Exhibitions

Allen and Barry Huffman have been collecting contemporary southern folk art for the past 40 years. Within their collection are subsets of folk art, including self-taught artists driven to share their messages, crafts for the tourist market, and Southern pottery. The guiding principle evident throughout their collection and the generous donation of contemporary southern folk art that they've gifted to the Asheville Art Museum is the story told by each of these artists through their artworks.

Featuring more than 40 works, Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom examines the career evolution of modern painter Beauford Delaney within the context of his 38-year friendship with writer James Baldwin.

The year 2021 marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Apollo space program at NASA, but that was hardly the beginning of humankind’s fascination with Earth’s only moon.

This exhibition features archival objects from the Theodore Dreier Sr. Document Collection presented alongside artworks from the Museum’s Black Mountain College Collection to explore the connections between artworks and ephemera.

This extraordinary exhibition, drawn from the collection of the Reading Public Museum, explores the path to Impressionism Through the 19th century in France. The show examines the sometimes complex relationship between French Impressionism of the 1870s and 1880s and the American interpretation of the style in the decades that followed.

Question Bridge: Black Males is a project that explores critically challenging issues within the African American male community by instigating a trans-media conversation among Black men across geographic, economic, generational, educational, and social strata of American society.

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.

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.

POP-UP EXHIBITION: The making of pottery in North Carolina has a long history. Native American potters are known to have made pots from the start of the 16th century, and European colonizers of the 1700s arrived with knowledge of their local ceramic techniques.

POP-UP EXHIBITION: This exhibition collectively demonstrates innovations in the traditional art of basketry. The artists’ conceptual media vary between organically dyed reeds, stoneware ceramic, woven wire and even hand-made paper.

POP-UP EXHIBITION: Looking Through: Glass from the Asheville Art Museum considers glass as a medium of internal and external contemplation. These transparent glass works evoke a sense of inner worlds made visible.

This exhibition surveys the life’s work of Lewis Wickes Hine (1874–1940), the father of American documentary photography.

As an American art museum, the exhibition calls attention to the fact that we have decided to collect those artists who came to this country – either at their own prompting or out of necessity. As they adopted America as their new home, we have, in turn, embraced them, their creative output, and their artwork.

Public Domain: Photography and the Preservation of Public Lands presents works drawn from the Asheville Art Museum’s Collection by artists looking both regionally and nationally at lands that are either state or federally managed or have become so.

Golden Hour: Olympians Photographed by Walter Iooss Jr. highlights dozens of photographer Walter Iooss Jr.’s images from the Museum’s Collection.

Precious Medals: Gold, Silver & Bronze highlights works from the Museum’s Collection including glass, ceramic, fashion, and sculpture that use the same metals that are given to the top three placing athletes in an Olympic competition.

Artistic Tribute: Representation of the Athlete pays homage to the historic Olympic tradition of including the arts as a competition.

The Asheville Art Museum is a regional affiliate partner of the annual Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, sponsoring an annual juried competition for students in grades 7–12 from all across WNC.

Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum of American Art is a selection of works from the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum which reveals the strength of the photographic image in the late-20th and early-21st century in the United States.

This exhibition highlights the Museum’s Collection of sculptural ceramics, especially from the 1980s until today.

This exhibition of ceramics explores the movements and connections of makers as a way to push boundaries of regionality and tradition while highlighting the richness and complexity of makers and practices around North Carolina. Curated by former Curatorial Fellow and Windgate Curatorial Intern Sarah Kelly.

Ernest Trova creates in the F.M. Manscapes portfolio a world for his iconic Falling Man figure, an every-person he saw as a symbol for a person's evolution through lived experiences. Vibrant colors, geometric patterns, and repetitive forms merge to communicate a sense of movement and environment as the prints detail the Falling Man's layered journey.

This exhibition explores the legacy of Barbara Morgan and her lifelong observation of “dancing atoms,” which inspired her photographic work.

Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds create an immersive experience born out of the iconic Pop artist's interest in innovation and experimentation. To ensure the safety of Museum visitors and staff, Silver Clouds will be presented as a touch-free experience.

Movement in static mediums such as painting, drawing, and photography is difficult to express, yet many artists feel called to explore it. Movement serves as an impetus for creation—to either capture it or create it in entirely different mediums. The works here, selected from the Asheville Art Museum’s Collection, highlight additional approaches to rendering a lasting imprint of the ephemeral.

A Telling Instinct: John James Audubon & Contemporary Art juxtaposes Audubon prints with the work of artists who continue this tradition of animal allegories and metaphors in the 21st century.

Ralph Burns has long been recognized as a documentary photographer whose images have captured the diverse and enigmatic nature of ritual and religion, and who has explored the subjective and often defining nature of belief, worship, and culture.

Sallie Middleton has long been considered one of the most gifted painters of plants and animals. She possessed a remarkable eye for detail, a skilled hand to record what she saw and a keen imagination to shape her enchanted images.