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July Issue 2004
Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Hendersonville, NC, Presents Tea Time Talk with Arthur Joura on Aug. 3, 2004
The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design in Hendersonville, NC, presents a Tea Time Talk with Arthur Joura, on Aug. 3, 2004, at 4pm. All Talks are held in the Conference Room at the Kellogg Center. Refreshments will be served. This Talk is in conjunction with Garden Fantasies, an exhibition of regional garden crafts on display in the Center's gallery through Aug. 13, 2004.
Joura is the Bonsai Curator at the North Carolina Arboretum, an inter-institutional facility of the University of North Carolina, in Asheville, NC. Joura's educational background is in fine art, having studied at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Student's League in New York City. He has studied bonsai at The National Bonsai and Penjing Museum in Washington, DC, with American bonsai master Yuji Yoshimura, "The Father of American Bonsai", and at the Nippon Bonsai Association in Japan.
The North Carolina Arboretum became involved with bonsai in 1992 when a collection from a Butner, NC, family was donated. Joura has since built the bonsai program to be one of the Arboretum's strongest components. In 1999 Joura began leading the design work on a garden for the display of the bonsai collection adjacent to the Visitor's Center. The North Carolina Arboretum's bonsai garden promises to contribute a new chapter to the ongoing story of bonsai development in the United States. Its final design reflects the same vision of a synthesis of Eastern and Western aesthetic values, focused on the universal appreciation of plants, that has become increasingly evident in Joura's curatorial work with the Arboretumís bonsai collection.
This statement can sum up Joura's bonsai philosophy: "At its best, bonsai is living art, expressing in miniature an experience of nature." In his development of the Arboretum's collection (which now numbers over 200 specimens, plus many others in production), Joura constantly seeks to forge connections between the art of bonsai and the Arboretum's mission to promote appreciation of the flora and culture of the Southern Appalachians. He has introduced to bonsai culture more than 50 different species native to western North Carolina, and created several tray landscapes depicting well-known natural sites of the region. Perhaps of even greater significance, the model for the Arboretum's bonsai plantings as Joura styles them is not the bonsai depicted in books and magazines, but rather the example of nature as represented by the wild trees of the forests and mountain tops of the Blue Ridge region. Joura feels that this is a return to the roots of bonsai as an artistic expression, not of a certain culture, but of an individualís experience of the natural world around them.
For more information visit the Center's website at (www.craftcreativitydesign.org) or call 828/890-2050.
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