Floyd draws people for many reasons. For artists, it’s the beauty, the community, the quiet. This little town just off the Blue Ridge Parkway is a blend of native and newcomer, log cabin and coffee house, gravel road and mountain ridge. Cara Ellen Modisett spends an all-too-brief few days exploring some of the newest additions to the Floyd arts scene.
“It’s a little like stepping into a painting,” says Caroline Thomas from her front porch in Floyd. Flowering vines drape half of it, curtaining an old-fashioned porch swing, steps lead down to the lawn.
Across the road is the sunset, red glowing above the ridgeline, the treeline, the meadow, the shadowy deer in the meadow, the creek with a folding chair sitting empty beside it, the fence.The porch is attached to a century-old farmhouse, on the slope of a hill.
Thomas is a potter, not unusual in Floyd, and she and her husband Craig Gammarino own Ambrosia Farm Bed and Breakfast just off Canning Factory Road. Besides operating as a B&B, Ambrosia Farm is also a summer camp for arts and adventure, where kids learn to make masks, baskets, Native American tools and pots; evening programs involve storytellers, musicians and drumming.
Floyd started out rural, simple, agricultural. In the 1960s and ’70s, “back-to-the-landers” arrived, and ever since the newcomer community has grown to be about half the county. It’s known for its every-weekend-of-the-year bluegrass jams, and the Crooked Road Music Trail passes right through town.
A group of (then) seven potters and one woodworker named 16 Hands played a big part in making it known for its artists, and hundreds of them are estimated to live in the county. Galleries, performance spaces and restaurants – some of which are all three (Oddfellas, Café del Sol) – make Floyd a focal point for creative types.
Most recently, the establishment of the Jacksonville Center, a barn-turned-arts-school named after the town’s first incarnation, has taken the town one step closer to communities anchored by older schools and arts centers such as North Carolina’s John C. Campbell Folk School and Southern Highland Craft Guild, Tennessee’s Arrowmont and West Virginia’s Tamarack.
Floyd is fast becoming the newest arts capital in the Blue Ridge.
Morning pottery class
The wheel is turning, and Martha Sullivan’s hands are slowly shaping a plate. It emerges from clay a little like magic, smoothing, growing, flattening. Sullivan is teaching a pottery class at the Jacksonville Center, on (Va.) Route 8 just north of Floyd’s one stoplight.
The barn and its outbuildings have been transformed. The pottery studio was once a creamery, and the windows still look out on farmland. There’s a blacksmith shop here now, and the huge barn has been turned into offices, gallery space, a retail shop and a glassblowing studio and a big community room where the Old Church Gallery Quilt Guild rotates giant hangings every 30 days.
Two of Sullivan’s students, I discover, are her parents, Rick and Carol Luttrell, who’ve come up from Lake Norman, N.C. two summers for her classes. One is Jerry Schrader, a retired photographer from Massachusetts who found Floyd on the internet. Another is Connie Colb, who moved here from Ohio after running a barbecue restaurant for years. She came here recovering from cancer, because of the organic farming and the low stress.
Sullivan was heavily involved with the creation of Jacksonville Center and in building this studio. A Virginia Tech graduate, she started there as a geochemistry major, and found her calling in a pottery class she took at the YMCA.
“I told my parents that pottery was really chemistry with an eye for form,” she asserts.
She’s been a professional potter for 10 years now. She’s back at Tech these days, finishing a Masters of Science in Architecture in Industrial Design. Like so many of the people who live in Floyd, she’s focused, pursuing a dream, living by art.
The Jacksonville Center
It was a dairy barn in the 1940s. In 1995 the Floyd Community Center for the Arts, Inc. was founded, says Chris Shackelford, director of the center’s school, which has 46 instructors this year. The center itself started construction in March 2005 and opened three months later.
In the upstairs gallery, the current six-week exhibit is a Floyd-wide collection of work, from pastel to pinhole photography to handmade paper, woodblock collage, clay sculpture, “recycled Styrofoam covered with Drivet” (a statue called “Ecstatic St. Francis,” by Donna Douglas), wood furniture, baskets, jewelry and a blue, yellow and orange paper pulp giant skink clinging to a closet door.
Marie Daniel, downstairs, helps in the shop. She was born here, taught high school art for two years, left Floyd in the 1960s, then came back a few years ago and built a house on her family farm.
“Our parents and our teachers told us to get an education and get out of here, because you couldn’t make a living in Floyd,” she says. Does she miss the old Floyd? “It’s still here,” she says. But there’s a new vitality – “the creativity, the support for the arts, the doing, the living, making living from art.”
“We’re not just an arts school,” says David St. Lawrence, executive director of Jacksonville Center. He’s from Silicon Valley. “We help talented people unlock their creative abilities and then we guide them to the market of their choice.
“We’re part of the economic engine of the region.”
Café del Sol
This is another of my favorite places in Floyd, a coffee shop that brews it strong, and serves sandwiches and even beer. In the same building is the Sun Music Hall, which hosts an increasing number of concerts by visiting artists; there’s also a retail shop. The café is lit up by huge windows set in the brick walls, and art, of course, rotates in this informal gallery, too.
Lydeana Martin meets me for lunch. She’s from Meadows of Dan, and is community and economic development director for the county.
“My family’s been here forever and forever,” she says. “I’m probably related to half the people this side of Route 8,” and she waves a hand in a southwesterly direction.
“16 Hands put Floyd on the map – there’s no doubt about that,” says Martin. New Mountain Mercantile, a nice little shop a few doors down, was the first to really sell the area artists’ work, and still does. “Most of us didn’t know they were there.”
New Mountain Mercantile
I find crystals, candles, incense, pottery, “Made in Virginia” and “Handcrafted by Local Artisans,” toys, tie-dye, batik sarongs from Mali, shell jewelry, blown glass, and four pieces by a former 16 Hands potter whose work I’ve loved for years.
Carter Holliday’s Studio
I drive out of town south on Route 8, hang a right, go past Sylvie Granatelli’s pottery studio, over the Little River, and take another right onto gravel Thunderstruck Road. It’s beautiful, crowded with yellow wildflowers, following the Little River.
Holliday, a woodworker, ceramics artist and painter, has built a house and studio/gallery up here. He bought 25 acres in 1992, coming from Florida with his wife and daughter.
“Got to be the countryside, to start with,” he says, on why artists come to Floyd. “As an artist, you’re always looking at color, you’re always looking at design. Mother Nature – she did it right to start with, and you can’t improve on it, so the only thing you can do is look at it, and look at it, and look at it.”
Second Night
After dinner with Martha Sullivan and her parents at Over the Moon – downstairs is a shop with organic foods and bulk teas and good chocolate; upstairs is a gallery and small restaurant, with live music some weekends – I head back to Ambrosia Farm to watch the sunset from the porch and wind down. I sleep well.
MORNING: The Bell Gallery
Joanne and William Bell dreamed up a gallery 10 years ago while traveling the art show circuit; this year they opened up Floyd’s newest arts space in a century-old storefront. Bill comes from Lexington, Va.; Joanne from Wisconsin.
“We just had our 25th anniversary,” says Bill – “at an art show.”
Bill is a photographer; Joanne creates glass-and-pressed-flower art. The gallery represents more than 50 local and regional artists. They’re creating a garden out back, to be completed in 2007.
The OLD CHURCH GALLERY
It’s a half a block away from the original location that gave it its name, now housed in an early 20th century house. The space is part historical society, part gallery, with rotating and permanent exhibits interpreting the history of Floyd: everything from contemporary photography to prehistoric sculpture to the town’s old telephone exchange.
The gallery is “a creative link to our history,” says Nancy Demory, a native who returned home from years as a psychologist in northern Virginia and Kansas and now serves as president of the gallery’s board of trustees.
The weekend the gallery opened in 1978, “someone came up from Roanoke,” co-founder Catherine Pawley remembers. “He said, ‘I want to come up and see who had the guts to open a gallery in Floyd.’”
Click here to read an interview with Floyd artist Carter Holliday.
Click here to read an interview with Floyd artist Jayn Avery.
FLOYD LINKS
Floyd, Virginia
Arts and music directory for Floyd:
16 Hands Potters (Floyd)
including:
- Silvie Granatelli
- Donna Polseno
- Ellen Shankin
- Stacy Snyder
Ambrosia Farm Bed & Breakfast
Ambrosia Farm Art Camps
The Bell Gallery (story)
Blue Heron Pottery (Jayn Avery)
Blue Mountain School
Cafe del Sol
Carter Holliday, artist
Chateau Morrisette Winery
DLP Concerts
Dreaming Creek Timber Frame Homes, Inc.
The Floyd Country Store
FloydFest
The Jacksonville Center for the Arts
The June Bug Center
LaPointe's Used Books
New Mountain Mercantile
Oddfellas Cantina
Over the Moon Gallery Cafe
The Pickin' Porch
Pine Tavern Restaurant
Seven Springs Farm
Sol Pottery (Martha Sullivan)
Villa Appalaccia Winery
Other Arts Businesses...
Alchemist Paints & Varnishes
Blue Ridge View Gallery
Crenshaw Lighting
Enchanted Tree (fabric art and more)
Glances Through Glass
Jeanie O'Neill: A Gallery/Boutique
Jeri Rogers Fine Art Photography
Meadows Music
Paula McDaniel Designs
Silverfish Designs (Terry Belcher)
Starroot
Tom Phelps Studio (stoneware)
Vitro Yoyo Glass Studio
ADDITIONAL LODGING
http://www.floydvirginia.com/visitors-lodging.html
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