Exhibitions

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.

American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection showcases over 80 stellar works of folk and self-taught art. Beautiful, diverse, and truthful; the art illuminates the thoughts and experiences of individuals with an immediacy that is palpable and unique to these expressions.

Joyce Tenneson’s Transformations series, which she began in 1985 and engaged with through 2005, features the human figure interweaving elements that feel vaguely mythological or symbolic. This exhibition features 12 large Polaroids from the poetic series.

William Waldo Dodge contributed to American Arts and Crafts silver’s relevancy persisting almost halfway into the 20th century. The aesthetics of the style were dictated by its philosophy: an artist’s handmade creation should reflect their hard work and skill, and the resulting artwork should highlight the material from which it was made.

A Hand in Studio Craft highlights recent gifts to the Museum’s Collection and loans from the family of glass artist Harvey K. Littleton. This exhibition places Harvey and Bess Littleton’s collection into the context of their lives, as they moved around the United States, connected with other artists, and developed their own work.

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.

Gillian Laub engages her skills as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual activist to examine the realities of racism and raise questions that are simultaneously painful and essential to understanding the American consciousness. Southern Rites is a specific story about 21st century young people in the American South, yet it poses a universal question about human experience: can a new generation liberate itself from a harrowing and traumatic past to create a different future?

Youth Artists Empowered (YAE) in collaboration with Tepeyac Consulting and the City of Asheville launched a public art initiative in fall 2021 to bring attention to the immediate effects of climate change on our community.

The Wyeths: Three Generations provides a comprehensive survey of works by N. C. Wyeth, one of America’s finest illustrators; his son, Andrew, an important realist painter; his eldest daughter, Henriette, a realist painter; and Andrew’s son Jamie, a popular portraitist.

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.

Stained with Glass features imagery that recreates the sensation and colors of stained glass. The exhibition showcases Harvey K. Littleton and the range of makers who worked with him, including Dale Chihuly, Cynthia Bringle, Thermon Statom, and more.

This exhibition features over 50 works of art in a variety of media by more than 30 Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and Cherokee Nation artists. The exhibition highlights the use of the written Cherokee language, a syllabary developed by Cherokee innovator Sequoyah.

Featuring a rare presentation of all nine prints from Robert Rauschenberg’s Ruminations portfolio, Judy Chicago’s Retrospective in a Box portfolio, and selections from the Museum’s Collection, this exhibition contends with the act of remembrance and reflection.

The experiment known as Black Mountain College (BMC) began in 1933 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. This exhibition highlights the Asheville Art Museum’s collection of design from BMC, like the rarely seen Gregory furniture, and situates it in the context of its influences and surroundings at BMC.

This exhibition, drawn from the Museum's Collection with additional select loans from regional collectors and institutions, explores works in a variety of media that speak to the vibrant abstract experiments in American art making during the middle of the 20th 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.