Cecilia Moushey | August 1-17, 2024

Cecilia Moushey is a poet and artist. They grew up in Asheville and love exploring the intimate areas of life. They are currently working on a degree in Environmental Science, are mediocre at rock climbing, and will tell you all the best swimming holes if you ask them nicely. You can find their work at your local Asheville cafe and on instagram @sleeeppyybunny

Meg Winnecour with Ben Berry | July 2024

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.

Will Iselnogle | April 29 – May 25 2024

We are so excited to welcome the Asheville-based illustrator Will Iselnogle as our artist in residence for late April and May! Will will be creating both visual art and installation work, and he needs you to love him.  He will host an opening on May 17 and a closing on May 24. Check back in for more details soon!

Sarah Louise | April 11-April 14, 2024

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!

Alex McWalters | January 16-February 12, 2024

Alex McWalters is a writer, musician and educator based in Asheville, North Carolina. He plays percussion for River Whyless, and is an adjunct professor of Creative Writing at UNC-Asheville. He holds an MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson and has served as the Warren Wilson MFA Residency Fellow since 2020. He serves on the board of Punch Bucket Lit, an Asheville literary nonprofit. Songs by River Whyless have been featured on, or in, NPR’s All Things Considered, Tiny Desk, World Café, and The Washington Post. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nimrod International, No Depression, Paste Magazine, The Bluegrass Situation and Asheville Grit. In his free time he likes to rebuild old motorcycles.

Photo credit Molly Milroy

Aliah Lavonne Tigh | June 2024

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.

Cast and Crew of DOLORES | March 11 – April 7, 2024

Starting March 11, our artists-in-residence are Candlewood Collective and the cast and crew of the play DOLORES, by Edward Allan Baker! We are so thrilled to have them in the space to rehearse and build their set; they’ll put up their incredible production over the last weekend in March and the first weekend in April!

Cast and Crew:

Director: Lucia Gray

Producers: Candlewood Collective

Stage Manager: Madelyn Anderson

Cast – Sandra y: Lauren Davis and A.K. Benninghofen

Cast – Dolores: Kim Mako and Emily Tynan McDaniel

DOLORES is a one-act drama about two sisters drawn together by domestic violence. Sandra and Dolores push and pull against one another as they seek to connect with each other and protect themselves.

This unique production has double cast both roles: cast members will trade off throughout the run, resulting in FOUR DISTINCT ACTING PAIRS. Tickets are for specific nights of the production; audience members wishing to see the play in a new cast configurations should purchase tickets for each evening they wish to attend. See below for scheduled performances.

To request tickets, email candlewoodcollective@gmail.com with your name, the performance you wish to see (schedule below), and the number of tickets requested.

*Audience members please note: this play includes references to domestic violence and offensive language. The producers have decided to include the language in its original form because it is true to the timeframe and to the characters, and it represents an important phase in the arcs of both characters.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:

SOLD OUT Thursday March 28 at 7pm…A.K. Benninghofen and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Friday March 29 at 7pm………………………………………………Lauren Davis and Kim Mako

Saturday March 30 at 7pm………………………………….A.K. Benninghofen and Kim Mako

Sunday March 31 at 4pm…………………………..Lauren Davis and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Thursday April 4 at 7pm………………………………………………Lauren Davis and Kim Mako

Friday April 5 at 7pm………………………..A.K. Benninghofen and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Saturday April 6 at 7pm……………………………Lauren Davis and Emily Tynan McDaniel

Sunday April 7 at 4pm…………………………………………A.K. Benninghofen and Kim Mako

Lyle de Vitry | February 15 – March 9, 2024

Hailing originally from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Lyle grew up in a household filled to the brim with music. The now Asheville-based songwriter’s carefully crafted melodies and poetry are imaginative and thought provoking as he explores themes of nature, love, memory, and the passing of time. At the heart of his creative practice, he explores the intimate relationships between sound and our emotional experience – and how music can foster both personal and community healing. A multidisciplinary artist, his body of work is extremely diverse in terms of form, content, and instrumentation. Ranging from lush ensemble orchestrations and arrangements to beautifully subtle musings on the guitar, Lyle’s work does not inhabit one genre sphere. Audiences around the country have found solace in his performances as he flows between introspective instrumental guitar compositions and meditative songs. In 2023, he performed as a finalist in the nationally recognized Telluride Troubadour and LEAF New Song Competitions. His highly anticipated debut album, “Door Within A Dream,” is set to be released this summer.

Swannatopia | December 6, 2023 – January 2, 2024

Swannatopia returns to our space one year after their last full residency, and we are so thrilled to have them back!

Swannatopia’s Experimental Art club will host their second annual holiday light and sound extravaganza at Lamplight AVL in West Asheville this December. “Time is Fake: a Swan Pond Experience” will bring the people together again, to shimmer and shimmy among sights and sounds from the collective’s many large scale installations staged over the past year. Featuring fresh cake works and fashions by Experimental Art Club, a Sunset Surprise, New Psycho Actives Bug Mall Soundtrack music video premiere, a puppet show live scored by a 9 member orchestra, swan song sound bath, and black light dance party by DJ Madbog.

About Swannatopia:
We, of Swannatopia, are a group of experimental artists headquartered in Swannanoa, NC and residing throughout the Southeastern United States. Over the past decade, we have set out to blur the lines between “artist” and “participant”, to defamiliarize the familiar, to nurture an immersive, whimsical and thoughtful experience of empowerment, and offer a glimpse of what is possible.

We believe artistic collaborations are essential to cultivate a healthy community and to maximize creative potential Our installations and exhibitions are mutually supportive endeavors that help us all- individual, group, and participant observers – to dream bigger, together. To date, our multigenerational list of collaborators totals 50+.

To this end, we launched our “Experimental Art Club” in 2021. An experiment in and of itself, Experimental Art Club aims to facilitate the free exchange of knowledge, experience, tools and materials, while bringing the people together to “make stuff for fun!”.

Coco Villa | November 2023

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We are thrilled to announce that Coco Villa will be our artist in residency for the month of November 2023! Tightly wound to identity, Coco Villa leads a multidisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body and object. Their work spans across disciplines of dance, photography, fashion design, installation, and film. Villa utilizes material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy and spirituality, and build familial archives through self-portraiture. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the dance studio, darkroom, dye kitchen, design lab, film set and library, playfully experimenting and creating by hand.

Image by Antonia Esposito  @espositoni_