What is Neo-Appalachian Art?

Neo-Appalachian art is a contemporary movement, centered in Western North Carolina and the Tri-Cities region of East Tennessee/Southwest Virginia, in which artists rework traditional Appalachian craft, folklore, and material culture using contemporary techniques, urban visual language, and often a satirical or absurdist edge, exploring the dynamics and complexities between the local and the increasingly national and global mass cultures. It is not a fixed style with a manifesto, rather it is a shared sensibility that shows up across painting, ceramics, printmaking, street art, textiles, and even food, unified by one goal: honoring where the region came from while refusing to be frozen in it. 

Neo-Appalachian art takes the raw material of the region,  self-reliance, oral storytelling, handcraft, folk religion, the land itself, and puts it in conversation with diverse elements both within and beyond the Appalachian region: pop culture, mass media, internet absurdism, contemporary gallery systems. The tension between those forces is the work. Explore below to discover more.