Twenty Makers From the Far Western Counties Are Bringing Their Work to Mars Hill This August

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  July 21, 2026

Twenty artists from North Carolina's far western counties are packing up their clay, fiber, metal, paper, and wood and heading east this August. Connecting to Place II: Blue Ridge Craft Trails Invitational 2026 opens August 7 at Mars Landing Arts Center in Mars Hill and runs through September 27. Admission is free.

The work comes from Franklin, Waynesville, Dillsboro, Bryson City, Cullowhee, Canton, Cherokee, Maggie Valley, and Brasstown. For a lot of Asheville-area gallery-goers, that is the part of the state they drive through on the way to somewhere else. This show puts it all in one room.

What the Show Is and When to See It

The exhibition sets up at 37 Library Street in Mars Hill, in Madison County, roughly twenty minutes north of Asheville off I-26. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is no admission charge, no ticket, and no reservation to make.

Twenty artists are in the show, all of them working sites or makers on the Blue Ridge Craft Trails. Clay, fiber, metal, paper, and wood anchor the exhibition, which is a fair summary of what mountain handcraft has rested on for well over a century. The result is a wide view of what contemporary craft looks like when the maker lives where the material comes from.

This is the second stop on the exhibition's run. Connecting to Place opened at The Bascom in Highlands and stays there through July 25 before the work travels north. That gives the show two very different audiences and two very different rooms, which is part of the point.

The full roster: Teresa Bouchonnet, Myron Carter, Susan Coe, Laurey Faye Dean, Brad Dodson, Gayle R. Haynie, Karen H. Hovis, Carol Lynn Johnson, Ilene Kay, Joe Frank McKee, Mike McKinney, Paul Hornbuckle, Janlyn Messina, Davy Arch, Caden Painter, Terance Painter, Paul Pieringer, William S. Rogers, Desmond Suarez, and Gayle Barker Woody.

If you follow craft in this region at all, some of those names will be familiar. Others will not be, and that is exactly why the show exists.

Why the Far West Rarely Gets Seen

Distance is the honest answer. A maker with a studio in Brasstown or Bryson City is two hours from Asheville, and the pull of the Asheville arts market means a lot of collectors never make that drive. Cherokee, Cullowhee, and Maggie Valley are closer to Atlanta than to the galleries where most of the region's craft buying happens.

Miryam Rojas, who owns Mars Landing Arts Center, framed it plainly when the gallery announced the show. "I am excited to share this exhibition of the artists in our westernmost counties, whose work many of us might not often get to experience," she said. "Bringing this wonderful show from The Bascom to Mars Landing offers these artists an additional breadth of exposure and admiration."

There is a real economic dimension underneath that. For a working craftsperson in Macon or Graham or Cherokee County, a show in a well-trafficked gallery near a major corridor is not a nice-to-have. It is a market.

The Blue Ridge Craft Trails exist partly to solve this. The network now includes about 355 studios, galleries, festivals, and arts organizations spread across 25 Western North Carolina counties plus the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. The idea is that a visitor with a map and a free Saturday can find makers who would otherwise be invisible from the highway.

An invitational like this one does the same work in condensed form. Instead of asking the buyer to drive four hours in a loop through Jackson and Swain and Clay counties, it brings twenty studios into a single room for seven weeks.

The Curator Behind It

M. Anna Fariello has spent most of a career making the case that mountain craft deserves serious curatorial attention, and she has the résumé to make it stick.

She started out as a ceramist before earning a graduate degree in museum studies and art history. She was founding director and chief curator of the Radford University Art Museum, held a fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and taught at Virginia Tech and Western Carolina University. She has curated more than thirty exhibitions since 1990, nearly all of them focused on American craft.

Her most consequential work in this region may be the Craft Revival Project at WCU, which she directed from 2005 to 2009. That grant-funded effort built an online archive documenting the mountain craft revival, and it remains the reference point for anyone researching how the handcraft economy here actually took shape. She later wrote Craft and Community: JCCFS 1925 to 1945, an early history of the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown. The North Carolina State Archives now holds her papers.

What she brings to Connecting to Place is a specific argument about what craft is for. "I like to think of craft as a socially integrated object, something made that's not simply appreciated for its beauty but also for a meaning more integrated into daily life," she has said.

That framing shapes the whole exhibition. The curatorial vision centers on continuity, on how today's makers carry forward practices that the mountains, their communities, and generations of accumulated knowledge shaped. It is not a nostalgia show. It is an argument that the line from 1925 to 2026 never actually broke.

The Building That Made This Possible

Mars Landing did not exist five years ago. Miryam Rojas founded it as Mars Landing Galleries in 2021, and in February 2026 it expanded into the Mars Landing Arts Center, a 9,000 square foot facility that now handles exhibitions, performances, film screenings, workshops, and flexible studio space for working artists.

Rojas came to this by a route nobody would have predicted. She is Peruvian-American, originally from Rye, New York, and she arrived in Western North Carolina by way of South Florida. She holds a degree in art history and fine art from George Washington University and spent close to two decades in art direction and stage design in the South Florida film and television industry. She also has commercial real estate renovation experience, which turned out to matter, because she personally spent eight months renovating the Mars Hill building.

Her stated aim for the gallery is to feature artists "not seen elsewhere in the region as if they have just landed in a new world." That is where the name comes from, and it is a reasonable description of what a Brasstown woodworker's pieces look like sitting in a contemporary gallery in Madison County.

The size is what made this particular show possible. Robin Johnson, coordinator of the Blue Ridge Craft Trails, pointed to both the space and the setting. "Whenever we hold events for our artists, we like to involve a gallery or arts organization that is also a site on the Blue Ridge Craft Trails," she said. "Mars Landing's spacious gallery can accommodate a large amount of work, and showing craft pieces in its contemporary environment gives the audience a new perspective."

Mars Landing is itself a listed site on the trails, which makes the whole arrangement circular. The network is hosting its own artists in one of its own venues.

A Hundred Years of Mountain Handwork

The reason a show like this feels natural here is that people built the infrastructure for it more than a century ago.

The Craft Revival ran roughly from 1900 to 1945, and it was an organized effort, not an accident. Settlement schools, mission organizations, and cooperatives worked deliberately to build markets for goods made in the mountains at a time when the cash economy in these counties was thin. Fariello has described it as a period when "a flurry of activity developed markets for local goods."

The trades that carried through are the ones you still see on studio tours: blacksmithing, doll making, quilting, woodworking, pottery, and weaving. They persisted because families taught them at home and because institutions like the John C. Campbell Folk School, founded in Brasstown in 1925 and still operating, taught them too.

That lineage is the reason WNC is not simply a place where artists happen to live. It is a place with a continuous handcraft tradition that outlasted the economic conditions that created it.

Congress recognized as much in 2003, designating the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area with a mandate to protect, preserve, interpret, and develop the region's natural, historical, and cultural resources while stimulating local economic opportunity. The Craft Trails grew out of that mandate. Madison County sits in the Central Mountains region of the network, grouped with Buncombe, McDowell, Yancey, and Mitchell.

Fariello's read on the current generation is direct. "WNC is known for its high-quality craft, both innovative and traditional handcraft practices," she has said. Of the 2025 invitational participants, she noted simply that they "created beautiful objects while keeping alive hand-making traditions."

What This Kind of Show Is Actually For

There is a version of the craft world that treats handmade objects as decoration, and there is a version that treats them as things you use. Fariello and the Craft Trails come down firmly on the second side.

Robin Johnson has put it in terms anyone can test against their own kitchen cabinet. Purchasing craft, she has noted, often means buying functional items and forming daily relationships with them, a favorite mug or a favorite scarf. That is a different transaction than buying a painting.

It also explains why these exhibitions matter beyond the art audience. A show that sends someone home with a potter's name and a town leads to a studio visit, then to a purchase, then to a repeat purchase. Multiply that across 355 sites and it becomes a meaningful piece of the regional economy in counties that do not have many other levers to pull.

The 2026 invitational is the third year of the series. The 2025 edition, Returning to the Ridge, ran at Mars Landing from July 2 through September 28 and grew to 33 artists and 60 works, which suggests the format is working. The two-venue structure, opening at The Bascom in Highlands and closing in Mars Hill, doubles the audience without doubling the ask on the artists.

Rojas has framed her gallery's role in the network the same way. "Supporting the Blue Ridge Craft Trails through Mars Landing Galleries honors both artists and the WNC community," she said.

Making a Day of It

Mars Hill is worth an unhurried visit. The town is built around Mars Hill University, downtown is walkable in an afternoon, and the whole thing sits close enough to I-26 that getting there from Asheville, Weaverville, or Burnsville is barely a detour.

Time your visit for a Wednesday through Sunday and the gallery is open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. From there, Madison County opens up. Marshall and its stretch of the French Broad are a short drive, Hot Springs is farther on, and the Bailey Mountain Preserve trails start at the edge of town.

If you are coming from the other direction, from Franklin or Sylva or Waynesville, there is a particular pleasure in driving two hours to see work made twenty minutes from your house. Sometimes it takes a gallery in another county to show you what is already in your own.

Call 828-747-7267 or check MarsLandingGalleries.com before you go, especially if you want to catch an opening reception or one of the gallery's workshops and performances during the run.

Weekends like this are part of why people end up staying in these mountains longer than they planned, and if you ever find yourself wondering what it would take to make that permanent, my door is always open for a conversation about it.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

When and where can I see Connecting to Place II in Mars Hill?

Connecting to Place II: Blue Ridge Craft Trails Invitational 2026 is on display from August 7 through September 27, 2026 at Mars Landing Arts Center, 37 Library Street in Mars Hill, North Carolina. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the gallery is closed Monday and Tuesday. Admission is free with no ticket or reservation required. Mars Hill sits just off I-26 about twenty minutes north of Asheville in Madison County. For current details you can call the gallery at 828-747-7267 or visit MarsLandingGalleries.com.

Which artists are featured in the 2026 Blue Ridge Craft Trails Invitational?

Twenty artists are in the show: Teresa Bouchonnet, Myron Carter, Susan Coe, Laurey Faye Dean, Brad Dodson, Gayle R. Haynie, Karen H. Hovis, Carol Lynn Johnson, Ilene Kay, Joe Frank McKee, Mike McKinney, Paul Hornbuckle, Janlyn Messina, Davy Arch, Caden Painter, Terance Painter, Paul Pieringer, William S. Rogers, Desmond Suarez, and Gayle Barker Woody. They come from Franklin, Waynesville, Dillsboro, Bryson City, Cullowhee, Canton, Cherokee, Maggie Valley, and Brasstown, and they work primarily in clay, fiber, metal, paper, and wood. The show was curated by M. Anna Fariello, a longtime curator of the Blue Ridge Craft Trails.

What are the Blue Ridge Craft Trails?

The Blue Ridge Craft Trails is a network of roughly 355 artist studios, galleries, festivals, and arts organizations across 25 Western North Carolina counties plus the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. It is a program of the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, which Congress designated in 2003 to protect and interpret the region's natural, historical, and cultural resources while supporting local economic opportunity. The trails are organized by region, with Madison County grouped into the Central Mountains alongside Buncombe, McDowell, Yancey, and Mitchell counties. Mars Landing is itself a listed site on the trails.

Did this exhibition show anywhere else before Mars Hill?

Yes. Connecting to Place opened at The Bascom in Highlands and runs there through July 25, 2026 before traveling north to Mars Landing Arts Center in Mars Hill, where it opens August 7 as Connecting to Place II. The two-venue format follows the pattern set in 2025, when the invitational's Mars Landing leg ran under the title Returning to the Ridge from July 2 through September 28 and grew to 33 artists and 60 works. The 2026 edition is the third year of the annual invitational. Seeing it in Mars Hill puts the work in a very different room than Highlands.

What else is worth doing in Mars Hill while I am there?

Mars Hill is a small college town built around Mars Hill University, and downtown is compact enough to walk in an afternoon. The Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre performs on campus during the summer season, and the Bailey Mountain Preserve offers trail access right at the edge of town. Madison County stretches out from there toward Marshall and Hot Springs, with the French Broad River running through both. The drive over from Weaverville or Asheville takes well under half an hour, which makes the gallery an easy anchor for a longer day in the county.