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. This exhibition features art pottery and functional vessels from each stage of Stephen’s career, from his origins discovering the medium alongside his mother in Tennessee to his multi-decade production just outside […]

Contemporary art, interdisciplinary research communities, and the inspiration of Appalachia converge in Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience. 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. Founded by artist and scholar Ray Kass in 1980 […]

The common idiom “it takes two to tango” is immediately called into question in both the imagery and text of the Tango portfolio. Featured is a series of eight intaglio prints that depict plants and animals alongside eleven sheets of prose that explore the steps of the Argentinian dance, the tango. The portfolio expresses artist Nancy Graves […]

The experiment known as Black Mountain College (BMC) began in 1933 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. The country was in the midst of the Great Depression and headed towards World War II; budgets were low, but creativity was high. When Josef & Anni Albers emigrated from Germany to the United States, […]

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. Image: Jo Sandman, Love, 1960, oil and enamel on canvas, 47 × 47 inches. […]