In September 2024, Hurricane Helene turned Asheville’s River Arts District (RAD) into a landscape of water and wreckage. Studios that once hummed with glassblowers, potters and painters stood submerged, decades of creative labor lost beneath mud and debris.
“As the water receded, the realization that hundreds of artists had lost everything was a gut punch that still brings me to tears even now,” says Kimberly Self Hundertmark, executive director of the RADA Foundation.
And yet, the story did not end there. Today, after 19 months of resilience and reimagining, the RADA Foundation is under contract on a property above the floodplain to create the RAD Creative Campus, a permanent cultural anchor designed to secure the future of Asheville’s creative economy…