Asheville Art Museum - North Carolina museum exhibiting 20th century American art

This exhibition explores the rich collaborative relationships between artists and master papermakers, revealing how the field of handmade paper art was a natural advancement of and response to the historic relationship between print and paper. Drawn exclusively from the renowned collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, The Art of Paper features 66 works by leading artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Helen Frankenthaler, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon and others who have redefined handmade paper as an expressive artistic medium.

This exhibition explores how second-generation studio glass artists made the West Coast an epicenter for glass art by embracing new styles, techniques, and collaborations.

This exhibition traces the development of the American studio woodturning movement through key artists who transformed the field, shifting it away from the artisanal crafting of functional forms to probe the expressive potential of wood turned by a lathe.

Poetic Exposures reflects on the ways artists harness the ephemeral medium of light to create meaning, bridging experiments in technology and art. Photography’s earliest practitioners leveraged sunlight and light-sensitive chemicals to fix images, creating new ways of seeing and novel understandings of time. Artists have since continued to experiment with new techniques and emerging technologies to reinvent the medium, yet light remains the anchor, guiding how meaning is generated in photographic images. This exhibition draws on Asheville Art Museum’s photography collection across time periods, highlighting the ways artists manipulate light to different effects, from Eadweard Muybridge’s transformational studies of movement in the 1870s to Jo Sandman’s work with X-rays and photograms in the early 2000s.

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.

Freeze Frame highlights the work of legendary sports photographer Walter Iooss Jr., whose more than 60-year career has chronicled the world's most elite athletes at the top of their game. Freeze Frame reveals the quieter side of sports in photographs that capture moments of anticipation, solitude, and stillness.