Calendar of Events
Looking for things to do in Hendersonville, NC? Whether you’re a local or just passing through we’ve got loads of great tips and events to help you find your perfect adventure.
Interested in adding an event to our calendar? Please click the green “Post Your Event” button below.
Join us for our annual Handcrafted Holiday Market, a festive craft market with one-of-a-kind gifts and artwork! This market will run from November 21 through December 19, and we invite you to help us open the market with our Holiday Reception on Wednesday, November 20 from 6-8pm. Guests can enjoy holiday food, drinks, and music while shopping the market. Santa will also be joining us for those wanting a picture!
From wine and whiskey cups to flasks and goblets, the 6th Annual Vessels of Merriment exhibition at Grovewood Gallery will feature handcrafted drinking vessels by 17 potters from across the country. This ceramic invitational will kick off with an opening celebration on Saturday, November 9, from 2 to 5 pm, where guests can mix and mingle with some of the participating artists and enjoy complimentary offerings served by our friends at Metro Wines. This event is free to attend and open to the public. Vessels of Merriment will remain on view through December 31, 2024.
Whenever you want!
Supplies available at
2 Sulphur Springs Road
If you need to request supplies for the same or next day, please call 828-254-1776.
Organizing a litter cleanup with your friends, neighbors, co-workers, or other community members is easier than you may think! Asheville GreenWorks provides cleanup supplies and safety information, and will coordinate trash pick up as needed. Available supplies include safety vests, gloves, trash grabbers, trash bags, and SHARPs containers (upon request).
Review the attached guides for instructions and safety information.
Need to know
Please review the attached documents and contact [email protected] with any questions. Your supplies will be available for pickup on the date you’ve requested at Asheville GreenWorks’ office at 2 Sulphur Springs Road, Asheville, NC 28806.
All cleanups should be reported using the online form and supplies should be returned after your cleanup.
Come enjoy our most popular Asheville tour!
Duration
1 hour and 30 minutes
About
Bachelorette/Bachelor Parties are not permitted on this tour. The Fender Bender Bus is bachelorette/bachelor friendly!
Historical and hysterical, The Hey Asheville tour features outrageously entertaining tour guides, outlandish comedy skits complete with special appearances and loads of Asheville information. You’ll get to see the best of downtown Asheville and the rarely seen but stunningly beautiful Montford neighborhood, not to mention the burgeoning River Arts District! You’ve never had a ride like this. It’s like a vaudeville show on wheels!
Find out what makes Asheville so unique on LaZoom’s City Comedy Tour. It’s the perfect mix of history, comedy, and entertainment. Our guides are trained professional actors working with an original script. It’s like a theatre on wheels! The tour highlights downtown Asheville, historic neighborhoods, the South Slope, and the River Arts District.
Age Restrictions
13 and up. No exceptions.
Stops
10 minute beer & bathroom break at Green Man Brewery
What’s Included
Guided tour of Asheville on a Purple Bus
Funny actors, fun bits
Actual History about Asheville
Green Man Brewery Stop
What’s Not Included
Beer/Wine (Must be purchased from LaZoom or the Brewery Stop)
Cash! You’ll want to tip the guides for changing your life for the better.
Located within the wildly-popular and botanically beautiful Southern Appalachian Mountains, The North Carolina Arboretum offers more than 10 miles of hiking trails that connect to many other area attractions such as Lake Powhatan, the Pisgah National Forest and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Visitors of all ages and abilities can enjoy their hiking experience at the Arboretum as trail options include easy, moderate, and difficult challenge levels. All trails are dog-friendly and visitors are asked to adhere to the proper waste disposing procedures for pets.
Part of a running group that would like to use the Arboretum as a starting point or parking location? Please review our Running Group Guidance and email [email protected] with any questions.
We are thrilled to extend an invitation for you to join us once again for the highly anticipated Vintage Market Days® at the WNC Ag Center from
November 22-24. This is more than just an event; it’s a celebration of creativity, community, and the timeless charm of vintage treasures. Immerse yourself in a vibrant atmosphere filled with unique finds, inspiring artisans, and like-minded enthusiasts. Together, let’s create unforgettable memories and embrace the spirit of discovery that makes Vintage Market Days® a truly special experience. We can’t wait to see you there!
We will be hosting local vendors and from surrounding states who will have a variety of items including but not limited to vintage, boutique, yummy snacks and treats,handmade, repurposed items, and so much more! As we celebrate our 8th year here in the Asheville area, our event has grown over the years because of you our VMD™ supporters!
November 22 & 23 9:00am-5:00pm
November 24 10:00am-3:00pm
Pieces made from nylon fabric ripstop, which keeps tears from spreading, invite viewers into created, fantastical worlds, only to highlight the complex—even impossible—architectures of their construction. Before the pandemic, Adrian primarily focused on personal experiences and interrogations of queerness, identity, and sexuality. Since then, the work has zoomed out in its scope, still centering identity but placed in larger infrastructure and surveillance systems that mediate, manipulate, and control desire.
Adrian counts queer fiber art, BDSM and kink culture, theatre, camp horror, puppetry, and drag among his many influences. Works in RIPSTOP, like the modernist bounce house sculpture A Fallible Complex (2021), evoke spaces for play, beckoning visitors in through their alluring aesthetic and then blocking their entrance or revealing structural instabilities, like missing floors. Others, like The Sensational Inflatable Furry Divines (2017-19), use sensual materials, like faux fur, spandex, and pleather, which connect to theatrical performance and counterculture. The materials “play on people’s initial associations and serve as a gateway into greater conversations about identity construction, performance, desire, and technology,” he shares.Pieces also nod to the history of quilting, including the AIDS Memorial Quilt, another influence on Adrian’s work. “Even when pieces aren’t explicitly making quilt references, I want the history of quilting and sewing-based craft to be part of the conversation of the work,” he says. “Craft is so much about the processes and histories behind materials. It’s about connecting with communities of people who practice those techniques. It’s about material and technique being a doorway into a greater relationship with an object.”
Themes of transformation—of structures, identities, and bodies—run throughout the show. “What I love about drag and puppetry is the sense of transformation and play, specifically with bodies,” Adrian says. “Within these art forms, a body can become mutable and capable of performing and becoming in unexpected states.” The sculptures also transform throughout viewers’ experiences, going through stages of inflation and deflation and existing in many different states.
RIPSTOP’s constant interplay between surface and depth, assumption and reality, are all a part of what Adrian describes as “looking behind the curtain,” which they trace back to the theatre. “When I’m thinking about systems, and the systems desire fits into, I’m thinking of stage construction, the backstage, the things that go on behind the show, and performance of our desires,” they explain.
As a craft artist, Adrian’s philosophy “comes down to having an intentional relationship with material, process, and technique,” he says. “Those aspects of art making are just as – if not more – important than an intellectualized concept being illustrated by an artwork.”
“Broadened definitions of craft that highlight communities of practice are foundational for the Center for Craft’s new strategic direction,” explains Executive Director Stephanie Moore. “Max Adrian’s work in RIPSTOP exemplifies the expansive and meaningful forms craft can take.” The Center for Craft is an institution Adrian credits for their professional growth. “The Center for Craft has felt like such a supporting institution for me specifically and for so many other craft artists I know,” they note. “To be able to bring this amount of work to Asheville is pretty cool.”
See Max Adrian: RIPSTOP at the Center for Craft Beginning July 26. A reception will be held on August 15. RIPSTOP is organized by Houston Center for Contemporary Craft and curated by Sarah Darro.
These early literacy programs for kids and their caregivers are designed to develop a joy for learning through books, songs, and activities.
Story time takes place in our library community room. This is not a ticketed event.
Join us for a North Carolina winery tour and celebrate a date night, bachelorette party, retirement, family, or a weekend away while sampling our favorite local beverages along the way. Our standard tour includes visits to three Asheville area vineyards. With safe and reliable transportation provided, you can sit back, relax and just have fun.
Included:
- Round trip transportation*
- Three vineyard visits
- Tastings at two of your three stops. Let’s just say that the pours at the first couple of locations are generous so we like to leave the third-stop beverage choice up to you.
- Time commitment = up to 5 hours
Want to include specific vineyards on your Asheville wine tours? If you have “must-see” wineries in mind or want to craft a full day catered to your group’s interests, we’re always happy to create a custom experience. Reach out any time!
American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection features more than 100 works of art by renowned American artists. The exhibition beautifully illustrates distinctive styles and thought-provoking art explored by American artists over the past two centuries. Though many objects from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection have been on view at other museums, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art and Saint Louis Art Museum, this exhibition features the best of the collection brought together in one location. The exhibition begins with Colonial-era portraits by masters, such as Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, and Sarah Miriam Peale, and then moves on to highlight the development of mid-19th-century landscape painting. Viewers will discover works depicting the United States from coast to coast by artists, including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Francis Copsey, and even a monumental arctic scene by William Bradford.
Bill Viola’s Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier, 1979 on loan from Art Bridges is an immersive experience that explores the ideas of death and regeneration in nature. In a darkened room, sounds from nature envelop the viewer, as a placid pool of water reflects a projected image of Mount Rainier onto a screen. The water is periodically disturbed, causing the image to dissolve and slowly recompose as the pool settles. As an active volcano at rest, Mount Rainier embodies both quiet beauty and dramatic violence. Using time as both a tool and a theme in his work, Viola visualizes the dualities of nature’s rhythms of renewal, which include moments of both fragility and strength.
Ceramic artists throughout history have become masters of all four elements—creating clay from a mixture of earth and water to shape their work, drying it in air, and hardening it in fire. Throughout this process, the artist decides which aspects of the work will be tightly controlled, and when the elements can step in to leave nature’s mark. This exhibition traces the historical, stylistic, and conceptual origins of work that either embraces or refuses the element of chance in ceramics, looking at modern and contemporary work made in Western North Carolina.
The Asheville Art Museum is pleased to present Ginny Ruffner’s Reforestation of the Imagination, organized and toured by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The exhibition imagines an apocalyptic landscape of withered plant forms that come to life when activated with augmented reality. In collaboration with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, Ruffner illuminates the delicate balance between nature and the artificial human-built world around us, putting forth an optimistic hope for the future: that technology can be a means to understand and help save the earth from environmental devastation. Visitors can download the free app “Reforestation” on their phones or use the iPads in the gallery to bring this second reality to life. When the tree rings of a stump are viewed through a device’s camera lens, a hologram of a fictional plant appears to sprout from the sculpture. These imagined fruits and flowers have evolved from existing flora, developing dramatic appendages and skills necessary to flourish in this radically different environment. In Ruffner’s fantastical reality, tulips develop stem flexibility, pears contain windows to the outside world, and flowers take on the form of birds. The installation includes Ruffner’s tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her surreal flora and their remarkable, sometimes humorous adaptations. Used as inspiration for the AR images, 19 original drawings by the artist will also be on view.
Plan to collaborate with other musicians at Sideways Farm & Brewery in Etowah. Bring your instruments and voices and enjoy making music and networking with other artists, while enjoying the beautiful scenery. Food truck is on site and beverages available for purchase from Sideways (small
batch craft beers, hard jun, ciders, wine, and non alcoholic drinks). Family, fans, friends, and leashed dogs are all welcome!
During winter months enjoy playing under the covered, sheltered, heated porch! And during the summer months enjoy
collaborating in the fields, on the stage, or under the patio
Kick off the 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐓𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 at our 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐲!
Friday, Nov 22 from 5-9pm
Get early access to shop our vendors while enjoying live music, craft activities, giveaways, and complimentary bites + bevs.
Tickets are pay what you can – purchase online or in person.
All proceeds benefit the Equal Plates Project.
Purchase your ticket here https://rb.gy/an2xqh
Equal Plates Project is a nonprofit that purchases from small farms at fair prices, transforms their quality ingredients into nourishing meals, and shares thousands of locally-sourced meals each week with neighbors facing complex barriers to food access. Learn more at equalplatesproject.org.
The Good Tidings Market continues Saturday + Sunday
Nov 23 + 24
11am-5pm
Free and open to the public
Charlotte, NC – The UNC-Charlotte 49ers Ice Hockey Club will host the Appalachian State Mountaineers in a rematch for the 2024 Outdoor Classic hosted at Truist Field, Home of the Charlotte Knights. Last year was an overtime thriller that left fans wanting more!
The game will take place on Friday, November 22nd at 7 pm. This game is also a part of the Light the Knights Festival presented by Truist.
“The team is incredibly excited to come back to Truist for our third annual College Hockey Outdoor Classic,” said Charlotte 49ers Ice Hockey Club Head Coach, Tobin Trautz. “Each year the overall fan, and team, experiences have grown exponentially. Last year, with our dramatic overtime game vs App State – the fans and players enjoyed a very exciting, edge-of-your seat experience that we feel deserves a rematch. We are looking forward to an even more intense battle with App this year – outdoors and under the lights at Truist Field!”
The 49ers Ice Hockey Club team is part of the University Recreation Department. The team is partially funded thru the Student Activity Fee Commission, with the remainder of costs are player-funded through dues, sponsorships, and donations. It is also entirely student-run and features several Alumni on their staff. The team is a member of the ACCHL Division II (Atlantic Coast Conference Hockey League) which includes schools such as NC State, Duke, Elon, Wake Forest, and UNC-Charlotte.
Tickets for the 2024 Outdoor Classic can be purchased online at www.charlotteicehockey.com
· $25 – Adults
· $20 – Students w/ UNCC & App ID (At the Gate)
· Hospitality Seating Also Available
*Limited student tickets are available at the door with proof of ID.
**All other tickets must be purchased online.
2024 OUTDOOR CLASSIC TO BENEFIT LOCAL CHARITIES IN THE CAROLINAS
The 2024 Outdoor Classic hosted by UNC Charlotte Men’s Ice Hockey Club vs Appalachian State University at Truist Field – Home of the Charlotte Knights – is proud to announce that this year’s event will support three local charities in our shared communities.
100% of ALL NET PROCEEDS of HOSPITALITY, BOX SUITES, & 50/50 RAFFLE SALES will be donated to the InReach & The Ability Experience – in support of empowering people living with disabilities in the Greater Charlotte community.
In addition, $5.00 from EVERY TICKET SOLD will be donated to HOSPITALITY HOUSE NORTHWEST NC – in support of their Hurricane Helene Recovery Fund – local to the App State community.
For more information on InReach, or to contribute directly, please visit www.inreachnc.org
For more information on The Ability Experience, or to contribute directly, please visit www.abilityexperience.org
For more information on Hospitality House Northwest cc, or to contribute directly, please visit www.hosphouse.org
For inquiries and information on how to support the team, please contact [email protected] or visit www.charlotteicehockey.com
Winter Lights is a spectacular open-air walk-through light show made from over one million lights! Located at the North Carolina Arboretum in Asheville, North Carolina, this year’s event features favorites like the famously tall 50-foot lighted tree and the Quilt Garden, along with enchanting new details designed to delight and surprise. All prices are per vehicle. No pets allowed.
Winter Lights features live entertainment nightly and food and beverages from the Bent Creek Bistro, the Cocoa Shack and the Cocoa Cabin! Open nightly from 6:00 – 10:00 p.m.
The Western Front, Christmas, 1914. Out of the violence a silence, then a song. A German soldier steps into No Man’s Land singing “Stille Nacht.” Thus begins an extraordinary time of camaraderie, music, and peace. A remarkable true story, told in the words and songs of the men who lived it.
Performances of All is Calm will be held on the days and times listed below. The lobby and concessions area will open one hour prior to showtime. Concessions may be taken into the theatre during the performance.
November 21 – December 15, 2024
Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays at 7:30
Sundays at 2pm
Friday 11/22 and 11/29 at 7:30pm
Friday 12/6 and 12/13 at 2pm
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library impacts the pre-literacy skills and school readiness of children under the age of 5 in Buncombe County. The program mails a new, free, age-appropriate book to registered children each month until they turn five years old. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library creates a home library of up to 60 books and instills a love of books and reading from an early age. If you have any questions about the program, please send an email to [email protected].
A national panel of educators selects the Imagination Library titles, which include: The Little Engine that Could, Last Stop on Market Street, Violet the Pilot, As an Oak Tree Grows, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Llama Llama Red Pajama, Look Out Kindergarten, here I come, and many more (take a look at all the titles).
Register your child now!
Program Launch and Expansions
Literacy Together became a Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library affiliate in November 2015 with support from the Buncombe Partnership for Children. Through this program, registered children in Buncombe County receive a free book in the mail each month. Their parents also have the opportunity to attend workshops to learn how to build their children’s early literacy skills. Parents in need of literacy assistance are encouraged to receive tutoring through Literacy Together’s adult programming.
The program served 200 children during the 2015/16 fiscal year. The program expanded to serve 400 children in July 2016, and 600 in August 2017. In July 2018, capacity increased to 1,900 thanks to a special allocation in the North Carolina state budget. We’re now serving 4,600 kids in Buncombe County.