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Asheville, NC

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Asheville Art Museum
2 South Pack Square
Asheville, North Carolina 28801
Phone 828.253.3227
FAX 828.257.4503
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Temporaray location during construction
Asheville Art Museum On the Slope
175 Biltmore Avenue
Asheville, North Carolina 28801
(Details at ashevilleart.org.)

E-Mail: mailbox@ashevilleart.org


www.ashevilleart.org

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Exhibitions

Counter/Balance: Gifts from John and Robyn Horn 

Asheville’s Naturalist: Watercolors by Sallie Middleton

American Art in the Atomic Age 1940–1960

Western North Carolina Glass: Selections from the Collection

Asheville Art Museum Presents the 2024 Western North Carolina (WNC) Regional Scholastic Art Awards Exhibition

Counter/Balance: Gifts from John and Robyn Horn 
Through July 29, 2024
Debra McClinton Gallery

Counter/Balance: Gifts from John and Robyn Horn presents important examples of contemporary American craft, including woodworking, metalsmithing, fiber and pottery by renowned American artists Albert Paley, Hoss Haley, Toshiko Takaezu, Stoney Lamar, Mary Merkel-Hess, Dorothy Gill Barnes, Kay Sekimachi, Bob Stocksdale, and many others.

This exhibition explores the traditional craft art-making process, a human hand working with technology to transform raw materials into a new form, containing a fundamental tension between the mechanized and improvisational to achieve qualities of asymmetry and balance or forms with richly textured surfaces. Many of the objects gifted from the Horns’ collection—whether made from glass, clay, metal, fiber, or wood—highlight this tension. The dialogue between forms fashioned in a studio and shapes implicit in nature does not necessarily create conflict but rather a counterbalance, implying a desire for human interaction and unity with the beauty found in nature.

This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and curated by Carla Funk, assistant curator

Asheville’s Naturalist: Watercolors by Sallie Middleton
Through June 10, 2024
Blossman Companies Education Gallery

Sallie Ellington Middleton (1926–2009) has long been considered one of the most gifted botanical painters. She possessed a remarkable eye for detail, a skilled hand to record what she saw, and a keen imagination to shape her enchanted images. Watercolor was the perfect medium for Middleton, as it allowed her to carry her paints on forays into the woods, and it made for a more natural and less messy process than oil paint.  

 Though she was an extremely accomplished painter, Middleton had very little formal training in art. Her uncle, the architect Douglas Ellington, was a noted draughtsman and built several important buildings, including the Asheville City Hall. Middleton spent her childhood living with her uncle at Chunn’s Cove, a home that Ellington built using eclectic building materials from several of his architectural projects in Asheville. She and her sister Martha grew up in this remarkable setting, having ample time to explore the valley and hillsides around the house. Though she briefly lived in Charleston, SC, and spent a few years in Biltmore Forest, Middleton spent most of her life living in the same home she had grown up in, and in the forests surrounding Chunn’s Cove.   

 Middleton’s detailed watercolors required months, and sometimes years to complete. She would work from life, painting the same specimen day after day until it grew too big for her composition. She would then put her painting aside until the following season, when she would find a similar plant or animal at the same stage of growth and pick up where she left off. Middleton said, “I have to work quickly. When you’re working so intimately with models, you can see their colors changing almost daily.”

When asked about her technique, Middleton called her process “brush drawing” because she was able to render sharp details in watercolor. She had brushes in all sizes, including some with just a single hair—allowing her to make precise lines and load her brush with deeply colored pigment. In many of her compositions, she included a single bluebird feather, which acted as a form of signature and taught her viewers to look closely at her work, just as she looked at the natural world. In this exhibition, how many blue feathers can you find?  

 Sallie Middleton quotes are from The Magical Realm of Sallie Middleton, text by Celestin Sibley, 1980, Oxmoor House, Inc.

American Art in the Atomic Age 1940–1960
Through April 29, 2024
Asheville Exhibition Hall

In the summer of 1939, physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi Germany was researching a deadly nuclear weapon. Within months, the Nazi army invaded Poland, beginning World War II. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development fast-tracked a program known as the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons.

Three years later, the unfathomable devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki signaled the end of World War II, and the United States became a dominant player on the world stage. Yet, the memory of the devastating horrors of war and the anxiety of knowing that henceforth all human life was in peril weighed heavily on the country’s collective consciousness. This was the beginning of the Atomic Age.

A number of European artists had emigrated to the United States with the rise of fascism, and an artistic exchange blossomed with Atelier 17 at its center. The experimental print studio was based in Paris between 1927 and 1939, when master printer Stanley William Hayter (1901–1988) relocated it to New York City—a decision that spared the artist and his studio from the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Atelier 17 operated in New York for fifteen years, between 1940 and 1955. The New York studio attracted European emigrants like André Masson, Yves Tanguy, and Joan Miró. Through contact with the Surrealists at Atelier 17, American artists like Philip Guston, Louise Nevelson, and Hale Woodruff were introduced to the role of the unconscious in personal expression.

While Atelier 17 operated in New York, the United States entered the era of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, a period in which fear and political repression under McCarthyism threatened artistic expression in every medium. In such a dystopic period, the act of making art became a reaffirmation of hope, a way for artists to parse what it meant to live in this new Atomic Age.

American Art in the Atomic Age: 1940–1960 is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and guest curated by Marilyn Laufer & Tom Butler. Thanks to Ron Rumford, Dolan Maxwell for the loan of the works and their support of the Museum.

Western North Carolina Glass: Selections from the Collection
Through April 15, 2024
Judith S. Moore Gallery

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. Begun in 1962 in Wisconsin, it was a student of Littleton’s that first came to the area in 1965 and set up a glass studio at the Penland School of Craft in Penland, North Carolina. By 1967, Mark Peiser was the first glass artist resident at the school and taught many notable artists, like Jak Brewer in 1968 and Richard Ritter who came to study in 1971. By 1977, Littleton retired from teaching and moved to nearby Spruce Pine, North Carolina and set up a glass studio at his home. Since that time, glass artists like Ken Carder, Rick and Valerie Beck, Shane Fero, and Yaffa Sikorsky and Jeff Todd—to name only a few—have flocked to the area to reside, collaborate, and teach, making it a significant place for experimentation and education in glass. The next generation of artists like Hayden Wilson and Alex Bernstein continue to create here. The Museum is dedicated to collecting American studio glass and within that umbrella, explores the work of Artists connected to Western North Carolina. Exhibitions, including Intersections of American Art, explore glass art in the context of American Art of the 20th and 21st centuries. 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 is organized by the Asheville Art Museum.

Asheville Art Museum Presents the 2024 Western North Carolina (WNC) Regional Scholastic Art Awards Exhibition
Through March 25 , 2024

The Museum recognizes Western North Carolina youth for their original artworks

The Asheville Art Museum has announced the regional award recipients of the 2024 Scholastic Art Awards. Award winners will be featured in a student exhibition in the Museum's Van Winkle Law Firm Gallery and Multipurpose Space from January 24–March 25, 2024. All regional award recipients will be honored at a closing reception on March 21.

The Asheville Art Museum and the Asheville Area Section of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) are the Western North Carolina (WNC) regional Affiliate Partners of the National Scholastic Art Awards. This ongoing community partnership has supported the creative talents of our region's youth for 44 years. The WNC regional program is open to students in grades 7–12, ages 13-18, across 24 counties. 

"I'm thrilled to witness the incredible talent showcased in the 2024 Western North Carolina Scholastic Art Awards exhibition," said Susan Hendley, School & Teacher Programs Manager at the Asheville Art Museum. "This is a celebration of original works by students across the WNC region and highlights the profound impact of arts education."

The regional program is judged in two groups: Group I, grades 7–9 and Group II, grades 10–12. Out of more than 500 total art entries, over 200 works have been recognized by the judges; Gold and Silver Key awards are featured in this exhibition, with select Honorable Mentions displayed digitally. The 2024 regional judges include Victoria Bradbury, Associate Professor and Chair of New Media at UNC Asheville, Andrew Davis, Studio Technician and instructor at Winthrop University, and Jenny Pickens, a native Asheville artist and educator.

Those works receiving Gold Keys have been submitted to compete in the 101st Annual National Scholastic Art Awards Program in New York City. Of the Gold Key Award recipients, five students have also been nominated for American Visions, indicating their work is the Best in Show of the regional awards. One of these American Visions Nominees will receive an American Visions Medal at the 2024 National Scholastic Art Awards.  

Visit the Museum's website for more information about the student exhibition.

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