Angel Alvarado | Nov. 10, 2026
The poster for BOOM BOOM Barns on a bulletin board at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, N.C. Nov. 3, 2026 (Echo/Emma Taylor McCallum)
This upcoming Saturday, Nov. 14, “Boom Boom Barns” will take place at Warren Wilson College (WWC) from 4 to 8 p.m. The event is an ambient farm stroll, hosted by WWC’s Art and Craft department in collaboration with Swannatopia, an art collective and production crew based in Swannanoa.
“Boom Boom Barns” is bringing in many visiting artists from out of state who will create art installations for the public to enjoy. There will be music performances, light shows, film screenings and even an attempt at breaking the Guinness World Record for the world's largest tape loop. If that was not enough of an attention-grabber, the event will also celebrate the White Barn's 101st birthday.
The event has been in the planning stages for almost a year and a half. The two primary coordinators are Kathryn Cellerini Moore, assistant professor of art, painting and drawing, who has been working at WWC for three years, and Madalyn Wofford, art and craft department Coordinator, who has worked at WWC for eight years. They both saw the potential for the college’s landscape to be used as the main theme for the event, wanting to bring more attention to the landscape’s natural beauty.
“We have so many barns and sheds and wonderful places and cabins on campus,” Moore said. “Madalyn and I had this idea to activate them. Originally, it was just sound and community, and then it grew into a larger sound, light, and music production. It's going to be very unique and very of this region and honoring this place and time.”
Wofford described the event as an interdisciplinary blend of many different fields both on and off campus, allowing everyone to share their work in creative ways.
“There's a lot of play with different departments,” Wofford said. “Beck [Banks, assistant professor of communications]'s music video class is participating, and Kathryn’s installation class and the sculpture class, but also the farm, garden, the Free Store, the archives and the Center for Working Lands are all huge collaborators in putting this on...We can all be imaginative in our fields and share field recordings of science projects or data collection in a very creative way.”
The event will showcase numerous artists of many mediums and organizations. This inclusiveness is intentional, organized in hopes that attendees will have the chance to learn more about the community and make connections with the local art scene and the scenery around them, which is often overlooked.
“There’s going to be a lot of community building with the arts community outside of Warren Wilson,” Wofford said. “There are a lot of visiting nonprofits like Black Mountain College Museum, which will be showing a film. Make Noise Music, which will be doing a noise demo, Lamplight Asheville, which is a local arts nonprofit that is bringing some of their resident artists to participate, and Impractical Instruments, which does a lot of lighting. They also do a lot of work with the youth and arts. There's just tons of connections to be made at this event.”
Moore explained why the event was significant for her, comparing how she was seeing the plans for the installation come together to a quote from Trevor Noah’s special, “Joy in the Trenches.”.
“I was listening to [Trevor Noah’s] special where he was talking about the state of the world, and he said, ‘Just because the big is happening doesn't mean that the small stops,’” Moore said. “For me, helping this happen and come to fruition is that celebration of the small. The ‘aha’ moment is going to be seeing people enjoying the work and experiencing work that maybe they would have never seen or thought of before, and then feeling the buzz afterward and hearing people talk about what they experienced and taking those memories with them. One of the powerful things about art is the connections.”
Emmet Clements, a senior at WWC, is going to be exhibiting his own work at “Boom Boom Barns” as part of his installation class, where “installation” art is defined as an art piece that works in a specific location. These pieces are built around a specific site and interact intentionally with the space and its audience, which in this case will be the landscape around the White Barn and the attendees.
Clements is excited to be showcasing his first-ever projection piece.
“I have a projection piece; this is my first time doing projection work,” Clements said. “Mainly I've been working in sculpture, but I'm taking a process video from the sculpture I've been working on and kind of blowing that up outside in the dark, and it'll be exciting.”
The work in question is Clements's “Maybe It’s Inevitable,”, a sculpture that was made to represent the biological process of decomposition. The piece was unexpectedly destroyed before it was completed as part of ongoing construction near Kittredge Theatre on campus. His projection piece will serve as a rearticulation and homage to the original piece.
“It was a sculpture meant to portray natural decay and see what happened when I put a fully biodegradable piece out and gave it sugar, yeast, and water to try and sustain itself and grow its own bacteria and mold, which was a success,” Clements said. “[The] piece that I'm bringing to “Boom Boom Barns” is...kind of like a part two. I'm calling it a relative because I can make that same sculpture again, but it's never going to grow the same because of the different natural environments.”
Clements shared how his recent works have all been following the exploration of natural processes inside the human body, which he thinks are not acknowledged or appreciated as often as they should be, as they are vital for survival and regular function.
“I've been creating a lot of works lately that are explorations of this kind of connection that we have between our mental perceptions of our bodies and how we exhibit the outside to other people,” Clements said. “The inside is something that is so foreign. An exterior versus an interior view. With my work, I‘m bringing these natural functions more to the surface.”
Overall, Clements is excited to make connections with fellow artists at “Boom Boom Barns” and to see how others' art will interact with the area.
“I'm really excited to see what other folks have thought of within those spaces, because it's such an interactive area with all the different barns and structures around the farm and the garden,” Clements said. “I'm excited to see what my other classmates are up to and to meet other folks from Swannatopia, because I live in an area that is so surrounded by the art community, and I haven't really gotten to be a part of that yet. It’s just all exciting.”
As the event comes up, so does the need for extra hands. Wofford and Moore are offering work crew shadow hours to anyone who would like to help out to either set up or take down infrastructure for the event, run the info booth, drive shuttles, or just be hosts of the farm and garden. Those who are interested in volunteering can email either mwofford@warren-wilson.edu or kcellerinimoore@warren-wilson.edu.
Attendees who plan to stay later in the evening are encouraged to bring a flashlight. There will be warming zones for everyone should the weather be chilly. Hot tea, food, and beverages will be available for purchase from local vendors around the area. Stay up to date by checking out swannatopia.com and @swannatopia on Instagram.