- Penland School of Crafts
This article is about the school. For the gentleman, please see
Theodore Penland .The Penland School of Crafts (usually called simply "Penland") is a center for craft education located in the
Blue Ridge Mountains , about 50 miles fromAsheville, North Carolina ,USA .The school was founded in the 1920s in the isolated mountain town of Penland, North Carolina. In 1923, Lucy Morgan, a schoolteacher who had recently learned to weave, created an association to teach the craft to local women as a way to give them a source of income. The center provided instruction, looms, and materials. Local volunteers built first a cabin and then a larger hall. In 1929, Penland was officially founded as the Penland School of Handicrafts. The school grew rapidly and began expanding into other crafts. By the 1950s, it was attracting students from around the world.
As of 2005 , Penland offered spring, summer, and fall workshops in a wide variety of craft disciplines, includingpottery ,glassblowing ,metalworking ,weaving anddyeing , andwoodworking , as well as in subjects more traditionally consideredfine art s, such aspainting ,photography , andprintmaking . The school has no permanent faculty; the workshops are taught by visiting professors and artists from around the United States. Penland does not award academic degrees.Penland holds an annual Community Day in early March. On this day most or all of the studios are open to people living near the school, who can take a tour around the grounds and then work on completing a small project with the help of the artists.
The distinctive architecture at Penland was designed primarily by architects based in North Carolina, including Frank Harmon (Raleigh, NC) and Dixon Weinstein Architects (Chapel Hill, NC).
External links
* [http://www.penland.org/ Penland website]
* [http://www.mintmuseum.org/penland The Penland Experience]References
* "Penland Course Catalog", Summer 2005.
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.