Immerse yourself in a poignant virtual reality (VR) short film that delves into environmental consciousness and the delicate balance of nature. The Last Chair of the Forest and the Plastic Bottle transports viewers to the ancient Pisgah Forest, where the beauty of the last remaining tree is juxtaposed against the haunting presence of a plastic bottle. The narrative unfolds within a possible future, asking you to reflect on the environmental consequences of human actions and the urgency of conservation efforts. You are invited to sit in the Last Chair of the Forest and experience this work yourself.

This work is dedicated to Homero Gómez González, who lost his life in 2020 defending the monarch butterfly forests in Mexico.

About the Artist:
Edwin Salas Acosta is a McCullough Research Fellow at UNC Asheville. He is an artist with over two decades of experience in puppetry, theater, and dance. His performances have been showcased internationally, including in Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Poland, Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Belize, Guatemala, the United States, and Taiwan.

Edwin is the author of two books on puppetry and has received grants from the Mexican government for his work, including from the National Endowment for Culture and Arts. Currently, he is pursuing a degree in New Media with a minor in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Generous support for this exhibition is provided by the McCullough Institute for Conservation, Land Use, and Environmental Resiliency, The New Media Department at UNC Asheville, and Art Bridges.

A response to the exhibition Reforestation of the Imagination by Ginny Ruffner, Forest Feels invites its viewers to participate in two distinct realities of an art museum experience: to observe the work as it is in this moment, and also to change the work by contributing to its evolution. There are many ways to participate in this piece! Please interact in a way that feels right to you. Rearrange the components, create a plant (real or imagined), add on, take away, or just stay awhile and enjoy some sensations.

About the Artist:
Amanda N. Simons (b. 1984, Flint Michigan, USA) is a visual artist, writer, educator, and safety advocate whose interdisciplinary art practice currently explores the intersections of queer identity, and experience-based learning. This visual art practice takes the form of many things — painting, print, small scale sculpture, performance, and video — and often features an interactive component or direct reference to the body — how we are taught to act or live or move, and what happens when we push against that?

Amanda holds dual degrees in English (BA) and painting (BFA) from the University of Michigan Flint, as well as dual advanced degrees in interdisciplinary studio art (MFA) and visual and critical studies (MA) from California College of the Arts, and works as the Program Coordinator of the SkillSet Program at the UNCA STEAM Studio.

Bill Viola’s Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier, 1979 on loan from Art Bridges is an immersive experience that explores the ideas of death and regeneration in nature. In a darkened room, sounds from nature envelop the viewer, as a placid pool of water reflects a projected image of Mount Rainier onto a screen. The water is periodically disturbed, causing the image to dissolve and slowly recompose as the pool settles. As an active volcano at rest, Mount Rainier embodies both quiet beauty and dramatic violence. Using time as both a tool and a theme in his work, Viola visualizes the dualities of nature’s rhythms of renewal, which include moments of both fragility and strength.

Generous support for the Moving Stillness: Mount Rainier, 1979 exhibition is provided by Art Bridges.

Ceramic artists throughout history have become masters of all four elements—creating clay from a mixture of earth and water to shape their work, drying it in air, and hardening it in fire. Throughout this process, the artist decides which aspects of the work will be tightly controlled, and when the elements can step in to leave nature’s mark. This exhibition traces the historical, stylistic, and conceptual origins of work that either embraces or refuses the element of chance in ceramics, looking at modern and contemporary work made in Western North Carolina.

The ceramics in this exhibition are all drawn from the robust collection of Andrew and Hathia Hayes, who have been collecting important regional pottery and sculpture for decades. Through their close relationships with artists, they have brought together works that show not only the different aesthetics seen in the region, but also a picture of the ceramics community. Regional artists including Cynthia Bringle, Donna Craven, Mark Hewitt, Fred Johnston, Ben Owen III, and Norm Schulman will be on view, demonstrating the many different approaches to ceramics in this region.

This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and Amelia Brown, Assistant Curator. It would not be possible without generous loans from Andrew and Hathia Hayes, and sponsorship from the Judy Appleton Memorial Fund.

Shifting Perceptions features a selection of photographs from the Museum’s growing Collection and is presented in a trio of sections, each featuring seemingly opposing forces: Natural/Unnatural, Together/Apart, and Inside/Out. Our brains gravitate toward hard distinctions, but life is filled with gradations, complexities, and ambiguities. Some photographs represent a distinct point of view, but many invite contemplation of the in-between, the intersections between two categories, and even the contradictions. Art dwells in questions and wonderings rather than in certainties.

This exhibition is organized by the Asheville Art Museum and is guest-curated by Katherine Ware.

In the early 1900s, travel by train and automobile became more accessible in the United States, leading to an increase in tourism and a revitalized interest in landscape painting. The relative ease of transportation, as well as the creation of National Parks, allowed people to experience the breathtaking landscapes of the United States in new ways. Artists traveled along popular routes, recording the terrain they encountered.

This exhibition explores the sublime natural landscapes of the Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina and Tennessee. While there were several regional schools of painting around this time, this group is largely from the Midwest and many of the artists trained at the Art Institute of Chicago or in New York City. Through their travels, they captured waterfalls, sunsets, thunderstorms, autumn foliage, lush green summers, and snow-covered mountains—elements that were novel for viewers from cities and rural areas. Though some of these paintings include people, they are usually used for scale and painted with little to no detail, highlighting the magnificence of nature.

The artists on view in this exhibition worked between the 1920s and 1940s, a period in which the international aesthetic shifted toward abstraction, and Abstract Expressionism became the dominant movement in the United States. Rejecting this non-representational approach, these artists instead looked for the sublime in nature. Like their predecessors in the Hudson River School (1825–1870), they were inspired by Romanticism, a 19th-century European movement that is known for stormy, melancholic scenes featuring architectural ruins. American landscape painting instead highlighted the majesty of untouched nature, positioning the beauty of the United States’ terrain on par with European cathedrals and castles. It is no coincidence that this revitalization of landscape painting occurred after Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909). With the creation of the National Park Service in 1916, people began to pay increased attention to the country’s natural resources and see them as an asset for tourism and a right of future generations.

This exhibition is curated by Andrew Glasgow. It would not have been possible without the research of Barry Huffman and Steve Cotham, and generous loans from Barry and Allen Huffman.

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.