North Carolina Glass Center

The story

The center started life as Riverglass, a plan for the Southeast's largest public-access glass facility on Riverside Drive north of the River Arts District. In 2016 the board voted unanimously to rename it the North Carolina Glass Center, bought the assets of the existing Asheville Glass Center, and took over its operations on June 1 of that year at 140C Roberts Street. The Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority put $200,000 toward the new build; Kari Rinn came on as first executive director that July; the purpose-built facility was to open in spring 2017. A decade on, the address on the contact page is still 140C Roberts Street, which is either a cautionary tale about capital campaigns or proof the old Asheville Glass Center space was good enough all along.

What's actually there is a nonprofit — 501(c)(3), still legally chartered as Asheville Glass Art School — running a hot shop around a furnace held above 2,000 degrees, a flame shop, a cold shop, and a gallery. More than 80 regional glass artists rent subsidized studio time, teach, and sell through it. There's a glass-art therapy program for veterans and a BIPOC artist residency now in its third year. Hurricane Helene put the River Arts District underwater in September 2024 and the center is still working through the economic aftermath; in the middle of that recovery it opened a second, larger campus at 112 East State Street in Black Mountain.

For visitors, the whole thing narrows to a 30-minute slot at $112 in which an instructor walks you through gathering molten glass and shaping a cup, pumpkin, paperweight, or ornament in two colors of your choosing. There is a $70 torch-based version in the flame shop and a three-hour, $255 workshop for people who want more than one object out of it.