Penland School of Crafts in the News

WNC magazine’s current issue contains an excellent story, titled A Tradition of Innovation, that presents an illustrated overview of Penland School. You can read the article on the WNC website. Here’s a teaser:

While remaining true to its past, the world-renowned Penland School of Crafts never stops exploring the reaches of contemporary art. Still nestled into the hills above the tiny town of Spruce Pine NC, Penland has grown into a world-renowned center for contemporary craft, offering a 400-acre campus where more than 1,500 students, instructors, and practitioners collaborate each year in an international melting pot of art and community.

The more time one spends at Penland, the more one understands the sense of connectivity and pulse of mystery that’s hard to define to an outsider. Though almost everyone who visits can agree there is a certain magic to the place. “There’s a removal from the day-to-day that happens when you have to drive up and up and up, and then up some more into the mountains, and you come around a corner and there’s that valley with the studios behind it,” says Steve Miller, another trustee who runs the MFA program in book arts at the University of Alabama and has taught at Penland 14 times. “That remove, that temple at the top of the mountain phenomenon—it moves me every time.” 

Thanks to writer Brian Barth (who is a relative of Penland’s founder Lucy Morgan) and photographer Mike Belleme for their fine work on this piece.