Helene I. George Terry McDonald, artist. Photo by Allison Taylor
By Andrew Patterson
The fall air greets me as I step toward Owen Hall at UNC Asheville. Inside, the campus is still—the kind of quiet that holds memory. It’s 10 a.m., and apart from one man sipping his coffee among the gallery walls, the space is empty.
That man is George Terry McDonald—artist, musician and one of the featured contributors to Looking Back to Move Forward, an exhibition created to honor the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene. The Department of Art and Art History Gallery Committee chose to dedicate this year’s slot—usually reserved for the Biennial Faculty Exhibition—to Helene instead. Around the same time, Professor Bill Bares was organizing a university symposium, and the two events aligned seamlessly.
A call went out to UNC Asheville students, alumni and faculty to submit works inspired by Helene. Co-curators Carrie and Eric Tomberlin invited faculty involved in the university’s Sustainability Certificate program to serve as jurors, helping shape an interdisciplinary story of resilience.
Outside Owen Hall, half-uprooted tree stumps still mark the landscape—a quiet reminder of the storm’s power. Inside, the artwork mirrors that memory: paintings, photographs and installations capturing both devastation and renewal. I find myself thinking how important it is that we choose to remember something so painful. And remembrance, I realize, is how we honor.
Through these pieces, we remember the lives lost, the homes destroyed and the livelihoods shaken—but also the people who saved others, the volunteers who dug through mud and debris, and the strangers who showed up from around the country to help.
McDonald describes the story behind one of his paintings, a depiction of White Water Falls, which was found sitting in muck and leaning against a post after the storm. The recovered piece now sits in his RAMP Studios workshop on Riverside Drive, where he once stood filming as floodwaters surged past—hoping the river wouldn’t rise any higher.
“Perhaps [it’s] better now with the streaks of dirt,” McDonald says of the recovered work.
There’s something uniquely powerful about the university gallery. Standing amid the Helene pieces feels like standing between worlds—the storm’s chaos and the calm that follows. The photographs capture pain; the paintings transform that pain into beauty. After the closure of the UNCA exhibition in October, McDonald moved his paintings to Static Age Records, where they will be on view through Friday, November 14.
On the final day of the Static Age exhibition, McDonald will bring his other art form to the space—performing with his band, The Zealots, at the closing reception. If you’re lucky enough to be there when he is, you’ll experience his work twice: once with your eyes and again with your ears, as he describes the subtle details hidden within each brushstroke.
That, perhaps, is the truest form of healing: to sit with what hurt us, feel it fully and allow it to move through us into creation. Maybe you’re not ready yet—and that’s okay. Art like this reminds us that transformation is possible.
Static Age Records is located at 110 North Lexington Avenue, Asheville. Tickets to the concert are available at StaticAgeNC.com/events.
