The Gallery That Called the PGA Tour: How 31 Asheville Artists Turned a Golf Tournament Into a Sales Pitch

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  August 13, 2026

Carol Fetty picked up the phone. That is where this story starts, not in a boardroom at PGA Tour headquarters and not in a marketing agency pitch deck. A vice president at a downtown Asheville art co-op read that professional golf was coming back to the mountains, called her fellow member artists, and told them the gallery needed to be part of it.

"When we read about the PGA Tour coming here, Carol got on the phone and said, 'Okay guys, we need to be a part of this,'" gallery president Margie Kluska said.

The result is a sweepstakes that runs through the middle of September. Buy a piece of original artwork at Asheville Gallery of Art, leave your name and phone number, and you are entered to win tickets to Sunday's final round of the Biltmore Championship Asheville on Sept. 20. The tickets transfer electronically to whoever wins.

It is a small promotion by the standards of a tournament that projects more than $10 million in direct community spending. It is also worth paying attention to, because it shows a group of 31 painters doing what small operators across these mountains have been doing since the water went down: finding the traffic and standing in front of it.

What the Partnership Actually Is

Worth being precise here, because the headlines have been generous. This is a ticket giveaway and a cross promotion. It is not a licensing deal, it is not an official merchandise arrangement, and nobody is commissioning golf themed paintings of the 18th green.

Fetty's own framing is the honest version of it. "It's interesting and we're having fun with it," she said. "They have to have something to do when they're not on the golf course, right?"

That is the whole strategy in one sentence. A tournament brings in spectators, sponsors, corporate groups, and traveling family members. Golf takes maybe six hours of a day. The rest of that day happens in restaurants, breweries, hotels, and shops, and the gallery would like a share of it.

The mechanics are worth studying if you run any kind of storefront in Franklin, Waynesville, Sylva, or Brevard. There is no app, no loyalty platform, no third party vendor taking a cut. A customer buys something, writes down a name and a number, and the business now has a reason to be memorable during the single busiest visitor week the region will see this fall.

The gallery said it had logged several entries with roughly a month to go. That is not a landslide. But the value here is not really in the entry count. It is in giving a tourist who was browsing a reason to buy today rather than think about it, and in giving the gallery a list of phone numbers belonging to people who already proved they spend money on original art.

Why a Golf Tournament Matters to a Room Full of Painters

Here is the number that explains everything else. Between 80 and 90 percent of the gallery's sales come from tourists.

Think about what that means operationally. Nine out of ten dollars that walk through the door at 82 Patton Avenue arrive from somewhere else. Local collectors matter and repeat buyers matter, but the business model rests almost entirely on people who are in Asheville for a few days and decide to take home something they cannot get at a chain store.

Then Helene happened, and the visitors stopped coming.

"The arts scene has been heavily challenged because of the hurricane," Fetty said, describing a tourism drop that hit galleries directly. Anyone who was here in the fall of 2024 remembers how that felt. The River Arts District took the worst of the physical damage, but the economic damage spread across every business in the region that depends on someone driving in from Charlotte, Atlanta, or Greenville with a weekend and a budget.

The recovery has been real and it has been uneven. Some corridors came back fast. Others are still waiting on infrastructure, insurance, and the slow return of a reputation for being an easy place to visit. For a cooperative gallery where every member is both an artist and a co-owner absorbing the losses, a slow year is not an abstraction on a quarterly report. It is 31 households.

So when a PGA Tour event lands in Buncombe County with more than 100 players, national broadcast coverage on Golf Channel, and four days of visitors who have money and free afternoons, a gallery on Patton Avenue picking up the phone is not a cute marketing story. It is a business responding to the biggest run of visitors it has had a shot at in two years.

Thirty-One Owners and Five Hundred Paintings

Asheville Gallery of Art opened in 1988 and bills itself as the first fine art gallery in the city and the longest standing one downtown. Nearly four decades in a retail corridor that has turned over many times says something on its own.

The structure is what makes it unusual. This is an artist owned, artist operated cooperative. All 31 members are co-owners. They exhibit their work and they also run the place, working shifts and handling the operational load. Members take on tasks based on what they are actually interested in doing rather than getting assignments from the top down, which is either a charming approach or a logistical adventure depending on the week.

On any given day there are more than 500 original works on the floor. Varied media, varied styles, a mix of emerging artists and people who have been showing regionally for decades. Shows rotate monthly, so the room a visitor walks into in August is not the room they saw in June.

The location is a ground floor storefront on Patton Avenue, the main artery running west from Pack Square. It is a walkable stretch, close to Pritchard Park, the Grove Arcade, and the Haywood Street corridor, which puts it directly in the path of anyone doing a downtown afternoon on foot. Patton is currently in conceptual design for a road diet and streetscape upgrades, the kind of project that is disruptive while it happens and generally good for foot traffic afterward.

When you walk in during tournament week and buy a landscape off the wall, you are not buying from a sales associate. You are buying from someone who owns the building's lease alongside 30 other people, and there is a decent chance the artist who painted the thing is standing behind the counter.

The Tournament Bringing Them Here

The Biltmore Championship Asheville runs Thursday, Sept. 17 through Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026. It is the inaugural playing, and it sits on the PGA Tour's FedExCup Fall schedule.

The venue is The Cliffs at Walnut Cove in Arden, roughly ten miles south of downtown Asheville. Jack Nicklaus designed it, it plays 7,167 yards, and it sits in a valley bordered by Pisgah National Forest and the Blue Ridge Parkway. It regularly lands in the top 30 course rankings for North Carolina. If you have driven past the entrance on your way toward Hendersonville, you have seen the ridgelines that will be on television.

Biltmore Estate and Explore Asheville signed on as co title sponsors in a four year agreement announced Nov. 10, 2025, covering 2026 through 2029. That length matters more than the first year's attendance figures. A one off exhibition is a nice weekend. A four year commitment is something businesses can actually plan around, hire around, and build inventory for.

The field will include more than 100 players. Golf Channel carries the broadcast, and PGA Tour Studios produces additional feeds, including PGA Tour Live on ESPN+, SiriusXM radio, and the international World Feed. Secondary outlets have reported a $5 million purse, though neither the PGA Tour nor Explore Asheville has stated that figure in their own releases, so treat it as unconfirmed.

Ticketmaster handles ticket sales, with daily admission for all four rounds and premium hospitality options on top of that. There is a hospitality venue called the Wicked Weed Tavern at the Turn, which puts a local brewery on the course. Youth admission is free, which is a meaningful detail for families in Haywood, Jackson, and Macon counties weighing a day trip.

Eight Decades Is a Long Time Between Tee Times

The last time the PGA Tour played Asheville, Ben Hogan was winning here. He took the title in 1940, 1941, and 1942, the final three Tour events the city hosted before the schedule moved on and the city went without a stop for more than 80 years.

That gap is the story the Tour leaned on when Chief Competitions Officer Tyler Dennis announced the return, and it is the reason this event registers differently than a standard fall tournament would somewhere else. A FedExCup Fall stop is not the Masters. But an 84 year absence gives it weight that the calendar position alone would not.

There is also a rough parallel here. Hogan's Asheville wins came during a stretch when this region was known nationally for its mountain resorts, its air, and its scenery, before the interstate reshuffled how Americans traveled. The 2026 event arrives as the region is rebuilding a visitor economy after a storm that damaged both the landscape and the perception of it.

Explore Asheville is a co title sponsor, not just a beneficiary, which tells you how the tourism authority reads the opportunity. Its own release describes millions of dollars in direct spending. The WLOS reporting cites a projection north of $10 million in year one. Either number lands as real money in a region where hospitality employment is a substantial share of the workforce.

None of that guarantees anything for a co-op of painters on Patton Avenue. Big events have a way of concentrating spending inside their own footprint. But the gallery saw what was coming, which is why it moved early instead of waiting to see what trickled downtown.

What Tournament Week Looks Like Out Here

The practical question for readers west of Asheville is whether any of this reaches Franklin, Sylva, Waynesville, Highlands, or Brevard.

It usually does, though not evenly. Buncombe County lodging tightens first during a major event, and rates follow. When downtown Asheville and Arden fill up, the overflow moves outward along I-40 and US 74, which means Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Sylva, and Cullowhee pick up guests who could not find a room closer in. Highlands and Cashiers tend to capture a different slice, the visitor who was already planning a mountain trip and decided to add a round of Tour golf to it.

Then there is the day trip pattern. Waynesville is about 35 minutes from downtown Asheville. Sylva is roughly an hour. Franklin runs an hour and 20 to an hour and 40 depending on how the Balsam grade and the Asheville corridor are moving. Those are all easy single day distances, which means plenty of locals will drive in for one round and drive home the same night, and plenty of tournament visitors will spend a spare morning driving out here to see the Nantahala, Dry Falls, or a Main Street that is not packed shoulder to shoulder.

Late September is also the front edge of leaf season. Anyone who has run a shop or a rental in these counties knows what the third week of September starts to feel like. Layering a nationally televised sporting event on top of the early color window is a favorable overlap, and businesses that plan for it will do better than businesses that get surprised by it.

The Asheville Gallery of Art figured that out in the spring and acted on it. That habit, planning for a good week instead of waiting on one, is part of what people notice when they spend real time in these mountains, and some of them start looking at what it would take to stay. If that thought has crossed your mind lately, I am happy to talk through which of these towns actually fits the life you are picturing.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you enter the Asheville Gallery of Art PGA Tour sweepstakes?

Buy a piece of artwork at the gallery and provide your name and phone number at the point of purchase. That is the entire entry process. There is no separate form to mail, no online registration, and no minimum purchase amount that the gallery has announced publicly. The prize is tickets to the final round of the Biltmore Championship Asheville on Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026, and the winning tickets are transferred electronically to the winner. As of mid-August the gallery reported several entries logged with about a month left in the window. The gallery is at 82 Patton Avenue in downtown Asheville, phone 828-251-5796.

When and where is the Biltmore Championship Asheville being played?

The inaugural Biltmore Championship Asheville runs Thursday, Sept. 17 through Sunday, Sept. 20, 2026, at The Cliffs at Walnut Cove in Arden, about ten miles south of downtown Asheville in Buncombe County. The course is a Jack Nicklaus Signature design measuring 7,167 yards, set in a valley bordered by Pisgah National Forest and the Blue Ridge Parkway, and it is regularly ranked among the top 30 courses in North Carolina. The event is part of the PGA Tour's FedExCup Fall schedule with a field of more than 100 players. Tickets are sold through Ticketmaster for all four rounds, and youth admission is free.

Is the Asheville Gallery of Art officially partnered with the PGA Tour?

The relationship is a ticket giveaway and cross promotion, not a licensing agreement or a commissioned art program. The gallery purchased or obtained tournament tickets and is using them as a sweepstakes prize to draw buyers through the door during tournament week. Gallery leadership describes it as partnering with the Tour, and headlines have used that language, but no one involved has described a formal contractual arrangement, official merchandise rights, or golf themed artwork. Understanding the distinction matters if you are considering a similar promotion for your own small business, because the mechanics here are simple and repeatable.

How far is Asheville from Franklin, Sylva, and Waynesville for tournament week?

Waynesville sits about 30 miles west of Asheville on I-40, roughly a 35 minute drive to downtown and slightly less to Arden depending on your route. Sylva is around 50 miles out, generally an hour. Franklin is about 70 miles, usually an hour and 20 minutes to an hour and 40 depending on traffic through the Balsam grade and around the Asheville corridor. Highlands and Brevard both fall in the 60 to 90 minute range. All of those are comfortable day trip distances for a single round of golf, which is part of why lodging demand during tournament week tends to spread west rather than concentrate entirely in Buncombe County.

When was the last PGA Tour event held in Asheville?

The Tour last played in Asheville in the early 1940s. Ben Hogan won the city's final three Tour events, taking the title in 1940, 1941 and 1942, before the schedule moved on and the mountains went more than eight decades without a stop. That gap is the framing the PGA Tour used when it announced the Biltmore Championship in November 2025, and it is the reason the 2026 event carries more weight locally than a typical FedExCup Fall tournament. The agreement between the Tour, Biltmore Estate and Explore Asheville runs four years, covering 2026 through 2029.