[gentle music] - Helene has fully changed everything.

[gentle music continues] Sadly, I lost my studio and all the work that I built up to of these five years in Helene.

But along the way I managed to meet incredible people and to really figure out what it means to be an artist in this modern era and what it means to find your community.

Hey, [indistinct], do you know if any of my pieces are still here?

- I haven't seen any.

- That's okay.

- Where are yours?

- I don't know, but it's okay.

- They've got to be in there though somewhere.

- That's okay.

They can be remade.

That's me.

[debris clatters] You start to wonder what's actually worth trying to salvage and what's worth just moving on from.

There's a character here.

Someone's sitting on a bench with an umbrella.

This is me.

When I saw the place where I had spent the past six months, eight months building, it was destroyed.

There was nothing that can survive that.

When you look at prints hanging from the ceiling, from the 26 plus surge of water, nothing's recoverable from that.

This has also changed how I view community.

I realized how powerful community is and how much of our own identities are formed from those around us.

So now I can't help but to think about where the future of Asheville is gonna go.

[static crackles] [effect clicks] [gentle music] - [Reporter] Asheville, North Carolina, that town is basically cut off from the rest of the state right now.

Most of the city is totally submerged in water.

- [Speaker] This is an unprecedented storm, and it's causing us to have an unprecedented response.

- [Esther] Hurricanes can cause a lot of wind damage, and they can cause a lot of flooding.

And we got them both.

We have down trees all over our community as well as devastating flooding you're looking at right Now.

- Still looking at Hurricane Helene as the Category 4 storm tore through the southeastern United States, leaving nearly a hundred people dead and a trail of devastation.

- I can't help to think about the future of these districts, because although things are destroyed, you have the most creative minds you could ever ask for all gearing towards, how can we make this even better than it was before?

A lot of people will say like, "I don't know how I would've handled it," but I guarantee you had you been there, you would've found that strength.

Not even maybe from within you, but from everyone around you, because everyone was being strong for the person on their left and being strong for the person on their right, and that created unity.

So yeah, things that will come with me for forever is the value of those around us, and that we are stronger than we think.

That it's okay to not be okay, because there's always time to build back stronger and better.

[bouncy music] [upbeat music] My name's XCVI.

I'm an artist here in Asheville.

I moved here about five years ago.

I do abstract works to sculpture work, photography, videography, and, ultimately, I'm a mixed media creator.

Arts has been in my life since the beginning.

Creating was always there for me.

When I went to college, I was going to be a business person, and that didn't happen because I took a drawing class, and I felt more confident than I had in any sort of other class.

And then that's when Covid hit.

I then would draw and paints all throughout the day, all throughout the night, and I posted a piece online for sale.

I wanted someone to have my work.

And when I got that first $20 bill, I put it in my pocket.

I knew that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

A friend of mine reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to move in with them in Asheville, North Carolina.

And I sold everything I had and I moved in.

[upbeat music] When you show up into these mountains and you see the beauty in the city and the sky, there's murals everywhere.

There's people actively pursuing their craft on the streets trying to sell you their work.

They're communicating to you their love of the nature around them.

The city of a million murals.

That felt like home immediately, and you don't get that anywhere else.

You know, you don't get that sort of community that encourages you to take a risk.

As soon as I got that studio, everything else that was baggage fell to the side.

The only way to describe that first feeling of having my art up on white walls surrounded by incredibly talented artists was the most vulnerable I've ever felt and the most comfortable I've ever been in my own skin.

I got to show this world the mirror to me.

I got to show them what I think about, what I don't talk about to friends, it all comes together as a painting.

They say there's no free places in the world anymore.

They're wrong.

You could go to the River Arts District any day of the week, you could see from people from all around the world.

Signatures that maybe you didn't know, but you're curious about.

Shops that you could walk around and just look.

They had taken an area that was going to be condemned, and they gave it to the artists, and the artist built that into something that can only be described as gold.

It was pure, it was beautiful, it was inspiring.

You don't get that for free very often.

But those artists, they made it, and they said it was for you, it was for me, it was for everyone who wanted to be a part of it.

[gentle music] [rain spatters] On the 26th of September, the rain had been falling for about two days nonstop.

That night, the storm just, it just kept picking up and it was hounding.

That was the last night for about 2.5 weeks that we had power.

When I woke up the morning of the 27th, I woke up at 7:00 AM to the blinds of my room flapping in the wind.

Chaotically, the tree in my front yard, cracking and moaning and groaning.

About 11:30 that morning, the wind had subsided enough.

I was able to get my drone up into the sky.

[drone blades whir] Trees down everywhere.

On houses, across roads.

My own road was blocked from either side.

We had no way to get out.

We had a reservoir of water, we had enough food.

And the day that we were able to make it out to the studio, I believe was the 30th.

We had to stop at Biltmore Village.

There was no other way in.

So we trekked through six inches, foot and a half of mud.

And we had a conversation that I'll never forget, and I hope that I don't have to have again, which is, what do we do if we see a body?

And we made a plan.

We knew that if we took a picture, we would get GPS coordinates to that exact location.

We were going to text that to the local 9-1-1 services along with the image and then we would move on.

That kind of set the tone for coming into the district.

When we crossed down from the tracks into the skate park, [static crackles] [effect clicks] [somber music] I saw what was gonna be the new climbing gym, the gas tank from Level 42.

The immaculate glass blowing shop [camera shutter clicks] had been ripped from its area and dragged about a hundred yards down the district and busted through the front entrance of the Foundation Studios.

Walking around that day, it felt like I was in a cemetery.

It was like I got to see these graves of places that were so beautiful in my world.

This used to all be covered in beautiful murals.

We have actually murals on the front side of our building from the RAD works prints, and they're the studio right next to me, and you can actually see stacks of their screens, which hopefully they'll be able to reuse because they're metal.

But the community here, you can see the walls, they're fractured.

The community's fractured.

One of our artists in the building, Spencer Beals, he was actually in the building at the start of the flood, and he was in the building when the rain first started.

We thought it was gonna be just a couple feet of rain.

He was there with a shop vac and brooms ready to push out the water.

Once it hit chest deep, he was able to get out and actually able to get across the tracks and watched our studio go underwater.

And he's here today working just like everyone else.

A lot of this art is nonrecoverable, which means the time that these artists have put in into making this, sorry, the level of thought that's been put into this level of care, it can't be brought back, but it can be cherished and it can be remembered.

And I feel like for a lot of us, our goal right now is to see this work again because that's covered in mud and waste.

You look around the area, you'll see the pleb is gone.

It's completely washed away.

I was standing in front of it when I first got here, not even realizing that I was standing in front of the place where I would fill up a growler of wine and bring it and sip with friends as we plotted our next big studio event.

And that's not coming back.

A lot of this stuff, this building will have to be demolished.

So it's coming home trying to figure out where I'm gonna be editing.

I just go through and collect whatever I got during the day.

So actually the beginning shot that I got was of one of the partners of one of our artists, Spencer Beals.

And during one of our breaks, his girlfriend, you know, she started playing guitar just sitting in front of the building.

And what's wild and sad is that she released her first EP in this building.

And, you know, it's cool because that's her medium of expression and she brought that and shared it with us.

Even though it was temporal, it was here and then it was gone.

But in that moment, you know when all you hear is helicopters overhead, sirens, it's beautiful, you know?

This is in front of Summit Coffee where just about everything was ripped apart.

Because if you look at it first glance, it just seems like maybe an open face of a building.

The more you zoom in, the walls are completely ripped apart.

The top floor where I'd sit with my triple shot espresso coffee in the morning just to get the day going right, you know, it's all openly exposed.

So what was once a little area that you could sit in and feel warm and safe is just completely different.

[compressor engine rumbles] Soon as I pulled up here, I saw a bunch of my pieces I never thought I was gonna get to see again.

And one of my pieces that was in our most recent showroom, "Same Storm," which is about how when communities come together and work towards a common goal, like anything can be achieved.

I never thought I was gonna see that piece again.

And I just got to see big mud be pressure washed off of it.

And it's there and it's still beautiful.

It's different, it's changed and so is everyone else here, but I got to see it again.

And it's here, and I know where it is.

- We are cleaning salvaged art and ceramics and sculptures that were stuck in in the flood debris.

Reid, the studio manager, and Jordan, who also helps us manage the studio as well as other people, help pull a lot of it out of the debris.

And now we're trying to clean it of mud.

This one's looking pretty good now.

But they start out like this It's kind of amazing it came out intact.

Just trying to get people's art back to them in better shape.

- I've experienced things I never thought it would in my life.

And our artwork is a mirror to us.

So there will be reflection of this experience in my art.

It changes you when you see what nature can do because we see on our TVs broadcasted all over what humans can do to one another, what a bomb can do.

And that's what the damage looked like.

It looked like something you could only see from a war film, but it wasn't, it was just nature.

The hardest thing for me to overcome with this storm was accepting help from people.

I've been raised by a single mother.

My father passed away when I was very young.

And we've always been taught to be self-sufficient, to be able to take care of yourself.

Because then if you're taking care of yourself, you can take care of others.

And when those around you have lost so much, it's easy to try and still say "I'm okay" when you're not.

Our community has been devastated.

We will rise like that water did, but it won't be damage left behind, it'll be the rebuilding.

And I think this spring we'll see the most beautiful flowers blossom.

And it won't just be the wildflowers, it'll be the connections that have been made from this.

I am so ready to see how this community builds back something just as beautiful and better than what we did before.

[contemplative music]