Art-Rich Asheville Gets a New Museum Building

I went to Asheville in western North Carolina a couple of weeks ago to see the Asheville Art Museum’s new building. Asheville, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a high-power culture capital, and the friendliest one I’ve visited. It’s the heart of the distinctly, uniquely American craft and design world, with new American masters working in ceramics, wood, stone, and, here and there, painting. I’d never been to the museum before. It’s top-notch on every level and both expresses and embraces the zeitgeist of this beautiful, tangy part of the country.

It’s an airy, attractive building where the art looks great and visitors feel comfortable and welcomed. That’s what a good museum building does. It’s in the center of town, with an impressive plaza surrounding Henry Richardson’s sky-blue glass sculpture, Reflections on Unity. The bill for new construction and the repurposing of the old museum building, once the city library, was $25 million. That’s a good deal.

Ennead Architects, the New York firm that designed Yale’s art-gallery renovation, did the basic plan. ARCA Design and Clearscape Architecture and Art, both from Asheville, saw the project to its finish. The new museum opened in December only to close in March when North Carolina shut its museums for six months because of the Chinese COVID hysteria.

The museum is 54,000 square feet. I love it. The façade is glass with a randomly punctured metal screen that filters light entering the atrium. During the day, it sparkles when the sun hits it, but at night, when the atrium is lit, the façade glows. It’s immediately inviting and magical. Asheville has superb Art Deco architecture but not much that’s cutting-edge modern. The new museum will certainly raise the aesthetic bar for future downtown development.

The atrium is no-nonsense. It’s art first and foremost. The Richardson sculpture outside is a landmark work of art inviting people inside, where there’s more good art. Kenneth Snelson’s Wing One, from 1992, is a big stainless-steel sculpture resting on the atrium floor. I liked Matt Jones’s three big stoneware pots decorated with a Star Wars theme. He made them between 2016 and 2018, but they’re traditional Appalachian forms using local technique.

Snelson went to Black Mountain College, which was near Asheville and one of the foundations of the city’s art-based culture. It was an experimental college with a life of only 25 years, closing in 1957, but its impact on American art is outsized. Josef and Anni Albers taught there, and its students include Ruth Asawa, Aaron Siskind, and Robert Rauschenberg. The museum owns about 1,000 objects by Black Mountain faculty and students.

The atrium’s a good reception space, but it’s not vast. Everything in the museum is human-scale, and everything is clear. The stairs have no risers, emphasizing transparency. The galleries — there are 16 — are nice, flexible spaces. The floors are ash, the ubiquitous local wood. Many of the walls in the transitional spaces are zinc and a nice, soothing gray.

The collection is good. Asheville might have Biltmore (a Vanderbilt house the size of Buckingham Palace), but it never had the wealth that makes for a big haul of Old Masters. It’s got about 6,000 objects with a strong emphasis on the art of western North Carolina and southern Appalachia. There’s a great collection of glass, wood sculpture, and pottery. Fantastical Forms is a show at the museum celebrating its ceramic-sculpture collection. The artists are all from North Carolina and South Carolina. Harvey Littleton’s Lyrical Movement, from 1989, was one of the highlights of an installation of the museum’s glass collection. The place has a great American photography collection, too.

I hadn’t heard of many of the local artists in the collection, so I learned a lot. Last week, when I wrote about the Mint Museum, I said North Carolina was the center of a lovely craft scene. Asheville has to be the heart of it. The strengths of the permanent collection are essential to the story of American art, which doesn’t begin or end in New York.

The new building, with crisp, clean lines and an emphasis on transparency, is harmoniously married to the old library, built in 1926 in an Art Deco version of Georgian Revival style. This is very difficult to do. Both old and new buildings have light-colored façades and are the same height. The 1926 building has a cornice decorated with cast stone lion’s heads, rosettes, and stylized vegetal forms. It gives the façade of the new building a flourish. The two are nice contrasts of opacity and clarity. The old building houses the museum’s 15,000-volume library and a spacious classroom and art-making space for children.

The Asheville Art Museum serves not only the city but the 25 or so counties of western North Carolina. While Asheville itself is a sophisticated place, and as far as I can tell many of its residents are from someplace else, the region is rural. Much of it is isolated. Poverty is a big problem. For many of the children in the region, the museum provides the only art curriculum they’ll get in school.

I want to say something about Pam Myers, the director. She’s been there for 25 years so it’s her place and her vision. She believes museums serve people and wanted her museum, and other museums in North Carolina, to open as soon as they safely could, and that’s reality-based safety and not nutcase-safety, which means never. She led other civic museums to lobby the governor to open the doors. That’s leadership. Granted, she had a brand-new building to show in its splendor, but the bottom line for her is the public’s right to culture at its best. People need art for all kinds of reasons, but in crazy times like these it’s a salve.

Biltmore is a unique experience. For years, it gave Asheville cachet. The 250-room French chateau–style house is the biggest in America. The family opened it to friends and family for Christmas 1895. It’s still a Vanderbilt family-owned, working estate with a serious historic-preservation and environmental bent. The house is a Gilded Age glory, and the 8,000-acre forest is responsibly managed. The gardens in spring are a sea of purple, red, white, and pink, and during Christmas there are over a hundred decorated trees in the house and miles of garland, all drawn from the property.

I like Asheville because the arts scene is serious, tasteful, and edifying, and it doesn’t ooze pomposity. It’s simpatico to everyone who likes good culture. And good culture is never bland. It doesn’t exist merely to soothe. It has to have an edge and capacity to startle, and Asheville delivers through real, consistent quality. Don’t expect theme-park thrills and chills, though. Expect to see the connoisseur in you emerge and blossom, spurred by Old World Biltmore, a fine museum, and foodie nirvana.

There’s something called the Asheville Renaissance, which started 25 or 30 years ago when the city center, for a long time in decline, started a revival driven by the arts. This revival was stimulated by John Cram, a gallerist who started Blue Spiral, a massive downtown space selling the work of local artists. This was inspired. Industry wasn’t going to return, but what was there and thriving was a craft community. Cram’s vision drew more artists. Today, in Asheville, artists are everywhere. I visited lots of studios, among them the ceramicist Michael Hofman’s. He’s very talented. The glass artist Alex Bernstein is there, too. Steven Forbes-deSoule and Robert Milnes are great potters. Matt Tommey is a sculptor working in textiles.

In a couple of weeks, I’ll write about the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. Both are great places.