Books On Tryon

Tryon Architecture & Landscape

by Michael J. McCue.
This forthcoming volume presents a new approach to the heritage of architecture in Western North Carolina, a region of surprising cultural diversity.  A team of photographers with diverse artistic approaches are recording and interpreting buildings in the vicinity of Tryon, a mountain town with an especially rich architectural heritage.  The emphasis of the work is not only to show the exterior building design, but how these structures relate to natural topography and designed landscape.
Interior photography, also, is a major objective of the book.  In total there are six images of each selected property, which allows for developing an understanding of its landscape context, exteriors, and interiors as well.  The images, however, are not like Architectural Digest.  Each property is photographed candidly as it is lived in or worked in, without artificial arrangement for the camera.
The places selected are a balance of grand and small, typical and atypical. The time period is from the eighteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first.  While the book includes vernacular designs typical of the region and the times, there is emphasis on unusual architecture and on structures designed by architects who can positively be identified.  Examples of work by many of these architects have never before been published, and some of the Tryon structures are by nationally-known architects whose work in North Carolina is not widely known.  A few of the places are easily seen by a casual visitor but, like much of the region’s most interesting architecture, most are hidden away from public view.  Some of these places are unfamiliar even to people who have lived in Tryon for a long time.
The volume is a generous format 9.5 x 11 inches, four pages per property.  Michael McCue, historian and design scholar, is authoring essays about each place to point out key architectural features, the historical significance, and how these properties enable us to understand the cultural heritage of Western North Carolina.  Some of the photographers working on the project are Christopher Bartol, Elaine Pearsons, Chris Talbot, Brenda Gray, Brooke Sanders, Carolyn Ashburn, Chuck Hearon, Mara and Ford Smith.  Vintage images are used to supplement features on historic properties, and to explicate the original designs of several Tryon structures that have been significantly altered or that are gone.
Price:  TBA
Projected publication date:  2010
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Tryon Artists: 1892 - 1942

by Michael J. McCue.
Published in a numbered, limited edition of 500, in conjunction with the 2001 exhibition at The Upstairs Gallery in Tryon, North Carolina. Hardbound 8.5 x 11, 192 pages, 79 color and 90 black and white illustrations. Includes exhibition checklist of 130 works exhibited, by 34 artists with portraits who worked in the artists' colony. Individual biographies of these painters, sculptors, illustrators and fine art photographers, plus six others who lived or sojourned in Tryon before World War II, 37 portraits of artists.

Appendix briefly describing 30 other visual artists known to have spent time in Tryon during the period. Essay by Michael McCue, presenting an overview of Tryon's place in the cultural life of North Carolina and the nation, and suggesting why its artists' colony previously has not been recognized in the scholarly literature. He shows that it was the state's most important artists' colony for fifty years, and one of the most cosmopolitan and eclectic art communities in the South. This edition is out of print. Information about many of these artists, and illustrations of their work, is contained in Paris and Tryon available now.
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Homer Ellertson (1892 - 1935)

Published in conjunction with the 2000 exhibition at Tryon Fine Arts Center. Thirty-six pages, with 5 black & white and 29 color illustrations, together with biography and commentary on Ellertson's art by Michael McCue.
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Paris & Tryon:
George C. Aid (1872 - 1938) and his Artistic Circles in France and North Carolina

by Michael J. McCue.
ISBN 0-9726801-0-1
8.5 x 11, 230 pages, 255 black-and-white illustrations, 39 color illustrations, reference bibliography, index, Smythe-sewn hard binding, dust jacket.
The American artist George C. Aid was born at Quincy, Illinois in 1872. From the St. Louis School of Fine Arts he went to Paris for study at the Julian Academy.
He lived in Europe, first in Paris, then in Bordighera, Italy, for a total of fifteen years. He was visiting in the US when WWI broke out; he never returned to Europe.
He settled in the artists community of Tryon, NC. He owned and operated a vineyard there for eight years, painting all the while.
In the 1930s Aid was invited to teach and work in Charlotte; over a two-year period prior to the onset of heart trouble, he made a major impact on the city's emerging art community.
Aid's art was exhibited in Boston, Chicago, and the Paris Salon. He took a silver medal at the 1904 St. Louis world's fair and a bronze medal at the 1915 San Francisco exposition. At the time of his death he was one of the most respected artists in North Carolina and the South.
His early work was largely oil on canvas or etching. After moving to Tryon he worked in oils and in French chalk on paper.
The first retrospective of his work was held in Tryon, NC, in 2002.

• The art of Aid, his friends and contemporaries in Europe and America
  
  
• Period photographs of artists, their studios, and locales they depicted in their art.
  
  
• Publication date: February 2003
  
  
• Winner of the 2003 Willie Parker Peace History Book Award of the North Carolina Society of Historians

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Tryon Toy Makers and Wood Carvers 1915 - 1940

by Michael J. McCue.
In 1915 Eleanor Vance and Charlotte Yale, the co-founders of Biltmore Estate Industries, moved to Tryon and founded a new craft industry that flourished for the next quarter century. In the mountain village they trained young people to make some of the finest hand-carved wood objects and hand-painted toys ever produced in the United States. The operation became nationally recognized; it was one of the original members of the Southern Highlands Handicraft Guild. The sophisticated designs and remarkable execution of the Tryon toymakers and woodcarvers are not typical of Southern "indigenous" highland craft. This introduces collectors and cultural historians to the uniquely cosmopolitan design influences of this distinctive oeuvre. Published in conjunction with the exhibition at Tryon Fine Arts Center in 2004, this monograph is now out of print.
A new hardcover book is forthcoming which will incorporate the material in this out-of-print publication, and add biographies of the crafters, numerous photographs of their work, and serve as the definitive reference for the subject. The book will be an oversized volume, with Smythe-swen binding, dustjacket, and index. Price $75. If you wish to be notified when the new Tryon Toy Makers and Wood Carvers book is published, kindly supply your contact information to Condar Press.