Exhibitions

Artist Walter B. Stephen contributed to Western North Carolina’s identity as a flourishing site for pottery production and craftsmanship in the early 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

Allen & 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.

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 showcases a selection of collaborative creative works that emerged from nearly four decades of the Mountain Lake Workshop series, a program sited in rural southwestern Virginia.

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 features over 50 works of art in a variety of media by 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.