This weekend, Penland is hosting an American Craft Council “convening,” which is a small gathering of makers, teachers, administrators, and others involved with craft. They are discussing a variety of topics having to do with the field of craft as a whole–where it is, where it’s going. You might think this sounds a bit dry, but consider that the 4:00 PM session today opened with a participant spontaneously showing this video.

North Carolina’s governor, Beverly Purdue, stopped by on Monday with a few friends. They spent a little time in the Penland Gallery and then program director Dana Moore took them on a tour of a few of our studios. In the picture above, the group is getting a little information about blacksmithing from studio assistant Gerald Boggs.

And here’s Governor Perdue getting a glassblowing lesson from our studio coordinator, Dean Allison. She called later to say they “couldn’t possibly have had a better time.”

Photos by Dana Moore

The annual exhibition of work by Penland’s fabulous core fellows just opened at the Penland Gallery. The reception is on Friday, October 8 from 7:00 – 8:30 PM. If you are in the area, don’t miss it.

The core program provides nine artists with an opportunity to live, study, and work at Penland for two years. We get amazing, gifted, fascinating, hard-working people in the program–being around them is one of the undocumented perks of working at Penland. This show has work in books, clay, drawing, glass, metals, photography, printmaking, textiles, wood and a many pieces that cross these boundaries. Just to give a few examples, the show includes a glass diving helmet, a ceramic owl with steel wings, a small wooden crane that suspends a small steel house, and a tiny brass boat sailing on a sea of metal letters. We’ll put up a slide show of work from the exhibition in a couple of weeks.