The Asheville Art Museum is offering visitors the opportunity to view a number of unique and diverse works from its Permanent Collection in an exhibition on view in its Appleby Foundation Gallery.
Collectors’ Circle: Celebrating Recent Gifts features gifts of art made in 2014 and 2015 by the Museum’s Collectors’ Circle.
The Museum’s Collectors’ Circle is a membership group that encourages the exchange of ideas and interests, art learning, connoisseurship and collecting. As a vibrant and critical source of support, they are dedicated to growing the Museum’s Permanent Collection through annual gifts of artwork, selected and presented in partnership with the Curatorial staff. Since the group’s beginning in 2004, the Circle or Circle Members have added over 90 works of art to the Museum’s Permanent Collection through annual purchases from an acquisition fund created by yearly dues.
The Museum’s fundamental collection focus is American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Underlying this, and within the overriding context of American art, is a concentration on work with significance to the Southeast. Within that framework, regional contributions are in three central categories: artists related to Western North Carolina; artists who studied or taught at Black Mountain College (1933–1956); and fine handmade objects created in the region — from early residents, including Cherokee Indians and regional craftspeople, to contemporary studio craft as exemplified by the Penland School of Crafts.