Editor’s Note (October 2024): We love and celebrate our mountain communities; however, following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, many areas remain inaccessible for travel. Please check DriveNC.gov’s travel map for the latest on traveling to these areas.
The oldest pottery in Yancey County, McWhirter Pottery looks much the way it did when Jim McWhirter and his wife, Kore, painted and made pottery, respectively, back in the ’60s. Photography courtesy of McWhirter Pottery
Surrounded by shelves of brown pots and a floor cluttered with white, clay-spattered buckets, Pete McWhirter cradles the spinning clay in his hands. Bluegrass music drifts from his radio as he molds the clay into a bowl. He works inside a structure made of rough-hewn lumber that looks like a classic mountain cabin along NC Highway 80, part of the Mount Mitchell Scenic Drive in the South Toe River Valley.
It’s the oldest pottery in Yancey County, founded in 1963 by his parents, Kore and Jim McWhirter. His mother studied art in college, and his father, originally from Georgia, made oil paintings. In 1960, after serving as missionaries in Paraguay, the couple moved to the North Carolina mountains — “penniless,” Pete says — with their four children. Kore helped an accomplished potter in the area, Wanda Lea Austin, with her production work. “When I was 5 years old,” Pete says, “I was poking my fingers in the clay, watching them work and helping with the shows.”
Pete and Kim McWhirter run the pottery studio established by his parents in 1963. photograph by Tim Robison
Pete and his wife, Kim, carry on the tradition, having taken ownership of the pottery business in 1989, three years before Kore died. “I have no formal training,” he says. “I’m inspired by others.”
The couple have another artistic side beyond their pottery. Both are songwriters and musicians; they’ve produced albums and performed at a host of festivals, including MerleFest in Wilkesboro, where they’re also the featured potters.
The thin lip of the McWhirters’ drinking vessels is a distinctive element of the their work. photograph by Tim Robison
It’s near closing time, but Pete will labor a few more hours into the evening to make bowls for a group of customers. “Wonderful life here in the valley,” he says, taking a pause from the potter’s wheel and walking around the store. This wonderful valley, sculpted by the South Toe River, rolls out beneath the shadow of Mount Mitchell, towering on the southwestern horizon. It’s a valley of trails, cabins, and campgrounds — the essentials for a mountain getaway — where the ancient craft of pottery still turns mud into masterpieces.
139 Red Clay Road
Burnsville, NC 28714
(828) 675-4559
mcwhirterpottery.com
The Carlton Gallery boasts artwork in a variety of media from more than 150 local, regional, and national artists. photograph by Charles Harris
Toni Carlton is a native daughter of these mountains, reared in a family of weavers and woodworkers. Her life is steeped in mountain artistry. “I loved doing anything I could with my hands,” she says. Growing up between Boone and Blowing Rock, Carlton was 9 years old when her grandmother taught her to weave. Her father and grandfather built looms for local weavers — and she, too, learned how to build a loom.
Carlton double majored in art marketing and industrial arts at Appalachian State University. In 1982, she and a couple of her artist friends opened the Woven Works Art Gallery and Studios, changing its name to the Carlton Gallery five years later.
Toni Carlton photograph by Charles Harris
A loom that her grandfather built now sits in the gallery, a handsome building of dark brown wood and stone columns along NC Highway 105 in the Grandfather community. It nuzzles up against the woods, across the road from the Watauga River rippling its way north toward Tennessee. On the southwestern horizon, Grandfather Mountain’s chiseled face cuts a profile against the sky. Traffic streams by on the two-lane, where a sign framed in rocks announces “Fine Art.”
The local landscape paintings are by far her best sellers. “We’ve got the prettiest scenery, and this is what [customers] want hanging on their walls,” employee Carolyn Witt says. Take a moment to peruse the beauty of the artwork: the riots of reds, yellows, and oranges of autumn; the bursts of whites, pinks, and greens of spring.
“A few artists actually step out with their backpacks and easel and go paint outside to capture this beautiful area that we live in,” Carlton says. As for her own work, it’s more of the abstract and spiritual variety, inviting viewers to interpret her pieces in their own way. But she knows it’s the mountain vistas right outside her window that keep people coming through her door, looking to carry a piece of the landscape home.
10360 NC Highway 105 South
Banner Elk, NC 28604
(828) 963-4288
carltongallery.com
The centerpiece of The Bascom’s six-building campus is the three-story, 27,500-square-foot exhibition space. photograph by Tim Robison
Inside a barn that now houses a ceramics studio, Cedar Chan quietly passes an afternoon. She’s making a gravy bowl in the shape of a possum, its tail fashioned as the ladle. She’s one of the local artists who practice their passion at The Bascom, a six-acre visual arts campus on a former horse farm just off Franklin Road near downtown Highlands. “This is what I do for fun and therapy,” Chan says.
The Bascom opened in the mid-1980s as the Bascom-Louise Gallery, a one-room exhibition hall in Highlands’ Hudson Library. Watson Barratt was an artist who had long been an ardent supporter of the library. When Barratt died in 1962, he willed the funding to establish an art gallery. Over time, the gallery collected abstract paintings, photographs, and other fine art. By the mid-2000s, the community saw the need for a bigger, more dynamic gallery and moved it to the horse farm. There, wood from the farm was repurposed to build the Studio Barn.
Its faded walls give the space a rustic air, a natural complement to the 87-foot-long covered bridge at the center’s entrance. A nature trail, featuring sculptures along the way, follows a brook that burrows through thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel. The center’s three galleries are free to the public and host rotating exhibitions.
“There’s always been a strong community of creatives here,” says Billy Love, The Bascom’s deputy executive director. “Over time, a strong desire to have a home for these folks developed.” Louise Bascom Barratt and her husband, Watson, were arts appreciators. Now, generations of arts enthusiasts come to admire the creations for themselves, and to feel inspired by a landscape that is itself a work of art.
323 Franklin Road
Highlands, NC 28741
(828) 526-4949
thebascom.org
The stone walls are a thing of rugged beauty, their rocks hauled from Brasstown Creek to build the historic Mountain Valley Creamery in 1928. Perched on three acres between the creek and Old Highway 64, the old creamery now houses Highlander Gallery.
“I really believe the personality of the person exudes out of their artwork,” says Sherry Bell Dukes, who owns the gallery with her husband, Wayne. They’re both artists: She’s a painter, sculptor, and seamstress; he’s a photojournalist and wood-carver.
In 2013, they opened a gallery in Murphy and, three years later, bought the abandoned creamery, which now features the works of more than two dozen mountain artists.
The backdrop of Highlander Gallery is enough to inspire the artist within: the wild woods, the meandering road, the murmuring creek. Its remoteness seems an unlikely spot for an art venue, but therein lies the beauty.
10079 Old Highway 64 West
Brasstown, NC 28902
(828) 835-9982
highlandergallery.com
When CatchLight Gallery was on the verge of closing, Martin Seelig and his wife, Wendy Weatherwax, took up the mantle to provide a fine-arts space for local photographers to show and sell their work. photograph by Charles Harris
A mountain stream flows clear and cold, its glossy surface mirroring the trees. It tumbles and swirls and gurgles without moving at all, its riffles stilled by the camera of D. Rex Miller. His photograph, Reflected Spring, is among an array of nature scenes and landscapes displayed inside the CatchLight Gallery in downtown West Jefferson.
The gallery’s facade is a burst of deep blue on North Jefferson Avenue, the town’s main drag. It’s a picturesque strip of shops and restaurants at the foot of Mount Jefferson, standing guard to the east with trails and overlooks.
“There aren’t many photography-only galleries in the country, let alone in North Carolina. We’re one of the very few,” says Martin Seelig, who owns CatchLight Gallery with his wife, Wendy Weatherwax, and is himself a photographer.
Martin Seelig photograph by Charles Harris
After hiking the Appalachian Trail, the engineer from Massachusetts considered this region among the loveliest spots on the route, and a decade later, he retired to Ashe County.
CatchLight had opened in 2012, when photographers Nicole Robinson and George Rembert, unofficial leader of the Ashe Camera Club, partnered to create a venue for local photographers to display and sell their work. But a year later, Rembert left for health reasons, and a year after that, Robinson accepted a job in Charleston, South Carolina. Seelig didn’t want to see the gallery shuttered, so he and his wife bought it.
The mission of the gallery’s founders was simple: “They said, ‘We’re not going to have pottery; we’re not going to have paintings and other things like that. It’s going to be photography,’” Seelig says. Like other fine artists, photographers have the power to stir something deep, to fire our imaginations — leaving us with snapshots of beauty.
118 North Jefferson Avenue
West Jefferson, NC 28694
(336) 846-1551
catchlightgallery.net
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