Category: Community Collaborations

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Care Packages (with zine!)

amanda simons and lindsay jones with zine
Lindsay PB Jones and Amanda N. Simons with zine

Penland staff recently had a nice collaboration with Youth OutRight—an Asheville-based organization that supports LGBTQIA+ youth ages 11-20. The group has been having weekly video hangouts throughout the pandemic, and Penland studio operations manager Amanda N. Simons, and facilities maintenance technician Lindsay PB Jones attended one of these meetings to get to know the group a bit and find out if there were activities they were interested in that Penland could support. 

The result was packages containing colored pencils, watercolor paints, art paper, Sculpey, embroidery and cross-stitch kits, pamphlet-making kits, and mug cake ingredients. Warren Wilson College donated tea grown on their campus for inclusion. And, best of all, a zine  created by Amanda and Lindsay. The zine included tips for watercolor painting and sewing, ideas for self-care activities, and, of course, cool illustrations. 

Penland provided the materials, Penland housekeepers Derek Freeman and Susie Pendley did the assembly, and Youth OutRight delivered the packages to twenty folks in their group. A good time was had by all. 

 

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At-Home Making

Penland community open house
Needless to say, we decided not to do this in 2021.

We normally kick off spring at Penland with an open house that brings 500-600 visitors to campus for hands-on activities in our studios. We couldn’t do that this year, but we hated to let the spring go by without offering some creative fun to the community. 

So we arranged for five local makers to demonstrate activities that can be done at home with easily available materials, and we turned those demonstrations into step-by-step videos. We posted these during the month of March, and they will be available indefinitely, not just for our local community, but for anyone with an internet connection. All of these activities are suitable for children–with varying degrees of supervision needed.

You can find them all at penland.org/openhouse or click on any of the links below. 

Rickie Barnett and Lynn Hobaica with masks

Papier mâché masks with Rickie Barnett and Lynne Hobaica.

 

Ellie Richards with kite

Make a kite from sticks, string, and a plastic bag with Ellie Richards.

 

Meg Peterson with paste paper

Paste-paper painting with Meg Peterson.

 

Sarita Westrup with pattern stamps

Repeat pattern stamping, a.k.a. simplified block printing, with Sarita Westrup.

 

Alena Applerose in the Penland kitchen

And two bonus kitchen episodes: Penland Coffee House gingerade and gluten-free peanut butter cookies with Alena Applerose. 

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Because we can’t invite you over…

Alena Applerose in the Penland kitchn
Alena Applerose in the Penland kitchen.

In a normal year (yeah, we’re saying that again), we’d spend the first week of March getting ready for our annual community open house. We can’t do that this year, but we’d still like to offer up some creative family fun. Every Saturday in March, we’ll post a video of a Penland artist teaching an activity that can be done at home, by young and old, using easily available materials. 

We want you to get in the mood with some Penland snacks so we’ve already posted videos featuring Penland’s baker, Alena Applerose, showing how to make two coffee house favorites: gingerade and gluten-free peanut butter cookies. 

Our first craft activity is a perennial open house offering: paste-paper painting with Meg Peterson. This is a little like finger painting and uses colored paste to make durable, decorative papers that can be made into book covers, envelopes, wrapping paper, or just displayed on the wall. So put on your aprons, roll up your sleeves, and join us at the kitchen table. That video will be posted on Saturday, March 6.

You can find the videos with material lists (and recipes) at penland.org/openhouse.

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The Pines Crew, Out of the Kitchen

Keith Moir of Penland’s kitchen team standing with the collection of vibrant painted signs he created for our neighbors at The Historic Orchard at Altapass.

What does a team of cooks and bakers do all summer with no one to cook and bake for? At Penland, at least, they get creative!

Our incredible Pines crew may not have been making breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for students and instructors, but they stayed busy nonetheless. A few lent their energy and talents to other areas of campus—Alena Applerose, our baker, moved down to Horner Hall to help with preparations for this summer’s online benefit auction, while Bill Jackson, Kirk Banner, and Chad Mohr have been helping out with campus landscaping, painting projects, and other maintenance tasks alongside our facilities crew. They also cooked up a much-needed staff pizza day at the end of August.

For others, their daily Penland jobs have sometimes taken them farther afield. Keith Moir, who you may know from his gorgeous chalk drawings on the menu board in The Pines, was able to use his artistic talents on a project for The Historic Orchard at Altapass, a nearby nonprofit up on the Blue Ridge Parkway dedicated to preserving local culture, traditions, and the land that supports them. Keith designed and painted a series of stand-up props that have been installed around the orchard’s trails to delight visitors, offer them opportunities for interaction, and remind them of the orchard’s mission to protect and educate. Thanks to Keith, you can now explore the orchard and take a photo as a monarch butterfly, an apple, a banjo player, a honeybee, or even the engine from the historic Clinchfield Railroad!

Day Dotson poses amidst a sea of meals ready to go out to local families.

Meanwhile, Day Dotson and John T. Renick III (yep, that’s Big John!) spent the month of July working with our local Mitchell County School Nutrition Program preparing and packaging meals for the Summer Food Service Program. Each day, they helped make about 550 meals that got delivered across the county to local students and families in need. “I’m so glad to be a part of this process supporting our community and making new relations,” Day said of the opportunity. “Also, weird tidbit: I got to eat a watermelon flavored golden raisin today. WOW!”

In past summers, we’ve been grateful for the hard work and heart of our kitchen team every time we sit down to a meal at The Pines. And this summer, it has been a real honor to get to offer their talents to give back to our community. Thanks to the whole crew, and especially to Keith and Day and Big John, for bringing so much grace and enthusiasm and care to Penland and Mitchell County this summer!

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Photo(s) of the Week: Packet Mania!

Early this week, Penland teamed up with our friends at Toe River Arts and an all-star crew of volunteers to get a second round of art packets out to students and families in our community. Much like our first round of packets, the goal was to provide inspiration and materials for creative activities that can be done at home by a range of age groups. All told, the Packet Mania team made a total of 590 art packets, the majority of which have been delivered to the Mitchell County Schools Central Warehouse to go out with their local food pickups on May 22.

Penland’s community collaborations manager Stacey Lane described these packets as “much more ambitious” than the first round. They contained a range of drawing supplies and papers, as well as tape, glue, scissors, origami paper, book-making materials, embroidery floss and fabric, needles, and even a small cardboard loom! Each packet also included a fun coloring sheet drawn by Mitchell High student Evelyn Kline and detailed instructions and suggestions for art activities and prompts using the materials. (Want to try them for yourself? Take a look here!)

Of course, a project like this is a big team effort, and we sure couldn’t have done it without the many people who contributed their time, energy, and talents. A big thank you goes out to:

  • Lisa Rose, Meg Peterson, and Stacey Lane, who coordinated the project through Penland’s community collaborations program
  • Mitchell County art teachers Melisa Cadell, Olivia Ellis, Leslie Dickerson, and Marisa Westall, who helped plan and provide content
  • Subs with SuitCASEs teaching artists Taylor Styles, Alena Applerose, and Sherry Lovett, who created lessons for the packets
  • Toe River Arts outreach coordinator Melanie Finlayson, who helped plan and coordinate this project and provided stickers and envelopes for the packets
  • Toe River Arts staff Debra Carpenter, JoAnn Townsend, and Tracy Maisch, who helped assemble packet materials
  • Kristie Autrey of Mitchell County Schools, who acted as liaison for the project
  • Cathy Adelman, Annie Evelyn, Kathie Sigler, and Sam Reynolds, who volunteered to prepare each packet’s pamphlet book materials
  • Penland core fellows Erica Schuetz, Mitsu Shimabukuro, and Scott Vander Veen, who cut burlap for the embroidery project
  • Mitchell High student Evelyn Kline, who created a special coloring sheet to include in each packet
  • Local student Lillian Kline, who helped with the shadow drawing project
  • The wonderful volunteers who helped with packet assembly, including Erica Schuetz, Michael Kline, Evelyn Kline, and Alena Applerose
  • And the generous donors who contributed funds to help make this project a reality!

We feel really lucky to be part of such a warm and generous community, and we can’t wait to see what creative ideas spring from these effort! We hope to share some of them with you in the coming weeks.

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Art at School, Art at Home

Meg Peterson making art supply packets

Penland’s Community Collaborations Program is dedicated to bringing art opportunities to students and neighbors in our local community. Sometimes, this work takes place on campus through our summer kids camps and events like our Community Open House. But more often, it happens in local classrooms thanks to longstanding partnerships with our Mitchell County schools. And now that our local schools are closed and a stay at home order has been issued in North Carolina, our Community Collaborations staff have pivoted their work toward new approaches that can help bring art opportunities right to our neighbors’ homes.

One of these efforts is an adaptation of Penland’s Teaching Artist Initiative. For decades, Penland’s Meg Peterson (pictured above) has been working with local students and teachers to create involved handmade journals that weave art into classroom studies of science, history, writing, and more. It’s hands-on, material-intensive work that encourages individual exploration and discovery. And now, Meg hopes, it’s something that her 3rd and 4th grade students can continue working on at home. This week, Meg has been busy creating 166 packets for them that include materials and prompts that mesh with the science curriculum in their classrooms—investigations of soil and landforms in one school, and explorations of body systems and nature observation in the other. “Students at Gouge Elementary are getting a whole kit to make natural earth paints,” Meg explains. The kits include gesso board, instructions, information on prehistoric cave painting and aboriginal earth painting, and a sample of a prevalent local rock. “The rock easily grinds to powder,” Meg says. “Then students can turn that powder into the most beautiful red-orange pigment.”

Stacey Lane putting together art supply packets

A second initiative is tied to the food distribution service recently established by Mitchell County Schools. The service has been delivering an incredible 1000 meals per day to families in our area, and it will now be delivering art materials, too! Penland staff members Stacey Lane (above) and Lisa Rose teamed up with local art teachers Leslie Dickerson, Melisa Cadell, and Olivia Ellis, as well as some of Penland’s Subs with Suitcases teaching artists, to create a set of prompts that can engage students and their family members of all ages. “Find an object from outdoors in nature…take a close-up look at the object and draw only the part your eyes have zoomed in on,” suggests one prompt. “Challenge yourself: Draw a glass of water with or without ice,” suggests another. Stacey, Lisa, and Penland core fellows Mitsu Shimabukuro, Erica Schuetz, and Mo Nuñez put in long hours this week to package the prompts together with materials such as colored pencils, a sharpener, paintbrushes, paper scraps, and book board. All told, they created 434 art packets that will go out to Mitchell County families this week.

This is certainly a difficult time for communities across the country, and our rural corner of North Carolina is no different. We hope that these efforts will bring a bit of creativity and fun to the next few weeks as we all try to adapt to the difficulties and uncertainties of this new normal.

For anyone else out there who would like some fun art ideas, you can find the prompts here: Art at Home Activities.

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Handmade Parade & Fireworks!

Last week, we celebrated Independence Day the best way we know how: with all of you! We kicked off the evening with the traditional Handmade Parade, followed by ice cream for all, picnicking on the lawn, and an impressive fireworks display at dark. A more extensive album of photographs is available to view here; below, we share a few of our favorite shots that encapsulate what we love most about this annual celebration.

Community
It’s all the people here, from students and staff to neighbors and visitors from afar, who make this event feel so full of life. Thank you to everyone who joined us for bringing your energy and helping us celebrate!

Color
Bring your red, white, and blue—and your orange, green, brown, pink, and purple, too! This parade is in full color.

Passion
A highlight this year was the entry focused on pollution and single-use plastics, including these remarkable plastic bag outfits and a giant sea turtle float. Thank you for reminding us that celebration and action go hand in hand.

Creativity
This wonderful beast was born from some cardboard boxes, a couple sticks, bright paint, and a lot of creative vision. It’s always a treat to see the ideas that are brought to life for the parade.

Camaraderie
The session 3 weaving class stuck close together to walk this giant choreographed loom all the way up Conley Ridge Road.

Dedication
Here’s (part of) our facilities and ground crew, aka the folks who orchestrate the entire fireworks display. They each go through a multi-day certification training, as well as spend days before the event designing the show, getting everything set up, and readying the 20,000 bottle rockets you see here!

Celebration
At the end of the day, it’s not just about the parade or the incredible fireworks. It’s about you all being here together, with us, celebrating the creativity and energy that make this place so special. Bring your ideas, your passions, your friends, and join us on the lawn next year!

 

Thanks to Mercedes Jelinek for taking and sharing the final two images in this post.