Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Gatlinburg�s �Best Kept Secret,� Endures

by Chris Barrett

Less than an hour from where you're reading this, there is some tremendous art going on. Novices and accomplished artists alike are hunkered down over pottery wheels and kilns, looms, lathes, easels, canvases, cameras, and presses to learn more about their own disciplines and others. Faculty from all over this country and 10 others have unpacked their own valises and sketchbooks nearby, anxious to help. The teachers and the taught were probably in their studios before you finished your corn flakes. And it's likely that they'll still be there when David Letterman starts his monologue tonight.

If this week's students and faculty have anything in common with their predecessors in those studios (and they do, as most of them have been there before), the art that follows them out of the studio will be important and worth seeing for many reasons. There will be weavings and woodwork made using traditional craft techniques, but of modern and innovative design. And there will be contemporary two-dimensional art—prints, paintings, hand-made papers, photographs, watercolors, drawings, and combinations of them all—that was enhanced by the antique crafts being practiced and learned in the studios next door.

If you've ever missed the Gatlinburg by-pass on your way to the Smokies, you've passed within feet of the place where it all happens. An arts oasis rendered all but invisible by nearby neon, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts is located on Gatlinburg's main drag. The courses offered there are rooted in the rural mountain culture of the Southern Appalachians as it thrived long before electrified Gatlinburg or the national park.

Beyond the sidewalk and hedge that separates Arrowmont from Gatlinburg proper, visitors find one of the most fertile patches of land for the cultivation of art anywhere. The atmosphere is something of a cross between Lhasa and the MacDowell Arts Colony—mentors are made readily available but privacy can also be had. The pristine 80-acre arts enclave, with its historic residence buildings and up-to-the-minute studios and gallery, gives you an idea of what Cades Cove (or

Gatlinburg, for that matter) might have become given a historic-minded, forward-thinking city council.

Crafty

The doings of well-meaning folks far from East Tennessee, the seeds for what is now Arrowmont were sown during the teens of this century. Pi Beta Phi, a fraternity for women, decided during their 1910 national convention to commemorate their 50th anniversary by providing opportunities for education to some community in dire need of them. Consultation with the U.S. Department of Education led the group to Gatlinburg. The first classes of the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School convened in February of 1912. Thirteen local children attended—their first exposure to organized education.

Efforts to satisfy the need for healthcare and high school classes in the area soon followed, both provided by Pi Phis. Fraternity educators and organizers who came to Gatlinburg to support the settlement school were impressed by the handicrafts unique to the region, particularly woodworking and weaving. They were also distressed by signs that the traditional arts were waning as mass-produced goods made their way into the mountains. Classroom and home-taught courses were established to revive traditions that were generations old. The wares of local artisans were marketed through the fraternity's alumnae clubs, and in 1926, Pi Phi opened Arrowcraft Shop, on what is now the Parkway in Gatlinburg.

In the shadow of the air-brushed T-shirt and bear-shaped candle boutiques now so prevalent in Gatlinburg, being the hamlet's first and oldest gift shop might seem a dubious distinction. But there's no question that Arrowcraft was a major force in what would become a far-reaching and lasting traditional arts and crafts revival in the Southern Appalachians. The institution now known as Arrowmont was born in 1945, when students from UT's College of Home Economics first came to the school to work and learn in exchange for college credit alongside locals looking to either teach or master the arts that once kept their homes and community alive. In 1977, Arrowmont's affiliation with UT shifted from the Home Economics program to the Department of Art.

Recent years have seen the school renew and modernize its commitment to the community it was established to help. Arrowmont arts and crafts classes for area children are offered both at Arrowmont and at Sevier County schools. Relatively new is the school's elder hostel program, focusing on students over 50.

Sandy Blain teaches ceramics at UT and has been involved at Arrowmont for 30 years. She's been director of the school since 1979 and has seen the school's curriculum shift even while adhering to a self-appointed task that has remained the same for more than 50 years.

"The mission of Arrowmont has always been one of education," says Blain. "When we used to educate children who were part of the settlement school, it dealt with the three R's. However, these children were identified early-on as having parents and grandparents who were very much involved in traditional crafts—the word traditional wasn't even used then. These were objects that the children saw and used in their homes. The children picked up on this and were very interested in the craft classes that were offered at the settlement school.

"Gradually, the traditional craft interest continued but also moved into a more contemporary vein where not everything was just reproducing the shapes and the forms in the idea that everything made had to be utilitarian. There were objects made that were functional or decorative or sculptural. Everything didn't have to be functional."

The school's woodworking tools began to do double duty, turning out chairs and cabinetry along with sculptural work that ranged from the merely decorative to the surreal. The school's wood-fired anagama kiln, more accustomed to producing functional, Oriental, or folk school vessels, was soon curing clay and glazes in shapes and patterns that had nothing to do with dinner service but could confound and delight any viewer.

That open-minded, open-door policy appears to be the foundation of Arrowmont's enduring success. Courses in traditional crafts are organized in studios that are separated only by picture windows from rooms full of artists engaged in more modern pursuits. So painters, printmakers, and mixed-media artists leave Arrowmont enriched by basketry, wood-joining, ceramic, or fiber arts techniques that they absorb either intentionally or accidentally. And the inverse is certainly true as well.

Arty

To hear Arrowmont alumni describe the school's courses, traditional college-level arts education compares to Arrowmont the way a drinking fountain compares to a fire hydrant. Intense is the word that comes up most often. F. Clark Stewart is a professor at UT, where he teaches drawing. Every three years or so, he also teaches a summer session at Arrowmont. This July, he'll teach life drawing there for the first time.

"It's a different population at Arrowmont," says Stewart, comparing the teaching atmosphere at Arrowmont to that of UT. "At Arrowmont, the students are generally older, and they take the classes very seriously. The first time I taught there and saw that I was expected to teach from 8 to 4, I said to myself, 'I can't believe how easy this contract is.' Then the classes started and I realized that the students expected me to be there until midnight every night, wanting me to teach them everything I knew during that one course."

Stewart compares the productivity of a two-week long session at Arrowmont to a full semester at UT, and students have made the same analogy.

"I'm anxious to see what happens with this life-drawing class," says Stewart. "Normally, figure drawing is something that takes some time to soak in. That's where drawing normally becomes very focused. It should be incredibly intense at Arrowmont."

Along with artists rooted in academia, like Stewart, Arrowmont has earned a reputation for hiring world-class working artists—people who support themselves by applying the talents they've come to demonstrate and pass along. Robin Surber is a Knoxville-based painter, muralist, and clay artist and a graduate of UT's art program. She's taken classes at Arrowmont and has also taught there. Surber thinks the rotating distinguished faculty at Arrowmont is one of its strongest attractions.

"They're working artists," says Surber, "and they're out there making a living at it. These artists are the best in the country. As far as the classes go, at Arrowmont they are much more intense than anything you'll find in a university. There's a lot more energy, and they're a lot more focused. I guess it's because that's the only thing you do there: your art. They encourage you in every way.

"You have the undivided attention of an internationally known artist for two weeks; eating dinner with them, going out for drinks after work. It's all right there."

Arrowmont students usually take advantage of the school's room and board program, which adds to the monastic air of the grounds. At dawn students roll out of their modest digs, stroll down the hill for breakfast, and then to the studio where they spend the day. They need never see the real world if that's their preference.

Andrew Saftel is a painter and sculptor who, formerly a Knoxvillian, now lives and works in rural Cumberland County. Saftel has taught at Arrowmont and also at Haystack, a similar school in Maine. He thinks the rustic rural setting combined with the room, board, and studio support services all play a role in the progress that artists make at a place like Arrowmont.

"I think that people are just really free in places like that," says Saftel. "It's when people take a couple weeks out of their lives to come to a comfortable place, where all their needs are taken care of, so they can just work. It's a very positive environment."

Now this is not to say that artists are anything other than articulate, but to ask for an artist's testimonial in words is like asking to see a politician's graduate portfolio. If you wish to see and feel for yourself how Arrowmont advances art and artists, now is the time. Showing concurrently in adjacent galleries, through April 11, are two wonderful shows featuring the work of many artists who have taught and been taught at Arrowmont. Between "Surface; New Form/New Function" and the school's National Spring Faculty Invitational, the breadth of media, materials, traditions, inventions, and personalities that find their way to Arrowmont is demonstrated nicely. There is fiber art, ceramics, metalwork, enameling, photography, sculpture, and more from artists of all states and all artistic bents.

If all Arrowmont did was display this work, that would be plenty. But it's important to remember how Arrowmont nurtures and otherwise sustains these kinds of art and the people who make it.

Among those who are hip to its driveway, hidden by simply being plain and well-marked instead of gaudy, Arrowmont is often called Gatlinburg's best-kept secret. Others fear that the location is a stigma, holding the school back from greater recognition or easier access to those who might benefit from it but never hear of it. Stewart doesn't necessarily disagree with the obvious disadvantages of an arts and crafts school buried in tourist kitsch. He does add, however, that once you're in Arrowmont, you have a very different perspective of what's outside.

"For the most part," Stewart says, "the relationship between Arrowmont and Gatlinburg is negligible. Arrowmont really is an island. Sometimes I do think that works against it.

"On the other hand, what happens at Arrowmont is very intense. Everyone is concentrating on their work. In a certain sense, it probably doesn't matter where it is. It could be in the desert or a big city and it wouldn't matter to the people working there."