Asheville Art Museum - North Carolina museum exhibiting 20th century American art

Presenting powerful photography by indigenous artists redefining identity, culture, and storytelling through a contemporary lens.

"Flora Symbolica: The Art of Flowers" explores the meanings and messages of flowers in American art of the 20th and 21st centuries, highlighting the timeless connections among art, nature, and human experience.

One of two inaugural exhibitions is Intersections in American Art, the major reinstallation and reinterpretation of the Museum’s Collection in a much-enlarged gallery space.

Showcasing Collection prints from 1905 to the 1940s, Iron & Ink explores connections between industrial labor, urbanization, and the growing middle class. The exhibition highlights works by WPA artists from the 1930s whose powerful images of machinery, skyscrapers, and daily life—both at work and recreation—capture this transformational era in American society.

"Coatlicue & Las Meninas" is the newest addition to Pedro Lasch’s ongoing series "Black Mirror/Espejo Negro." Throughout the series, Lasch creates a dialogue among works of art from early modern Europe and pre-Columbian sculptural figures, employing the mirror as an emblem that interrogates the tension between presence and absence, colonial histories, and the politics of visibility. "Coatlicue & Las Meninas: The Stanford Edition" (2007/2025) is the first artwork commissioned for “What Can Become of Us?,” a collaboration between the Stanford Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) and Zócalo Public Square, envisioning new perspectives on migration, America’s diverse communities, and how people come together across differences.

This exhibition traces the historical, stylistic, and conceptual origins of work that either embraces or refuses the element of chance in ceramics, looking at modern and contemporary work made in Western North Carolina.

Art and artists often encourage us to consider our place in the world. Artworks in the Windgate Foundation Atrium and Museum Plaza bring many separate parts together to make a unified whole and offer a variety of possibilities for how to navigate our physical world on regional, national, and global levels.