North Carolina's Arts and Crafts

 By: Katheryn McGuire

Like many places in America, North Carolina is home to a rich tradition of artists and crafters. From colonial chairmakers to modern painters, many artists call this state home. As an artist myself, I was interested in researching North Carolina arts further, and making a StoryMap was the perfect opportunity.

My first step in developing the StoryMap began by searching through the North Carolina Literary Map database. The NC Literary Map highlights literature from around the state, so I used the database to search for “literature” by and about arts and artists across the state. Since I wanted to highlight specific locations, I went through the database by browsing literature from specific counties in North Carolina. After noting down several books, I did further research on them through WorldCat and other databases. Doing outside research allowed me to find even more books about NC arts and crafts, which were later added to the NC Literary Map. I wanted to make sure that the books I selected covered a wide range of art forms, so I selected books on woodworking, textile arts, pottery, and more.

I started to work on individual entries for the StoryMap by focusing on areas that I had familiarity with. One of the first entries I did was on Hickory, which is home to the Hickory Furniture Mart, a cornerstone in the craft of furniture-making in NC during the 20^th century. I currently live outside of Hickory and have been to several of the furniture stores in the city, so it was interesting to examine the history of furniture-making from a more analytical view.

Working on the StoryMap meant that I looked into places in the state that I have never been to or have only seen in passing. I have never been to Seagrove, NC, but I was fascinated to learn about the area’s history of pottery making. Not only was Seagrove a center of pottery in earlier decades, but the majority of Seagrove’s current population are potters, cementing the area’s legacy as a center of pottery in North Carolina. Research into pottery at Seagrove led me to discovering other places in North Carolina with a rich pottery tradition, which resulted in StoryMap slides on the Catawba Valley and Winston-Salem’s historic Bethabara district.

Researching into the arts of North Carolina oftentimes meant looking into specific artists and highlighting their work in my slides. For example, I researched Doug Marlette, a nationally syndicated comic artist who was born in Hillsborough, NC. Marlette’s newspaper work was interesting to research, and I checked out copies of his graphic novels to read in my free time. Looking into specific artists allowed me to delve deeper into their work and appreciate it on an individual level.

Ultimately, I’m very grateful for the opportunity to create a StoryMap. Not only did it allow me to base my research on a topic I was previously interested in but gave me the chance to learn about places and artists in North Carolina that I knew only a little or even nothing about. I’m grateful to have learned more about the artistic traditions of my home state and how these art and craft styles developed over the state’s history.