Exhibitions

Beyond the Lens presents key works from the collection of Louis K. & Susan Pear Meisel, revealing this profoundly influential yet under-recognized art movement, bringing together paintings and works on paper dating from the 1970s to the present, illuminating the very definition of Photorealism from its founding up to today.

This exhibition highlights works on paper and explores many of Romare Bearden's most frequently used mediums including screen-printing, lithography, hand colored etching, collagraph, monotype, relief print, photomontage, and collage.

Western North Carolina is important in the history of American glass art. Several artists of the Studio Glass Movement came to the region, including its founder Harvey K. Littleton. The Museum is dedicated to collecting American studio glass and within that umbrella, explores the work of Artists connected to Western North Carolina. A variety of techniques and a willingness to push boundaries of the medium can be seen in this selection of works from the Museum's Collection.

This exhibition brings together works from some of the most preeminent postwar and contemporary artists who used food as their subject matter.

The selection of objects displayed illustrates how Bresler’s eye for collecting craft not only draws attention to nature and artists’ interest in it, but also accentuates her role as a natural collector with an intuitive ability to identify themes and ideas that speak to one another.

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.

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.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: Dear Lorna, Love Ray features letters written by Ray Johnson to Lorna Blaine Halper while Johnson was a student at Black Mountain College. The letters reveal snippets of daily life at the college, Johnson’s experience of his growth as an artist, and early examples of Mail art, a movement that Johnson helped found.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: This exhibition follows select artists from their time at Black Mountain College (BMC) through their early years in the Beat scene of 1950s San Francisco.

Altruistic Genius: Buckminster Fuller’s Plans to Save the Planet brings the inventions and designs of R. Buckminster Fuller to Western North Carolina and introduces visitors to Fuller’s strategies for the sustainability of humans and the planet relating to housing, transportation, mathematics, and engineering.  

The artworks in this exhibition reveal the breadth of possibilities and unique qualities that exist when artists choose to employ and even create handmade paper. From the colored paper of Sol Lewitt’s Eight Pointed Stars to the work of artists like Paul Wong and Nancy Cohen made in collaboration with the preeminent handmade paper studio Dieu Donné, paper is transformed from support to conceptual center.

Too Much Is Just Right: The Legacy of Pattern and Decoration features more than 70 artworks in an array of media from both the original time frame of the Pattern and Decoration movement, as well as contemporary artworks created between 1985 and the present. The artworks in this exhibition demonstrate the vibrant and varied approaches to pattern and decoration in art. Sections will explore the history of pattern and decoration’s use in American art during and after the now formally recognized movement was established. Artworks from the 21st century elucidate contemporary perspectives on the employment of pattern to inform visual vocabularies and investigations of diverse themes in the present day. 

An enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Luzene Hill advocates for Indigenous sovereignty—linguistically, culturally, and individually. Revelate builds upon Hill’s investigation of pre-contact cultures. This has led Hill to incorporate the idea of Olin—the Nahuatl word for the natural rhythms of the universe—in Aztec cosmology in her work. Before Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous societies were predominantly matrilineal. Women were considered sacred, involved in the decision-making process, and thrived within communities holding a worldview based on equilibrium. Olin emphasizes that we are in constant state of motion and discovery. Adopted as an educational framework, particularly in social justice and ethnic studies, Olin guides individuals through a process of reflection, action, reconciliation, and transformation. 

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

Asheville-born and Raleigh-Durham-based interdisciplinary artist Sherrill Roland’s socially driven practice draws upon his experience with wrongful incarceration for a crime he did not commit and seeks to open conversations about how we care for our communities and one another with compassion and understanding. Through his work, Roland engages visitors in dialogues around community, social contract, identity, biases, and other deeply human experiences. Comprised of artwork created from 2016 to the present, Sherrill Roland: Sugar, Water, Lemon Squeeze reflects on making something from nothing, lemonade from lemons, the best of a situation.

This exhibition presents highlights from the Asheville Art Museum’s Collection by artists engaging the intaglio printmaking technique of etching in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Rebel/Re-Belle: Exploring Gender, Agency, and Identity | Selections from the Asheville Art Museum and Rubell Museum combines works from two significant collections of contemporary art to explore how artists have innovated, influenced, interrogated, and inspired visual culture in the past 100 years.

Presented in English and Spanish, Border Cantos | Sonic Border offers perspective on the challenges of migration, inviting us to bridge boundaries. When experienced as a whole, the images, instruments, and emanating sounds create an immersive space in which to look, listen, and learn about the complicated issues surrounding the Mexican-American border.

This exhibition highlights the beauty of the Moores' decades of collecting foundational artists in the Studio Glass Movement.

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

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.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: The idea of the past and the future subscribes to a linear timeline that many artists actively seek to subvert in their artwork. If the binary of past and future is erased, what new parameters are opened for looking at and considering a work of art? How would that freedom allow artists and viewers to consider multiple realities? What was once futuristic can now be seen as retro and what was once old-fashioned can inspire new experimentation. When imagination is introduced into art, the idea of a multiverse becomes a possibility, where more than one experience can be real and shared. This digital exhibition considers how artists and their artwork conceive of the future and how they recontextualize representations of the past to expand the perspectives shared with audiences.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: Dear Lorna, Love Ray features letters written by Ray Johnson to Lorna Blaine Halper while Johnson was a student at Black Mountain College. The letters reveal snippets of daily life at the college, Johnson’s experience of his growth as an artist, and early examples of Mail art, a movement that Johnson helped found.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: Many artists, like the ones in this digital exhibition, create art with the intention for it to be sold. An artist’s experiences, identities, and class can inform where they sell their artwork. Different types of markets also play a role in an artwork’s availability. Sometimes the market is a craft fair, where the artist must apply and be accepted as a member. Perhaps the artwork was sold from a display in the artist’s front yard. A client may have commissioned the artwork directly from the artist. Artwork that is produced in large quantities at a factory can be marketed to a national audience. By learning more about the artist and the story behind their art, one gains insight into the various markets in which the artwork was sold.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: This exhibition follows select artists from their time at Black Mountain College (BMC) through their early years in the Beat scene of 1950s San Francisco.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: Tensions can set the groundwork for an artist’s creation—whether they reflect lived experiences or abstract ideas. Many artists address conflicts around race and gender within their own lives and for generations prior through their artwork. Sometimes the tension illustrated within an artwork deals with the object itself and focuses on the material from which it is made. In this digital exhibition, these discrepancies are used as a mechanism by which to question everything from museum standards, which were often created with a colonial mindset, to previously held beliefs in materiality. By setting up an opposition within a work, either in its context or in its makeup, the tensions in these works address something greater than themselves.

DIGITAL EXHIBITION: Art often tells a story. The visualization of a narrative through text or symbolic imagery separates the works grouped in this digital exhibition. Artworks with written language integrated into their composition tell a story with words. Artworks that use images of figures—humans, animals, spirits, things, and popular culture—tell a story using symbols and recognizable objects. Within these two categories, artists convey the narrative of their own lives or culture, whether from present day, history, or tales rooted in myth or legend. The art selected in this exhibition illustrates these many different story trajectories and celebrates the diversity of the artists.