Hurricane Helene destroyed Asheville’s flourishing arts community. Can they rebuild what was lost?

The arts community in Asheville, North Carolina, is piecing itself together in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

In the River Arts District, artwork was destroyed, and the buildings that once housed studios and galleries are mud-caked or crumbling apart. As they face the immediate challenge of survival, the community now wonders if what it once had can ever be rebuilt from the ground up.

On a recent Saturday morning, the painter Elizabeth Porritt Carrington drove from her home in West Asheville to what she called her “village” – the RAD. It was once a colorful neighborhood of art galleries and restaurants, and a vital part of Asheville tourism.

When Helene hit western North Carolina on 26 September, the French Broad River flooded; it crested on 28 September at 24ft, surpassing previous records.

Water, debris and mud transformed the RAD into an apocalyptic Dr Seuss landscape – trees bent sideways, or fallen, plastic bags shredded to ribbons in the branches. Sheets of metal, like those from raised garden beds, are wrapped around the trunks. Mud puddles are thick, and passable only by ad hoc plywood bridges. Brown dust covers everything.

Carrington approached Riverview Station that morning to visit her second-floor studio and gallery space; the 1902-era building was home to 60 artists. She came across eight art prints splayed out across the dusty grass.

Water had seeped underneath the plastic coverings and warped cardboard and paper.

Carrington realized six of those prints were her own works, being sold at Tyger Tyger Gallery on Riverview Station’s first floor, she said. Someone must have brought the works outside to dry in the sun.

With her face covered in an N95 mask, Carrington peered through Tyger Tyger’s dark, open front door.

“I believe one of my paintings is stuck up in the rafters in there,” she commented.

The Blue Ridge mountain town of Asheville is considered one of the south-east’s top arts communities. Carrington is one of 300 or so working artists in the RAD. Her studio is on Riverview Station’s second floor, and ahead of Helene, she thought: “I don’t have to worry at all.”

The gallerists at ArtPlace and Tyger Tyger did worry, though. Carrington was visiting family in County Clare, Ireland, when Helene hit. She estimated 80% of her work was saved because one gallerist moved her work to a higher floor, and another gathered up her paintings and delivered them to her home.

When floodwaters receded, artists like Carrington returned to the RAD to salvage artwork and belongings. Without power, Riverview Station was spooky: it was pitch black and muddy puddles filled the halls. Carrington was able to retrieve her most expensive oil paints, she said, as well as a laptop and camera.

Sketchbooks that she has had since childhood were badly damaged by the floodwater. She was also able to retrieve some paintings. The ones hanging on the wall in her gallery were relatively unharmed; the ones that had been leaning on the floor in her studio were caked in mud.

(When the Guardian visited, most everyone in the RAD heeded warnings about toxins in the mud and wore face masks and other PPE.) Some works ended up in a pile to be discarded.

“How do you hose down an oil painting?” Carrington asked. “Who is going to want to buy a painting that’s been in 2ft of contaminated mud?”

Starting to rebuild

Artists say it is too early, and they are still too traumatized, to imagine how the RAD bounces back, but they recognize the rebuild will be different. Many of the older industrial buildings with cheap rents that attracted artists to the RAD in the first place have literally crumbled.

“It is overwhelming to think what it would take to have the River Arts District be what it was,” the mixed media artist Bridget Benton said. “The River Arts District was something completely unique.”

The RAD’s building owners were dedicated to providing affordable studio space for working artists. Now, Benton worries that real estate development companies with the capital to clean and rebuild won’t have that same dedication to affordability.

“The people who are going to have the funds [are] going to expect a return on investment,” said Benton, who added that she believed the RAD would return with “a few big, shiny high-end galleries … The small makers are just not going to be able to afford it.”

Nikki Eldred, whose Chinese tea and elixir bar Asheville Dispensary opened in Marquee just one month ago, felt similarly.

“I’m very fearful of land developers coming in grabbing the land, bulldozing everything and building things that don’t hold the heart of Asheville,” she said. “I’m trying not to lean into that fear too much.”

‘How can we begin to generate revenue?’

Western North Carolina’s leaf season brings billions in tourism dollars into the region, but the governor, Roy Cooper, has implored tourists not to come, given the inaccessibility of many roads and widespread water outages.

Artists in the RAD now wonder how to recuperate losses from a canceled tourist season.

“How can we begin to generate revenue?” said Benton.

310 Art, a fine art school where she was an instructor, is “completely decimated”, she said. She hopes it will be able to temporarily relocate somewhere nearby.

To generate an income, she envisions hosting collage nights or watercolor painting sessions (“We did a lot of that during the beginnings of Covid,” she said).

The gallery ArtPlay posted all the work it displayed online, with 75% of funds raised going immediately to the artists. Carrington said she had sold one $600 piece through ArtPlay’s sale. But online sales have never been a strong interest of hers.

“I was really dependent on the RAD and the galleries I was in,” she said.

There is also a pressure to seize the moment when the storm’s destruction is in the news.

“Everybody is, like ‘why don’t you have a GoFundMe page up yet?’” Benton said. “There is the feeling that if we don’t do the fundraising now, nobody is going to care a week from now.”

Carrington aspired to build out her online presence in the fall. Now, that’s a necessity.

“I’ve got to completely change what I’m doing and start over,” she said. “I imagine I will, and I trust myself to do that. I don’t know yet what it looks like.”