Plans Being Finalized for 25th Anniversary Conference

What began twenty-five years ago as an experimental Arts & Crafts weekend at the historic Grove Park Inn will emerge this coming February as the longest running event dedicated to the revival of the Arts & Crafts movement.

Nearly fifteen hundred attendees are expected to begin arriving in Asheville, North Carolina, the third weekend in February for an extended weekend of seminars, workshops, demonstrations, discussions, exhibits and the country's largest antiques and contemporary artisans shows dedicated exclusively to the Arts & Crafts movement.

Asheville provides the perfect backdrop to this annual event, as evidenced by its being named to yet another Top Ten list this past month. TripAdvisor voted Asheville its #10 most popular destination for "Food and Wine," along with New Orleans, Napa, Charleston and Santa Fe.

Helping to propel Asheville into the Top Ten, two historic landmarks, the Biltmore Estate (1895) and the Grove Park Inn Resort and Spa (1913), combine to attract more than 1,000,000 visitors a year to this mountaintop plateau, both surrounded and protected by the stunning Blue Ridge Mountains.

And for the past quarter of a century, Arts & Crafts enthusiasts from across the United States, Canada and England have sought a respite from winter with a long, relaxing and educational weekend in Asheville and the Grove Park Inn. The Arts & Crafts Conference is again brimming with the country's finest artists, artisans and antiques dealers specializing in the Arts & Crafts style.

They will be complimented by six major seminars, plus the Asheville premier of the award-winning documentary The Day Carl Sandburg Died, introduced by writer and director Paul Bonesteel. Deemed the poet of the Arts & Crafts movement, as a young man Sandburg fell under the spell of Elbert Hubbard, and journeyed several times to East Aurora to stand alongside Hubbard at the podium in the Roycroft Inn.

In addition, optional events include a Thursday night banquet at the adjacent Biltmore Industries (a 1917 Arts & Crafts woodworking and weaving enterprise) hosted by the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms; a Saturday evening reception and talk at the downtown Asheville Art Museum; and daily house tours organized by the Asheville Preservation Society.

Information packets are being mailed this week to registered attendees, and can be viewed online at Arts-CraftsConference.com. Rooms are still available at both the 510-room Grove Park Inn and the downtown Renaissance Hotel, but are expected to disappear soon. A free shuttle bus will again run between the two hotels for conference attendees.

To see the complete agenda, plus information on lodging, transportation and the shows, please go to http://www.Arts-CraftsConference.com.

- Bruce Johnson

PS - Do not miss the updated Slide Show!