TACtile Arts

Tryon has a long and proud history in the arts, born in the traditional crafts and music-making of an isolated mountain community and infused with new ideas brought south by the railroads in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Now Appalachia's best will be on display at the Tryon Arts and Crafts Festival October 17 and 18, with more than 40 potters, weavers, woodworkers, jewelers, metalworkers and painters gathering on the grounds of TAC's new home on Harmon Field Road.

Tryon Arts and Crafts has been an important creative center for nearly a half century, formed in 1960 as an arts and crafts cooperative after a blizzard the previous year left most of the townspeople stranded at home for three weeks. One of them wrote to the local newspaper suggesting a center for teaching crafts as a leisure time activity for just such forced periods of isolation, and it wasn't long before a meeting was called at the old Oak Hall Hotel to talk about the idea. Among those attending were Carter P. Brown, the creator and owner of the venerable Pine Crest Inn, and the Tryon-based philanthropist Violet Parish-Watson, who would soon go on to play a critical role in the creation of the Tryon Fine Arts Center.

Both luminaries were among the founding members of what was at first simply called Tryon Crafts, organized to not only to teach craft-working skills but to reinvigorate Tryon's reputation as an artists' colony. Originally meeting in a makeshift space a few steps from the town's train depot on Trade Street, TAC was among the first tenants when the Fine Arts Center was completed in 1969. It remained there for the next 37 years until, in 2006, it moved into 10,000 square feet of newly renovated space in what had been the Tryon Middle School, purchased from the town with a bequest from Jeanette White, a weaver of some note and a longtime TAC member.

The top-to-bottom renovations were funded by donations from 13 major donors and grant support from the Polk County Community Foundation. The new building houses six classroom studios and workshops, an exhibition gallery, a gift shop where articles made by TAC members can be purchased and, in an adjacent purpose-built structure, a forge. "Having so much more space has definitely brought more people to TAC," says vice-president Valerie Miller during a recent tour of the building. "Although this month's festival will be outdoors, visitors will be able to tour the facility and see how much more we're doing with the new space."

In the woodworking shop, Wayne Henderson was supervising three students crafting the guitars that, along with mandolins, will be among the 20 handmade instruments Wayne produces each year. A winner of the National Heritage Award, Wayne travels throughout the country from his home base in Virginia showcasing his instruments and, as an equally accomplished musician, playing them in concert. He'd just given one such concert for TAC at Harmon Field, which stretches to the Pacolet River just behind their building.

Across the central gallery, the fiber workshop was in full swing with six looms and weavers creating everything from winter scarves to small rugs drawn from the rainbow of colored wool skeins lining shelves along the walls. Some of the weavers have been working at TAC for more than a quarter century. On other days in the fiber classroom, students produce the hand-printed silk scarves on display in the gift shop, and most recently a group of African-American women in Tryon have established a kind of transcontinental workshop with counterparts in Africa. The women trade fabrics and patterns to produce brilliantly colored and decorated cloth dolls, also on sale in the gift shop along with the pottery, woodwork, stained glass and metalwork that flows out of TAC's studios each year.

Given special pride of place in the central atrium is the Heritage Gallery, displaying the work of the legendary Tryon Toy Makers, who produced exquisitely designed wooden playthings for the young. Their work is housed in elegant mahogany display cabinets and includes playfully-colored wooden dolls and minutely-detailed furniture scaled for a young girl's dollhouse, along with trains and cars for their brothers. They are part of the display of artifacts turned, sanded and polished by hands that seem to reach across the years to guide and preserve a lustrous heritage.