PIE.ZAA Pizza invites Asheville to help paint memorial mural for Wyatt Adair
PIE.ZAA Pizza turned a memorial mural for Wyatt Adair into a public gathering, inviting Asheville neighbors to paint alongside artists on May 17.
PIE.ZAA Pizza used art to answer a violent loss in downtown Asheville, inviting the community to help add to a mural honoring employee Wyatt Adair. The tribute was paired with the restaurant’s first quarterly artist marketplace on Sunday, May 17, turning remembrance into a public event in the South Slope.
Adair, 20, worked at PIE.ZAA and was killed in an Asheville shooting that police said began around 1:04 a.m. on Monday, March 9, when officers responded to a report of a gunshot victim on Patton Avenue near New Leicester Highway. Police said they found William Wyatt Adair dead at the scene and quickly located a suspect nearby on New Leicester Highway. The Asheville Police Department later said the juvenile suspect died days afterward from self-inflicted injuries.
The mural gives coworkers, regulars and neighbors something visible to gather around after a weekend of violence that left its mark across the city. Local coverage said three separate Asheville shootings over that weekend left two people dead and nine others injured, deepening the sense of shock around Adair’s death and making the restaurant’s response part memorial and part neighborhood repair.
PIE.ZAA’s decision also fits Asheville’s long reliance on public art as a civic tool. The City of Asheville says its Public Art Program is intended to strengthen the city’s identity as a work of art and support the creative sector, while the River Arts District revitalization effort says the number of artists and creative businesses there more than doubled during the decade-long project. In South Slope, where PIE.ZAA is located, that tradition has made murals more than decoration. They function as markers of identity, grief and continuity.
By opening the wall to community participation and tying the tribute to an artist marketplace, PIE.ZAA gave Asheville a concrete way to respond to a death that touched both a workplace and a wider neighborhood. The result was not just a memorial for Adair, but a public act of remembrance anchored in one of the city’s most visible arts corridors.
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