By Shira Firestone, CJN August, 2025
This fall, the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum — just a short drive from Charlotte — will present Jack Boul: Land, City, Home (August 30, 2025 – March 7, 2026), a retrospective of the acclaimed Jewish American artist whose work captures both quiet domestic moments and lyrical landscapes.
But this exhibition carries a unique resonance for North Carolina’s Jewish community. Boul’s connection to the region traces back to Camp Catawba, a Jewish music and arts camp founded by Holocaust survivor Dr. Vera Lachmann, just outside Blowing Rock. For decades, this little-known chapter of Jewish life in the Blue Ridge Mountains offered a haven for children and artists—many of whom were refugees or descendants of refugees—whose stories intersected with broader themes of resilience and renewal.
Boul’s own life was deeply rooted in Jewish identity — from his early years in New York to his time working at Jewish institutions like Camp Kinderland. His meaningful connection to Camp Catawba, where he taught art in the 1960s, left a lasting impression on his work.
We’re fortunate to share this connection through a personal reflection from his son, David Boul, who attended Camp Catawba as a child. His memories reveal how his father’s time in the Blue Ridge helped shape his artistic vision—and how Jewish history continues to echo through his landscapes.
In the Shadow of Charlotte: A Son’s Reflection
By David Boul
Way back in 1966, when I was just a little boy, I arrived—alone—at a Jewish summer camp in the North Carolina mountains. Camp Catawba was not far from Charlotte, nestled in the hills adjacent to the Moses Cone estate. It was founded by Dr. Vera Lachmann, a Holocaust survivor who had fled Germany after her Jewish school was shut down by the Nazis.
The camp offered swimming, archery, horseback riding—but it was most known for music and the arts. My parents were both professors, and they’d heard about Catawba’s reputation. They were hesitant to send me away for eight weeks, so my mother—ever resourceful—convinced my father, Jack Boul, to come along and teach art seminars at the camp. Actually, he was also there to check on me.
He arrived in Blowing Rock and fell in love with the beauty of the Blue Ridge. That summer inspired some of his most lyrical landscape paintings—capturing the quiet dignity of the land.
It was here, on this idyllic property, that I discovered the beauty of North Carolina. And it was here that my father taught young campers and staff how to see with an artist’s eye and let their hands speak what words could not.
Camp Catawba itself had deep Jewish roots. Dr. Lachmann had taught at Salem College before founding the camp, and she modeled it after the famous Black Mountain College near Asheville and the Berlin school she’d lost. Her neighbor, Bertha Lindau Cone, the widow of Moses Cone, was herself a German Jewish refugee. The two women would often share tea on the porch of the Cone mansion, their lives quietly entwined in this Appalachian refuge.
My father was shaped not only by his summers at Catawba, but by his earlier service in the U.S. Army during World War II. Assigned to a U.S.-run prison camp holding German soldiers who denied the Holocaust, my father later created a series of monotypes in response—haunting, restrained, and deeply human.
A number of his landscapes and domestic scenes will be on view at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum. His art has been exhibited in the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, and the Phillips Collection, but this exhibition marks his first art show in North Carolina since his 1986 exhibition at the Mint Museum in Charlotte.
For me, it’s more than an exhibition—it’s a homecoming.
Main Photo Caption: Jack Boul, Catawba, undated, oil on canvas, from the collection of David Boul and Tom O’Briant. Photo: Paul Blake