks. Extended hours will allow visitors to continue viewing the works in a museum setting.

Save the Date for: 

Baseball Museum Opening Night | Fri Aug 21 | 6PM
Baseball Museum Extended Showing | Sat Aug 22 | 12-4PM

J Seger is the Rolling Stoner, the Sick Duck, a Marylander who began his musical odyssey in Richmond, VA, continued it in Brooklyn, NY, and lives it now in Asheville, NC. The music is wholly original while the person maintains a respect and reverence for possibility, tradition, and integrity. A writer, a player, and a singer; all genuinely being cool. Aside from music, J has created and collaborated on personal works in many mediums and forms: writing, video, print, sculpture, radio, textile, hardscape.

Nathanael Roney is primarily a visual artist, living and working in Asheville, NC since 2006. Originally schooled as a graphic designer, his frugality has expanded that tool to include original illustration, painting, printing, writing, photography, video and performance. He plays and writes music with J in The Family Swaggards, has an extensive history of exhibiting his work to the public, and writes and publishes what he refers to as “poetry” to simplify expectations and/or premises of consumption.
J Seger & Nathanael Roney present art under the name Age Cowboy.

Zoie Reamer | July 2-July 16

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We are excited to welcome Zoie Reamer to the Residency this July. During her time at the residency, Zoie will be working on oil paintings with corresponding projections, hand dyed soft sculpture, painted lamp pendants, as well as interactive sound installation.

Artist Statement:

Zoie Reamer is a multidisciplinary artist inspired by visual enmeshment of her inner imaginative world with reality, drawing from harmony in faces and sanctuaries in nature. She uses oil painting, illustration, soft sculpture, sound, and projections to create pieces that reflect the connections between these worlds. She often mixes technical, naturalistic rendition styles with process-based abstraction to achieve this connection..

Zaquia Luisa Salinas | April 29-May 13, 2026

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We are excited to welcome Zaquia Luisa Salinas to Lamplight’s Residency at 821 this spring! Throughout her time at the residency she will be working on A Call to Prayer: an immersive, participatory performance project that blends embodied ritual with collaborative installation.

Zaquia will develop installation elements – integrating objects, projections, and spatial design – while inviting community members to participate directly. Visitors are encouraged to contribute offerings to the space and engage in intimate, one-to-one (or small group) performance appointments with the artist.

Artist Statement:

Zaquia Salinas is a dance artist invested in movement-art as an act of reclamation and world-building. She is committed to creating work that forges meaningful connection through personal and collective storytelling. Conceptually rooted in biomythography, her work (re)builds narratives that braid the personal with the communal, expanding how story can be held, alchemized, and shared. Her interdisciplinary constellations operate as portals for communion with body, earth, ancestor, and spirit. At the heart of her work is the desire to create rituals and spaces that help us understand ourselves and each other more deeply.

Help Artists and Asheville Thrive Together

 

SUPPORT OUR CAMPAIGN

This winter, we’re raising $120,000 to support both our ongoing work and our exciting expansion at 2 Westwood Place.

At Lamplight AVL, we believe that artists are the heart of our town. At our home in West Asheville, our residency programs give artists the space, time, and resources they need to create innovative work and share it with our community.

Just down the road, at 2 Westwood Place, we’re building the next chapter of that mission: A new, mixed-use creative space. At the heart of 2 Westwood will be affordable, community-minded artist studios – with several spaces priced below market value to help artists stay and create right here in Asheville. Later next year, a portion of the building will become a community-funded, arts-forward event space. 2 Westwood is being designed as a third space for Asheville’s creative community that will host: open studios, shows, music, workshops, and other arts-centered programming.

This expansion grows directly out of our Recover, Remain & Thrive Program, launched in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Last year, you helped us fund and distribute immediate relief grants to help artists recover and long term sustaining grants to help artists remain in Asheville. Now we‘re raising $120,000 to help artists thrive in our community.

Your contributions will directly support:

• The operation of our new artist studios,

• Development of the community event venue,

• Affordable creative spaces,

• Inclusive, public arts programming,

• And our ongoing residency program.

 

Every contribution helps create a space where artists and the Asheville community can thrive together.

A Conversation with Art Remains Grantee alexandria monque ravenel

As we look back on the year, we’re feeling incredibly grateful to call Asheville home. To be surrounded by so many creative, generous, and resilient people. In the wake of Helene, we’ve been rebuilding the Asheville we hope to be a part of, together.

This summer, we gathered with our Art Remains grantees at Drop of Sun Studios for a community conversation, hearing directly from them about how the storm affected their work, how your support aided their recovery, and where they are now. We also sat down for a one-on-one conversation with alexandria monque ravenel of Noir Collective, and were deeply inspired by alexandria’s vision, leadership, and life-long commitment to community and collective care.

This conversation is a powerful reflection on resilience, collaboration, imagination, and the power of art to create change. We hope you enjoy watching this conversation, and we deeply encourage you to support alexandria’s work at Noir Collective!

 

Special thanks to This Land Films for filming and holding this conversation

A Conversation With Our Art Remains Grantees

As we mark the one-year anniversary of Helene, we are reminded not just of the storm’s devastating impact, but of the resilience of our arts community and the collective effort that helped it recover. In October of 2024, in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, Lamplight AVL launched the Recover, Remain, & Thrive program to support artists and organizations in our community.

Phase 2 of this effort included a community-supported fundraiser, through which we collectively raised $115,000 to offer recovery grants to local arts organizations deeply impacted by the storm. After an extensive application and review process, 9 area organizations were awarded grants.

Instead of traditional grant reporting, we did something different. This past July, we hosted a conversation at Drop of Sun Studios with grantees to hear directly from them—about how the storm affected their work, how your support helped them recover, and where they are today.

 

Today, so close to the 1 year anniversary of the storm, we’re honored to share a video from that conversation with you.

Helene taught us the power of showing up for one another in impossible times. As you remember the storm, remember what you supported in the aftermath, how our community came together to buoy one another up, and the resilience and care we witnessed in our entire region. Your support of our recovery initiative has deeply impacted the work of the grantees in this video and the artists they support, and we and they are so grateful!

 

With deep gratitude,

—The Lamplight AVL Team

community driven nonprofit for the arts

Lamplight AVL is a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization that supports the community through engagement with music and the arts.

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