The Fabric of Downtown: Temporary Barn Quilt Installation Closes Out the Campaign

Artist Dayna Walton installing the barn quilts

Fabric of Downtown set out to tell the story of what holds Downtown Asheville together, its people, its history, its everyday texture. It only made sense that the campaign's final piece would be an actual quilt.

At the celebration for the Wall Street Steps Mural this past summer, ADID hosted free community painting workshops with mural artist Dayna Walton, inviting our neighbors to paint their own barn quilt panel, each built around a single theme: the leaves of Downtown's own trees. Barn quilts are a traditional folk art form, wooden panels painted in quilt-block patterns and mounted outdoors, more commonly seen along rural driving trails than in a dense Downtown corridor. Bringing that tradition to Wall Street gave the campaign's closing chapter something the rest of Fabric of Downtown couldn't: a piece the community made with their own hands, not just watched or read about.

The temporary installation will be up for six months, so we hope you're able to enjoy it while it lasts.

Thanks to Dayna Walton, the artist who continually goes above and beyond for the sake of art, ecology, and the Asheville community. Thanks also to the community members, neighbors, and friends who showed up to paint and share the fruits of their creativity and labor with us for this special piece, and to Slava Bakery, Leslie and Associates, and the building's property owner, who graciously allowed us to mount the work on their building.

Wall Street now carries two layers of public art side by side: Walton's mural, and a row of quilts painted by the people who use the street every day, standing as the capstone to a campaign built on telling Downtown's story from the inside out.

Our work on Wall Street isn't done yet. More to come this fall.

Asheville community members coming out to paint their barn quilts this summer.