Come by the residency this July! Meg Winnecour will run an open art studio for a month, a space in which she will make her work (acrylic nature portraits on panel, watercolor and dye explorations on paper, and free-stitched cyanotypes) in a public way, and invite people to come into the space and make some work of their own, with or without her help. She will work in a new medium each week (cyanotype, acrylic paint on panel or canvas, and watercolor on paper). Her dream would be for her West Asheville neighbors to stop in for an art experience on their way to the bakery or the library, folks out running errands stopping in to see what’s going on and then getting pulled into making a piece of their own, dear friends stopping in for a chat. More than anything, Meg wants to add beauty and connection to her neighbors’ lives through time spent chatting and making a piece of art to take home.

July 2-7… cyanotypes and free-stitching

July 8-14…acrylic nature portraits

July 15-21…watercolor and dye explorations

July 22-26…cyanotypes and free stitching

Meg Winnecour is the founder, director and CLO (Chief Love Officer) of Cloud Collective Residency in Asheville, NC, the city she’s called home for over 2 decades. Meg spends her days running an artists’ and writers’ residency, teaching workshops, making paintings and stitched cyanotypes, and writing poems. She lives in a hundred-year-old house with her husband, teenage daughter, and four bossy but lovable chickens.

While Meg will be the artist in residence Monday-Friday the month of July, she will share the space with author and illustrator Ben Berry, who will be in residence weekends during July.

Ben Berry grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Ben was taught by his great uncle Tomas Berry, the eco theologian, about the importance of our place in the cosmos.  Our stories are interconnected in an intimate way with the universe.   We are “not a collection of objects, but a communion of subjects”  as he would say.

Ben wrote, illustrated, and published his first children’s book 2 years ago with that influence as a key part of my inspiration.  “Where Do We Come From, and Where Do We Go?  A Turtle’s Creation Story.”  It tells the Universe Story and we arrive at the present moment.

Ben’s next book will be an open collaboration with the people of Asheville where he currently lives and works.  It will be called: “I Am Not Myself, Without Everything Else.”

A children’s book, each page will be full of illustrations of the beautiful Subjects of the Universe, created by the people of Asheville. Ben will be in residence at Residency 821 weekends in July and invites all to come in and contribute a drawing to be included in the book.

Ben plans to publish through Amazon and will be distributing them to the local elementary schools in the coming year.

Sarah Louise makes music to help people connect with each other and our wondrous planet. Her albums range from Appalachian folk songs, to solo 12-string guitar, to genre-bending electronic journeys that have been called “Mystical” by the New York Times and “In tune with the thrust of existence” by NPR. She lives in the mountains of North Carolina where she forages wild food, makes medicine, wanders off trail and practices using song to communicate with other species. She feels equally a part of the lineages of folk musics and experimental artists like Pauline Oliveros and Milford Graves who practiced deep listening to explore the relationship between sound, body and place. For Sarah, song is powerful medicine. It has helped her heal what nothing else could and has gifted her an ability to create sonic journeys that can unlock grief, spark celebration and help communities tap into their own embodied expression. Music is alive, and there is a song for every moment. The Earth delights in all of our expression!

Aliah Lavonne Tigh is the author of Weren’t We Natural Swimmers, a 2022 chapbook with Tram Editions, with poems appearing in the Academy of American Poets‘ Poem-A-Day, Mizna, Guernica, The Texas Review, Matter: A Journal of Political Poetry and Commentary, The Rupture, and others. Tigh has joined other writers for the Tin House Summer Workshop, read for Houston’s Poison Pen Reading Series and Hess Reading Series, The Brooklyn Rail, and contributed work for a Gulf Coast Journal and Texas Contemporary ekphrastic collaboration and was a grateful Recipient of Idyllwild Arts’ 2017 Bentley-Buckman Writing Fellowship. Tigh holds poetry and philosophy degrees from the University of Houston and an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles, and lives in Houston, Texas.