Art After Helene: Artist Panel Discussion
Art After Helene: From Mountains to Sea Artist Panel Discussion
Thursday, January 22, 2026 • 6:30-7:30 PM
Reception Hall
CAM Members $10 | Not-Yet Members $15 | Students & Educators Free
Join us for an engaging artist panel featuring Western North Carolina artists Julyan Davis, Erika Diamond, and Bill Green, all included in CAM’s exhibition From Mountains to Sea. In conversation with Associate Curator Ben Billingsley, the panel will explore how artists respond to place, change, and lived experience through landscape.
The conversation will also reflect on the impact of Hurricane Helene—the deadliest strike on the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina—highlighting how memory, grief, and ecological trauma can be transformed through creative practice into works of hope and renewal.
The exhibition From Mountains to Sea features landscapes that are at once beautiful and provocative, scarred yet sacred, speaking to loss, change, and rebirth. Learn more about the exhibition here.
Register at the link below.
REGISTRATION
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Julyan Davis is an English-born artist and writer who has painted the American South for thirty years. He received his art training at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. In 1988, having completed his B.A. in painting and printmaking, he traveled to the South on a painting trip that was also fueled by an interest in the history of Demopolis, Alabama and its settling by Bonapartist exiles.
Erika Diamond is a textile-focused artist, curator, and educator. Holding degrees from Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA), Diamond has exhibited nationally and abroad in venues such as Contemporary Craft, SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, Dinner Gallery, Form & Concept Gallery, and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. As Associate Director of Galleries at Chautauqua Institution and a freelance curator, she creates exhibitions that blur distinctions between the genres of art, design, and craft, while centering diverse voices and practices.
Bill Green, a photographer, explores the idea of lost America wherever he finds it. Green documents the heritage of Southern small-town life and the stories found therein. Obscure everyday scenes people might not otherwise are where he can be most often found. He believes that a mix of time, place, and texture is often dismissed as the uglier side of cities or countryside, yet it resonates aesthetically in ways modern buildings can’t.
FEATURED IMAGERY:
The photographs used in event materials are by Bill Green, one of the panel artists. His paired “before and after” photographs—this example being one of three—document sites before and after Hurricane Helene, highlighting the storm’s destruction and its lasting impact on small-town Western North Carolina.
Photograph credit:
Bill Green (American, b. 1963), A Quiet Stretch [detail], [left] Before 12/30/21, [right] After 1/5/25. Photography, 20 x 30 in. Courtesy of Bill Green. © 2025 Bill Green.
From Mountains to Sea presented to the community by Wells Fargo
