Feature Articles

July Issue 2001

Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, NC, Offers New Exhibitions for the Summer

The Asheville Art Museum, located in Pack Square in downtown Asheville, NC, will offer two new exhibitions this Summer. In the Museum's Gallery 6, the exhibition We Shall Overcome: Photographs from the American Civil Rights Era will be on view from July 20 through Sept. 9. In the Holden Community Gallery, the exhibition Buncombe County Folk Pottery will be on view from July 5 - Sept. 2.

During America's Civil Rights Era, the fight for equal rights took many forms, including boycotts, sit-ins, and marches. Photographers contributed to the movement by relaying the struggle to every corner of the nation. This exhibition brings these powerful images together for an experience you won't forget. The exhibition explores the role of American photographers in documenting one of the most decisive eras in this nation's history. The 80 black and white photographs in the exhibition focus on key events and personalities of the Civil Rights Era (1954-1968).

Works in We Shall Overcome are by some of America's most thoughtful and gifted photographers, including former LIFE magazine staffers Gordon Parks and Charles Moore; Magnum photographers Bob Adelman and Leonard Freed; then-staff photographer for the Nation of Islam, Robert Sengstacke; and Black Star photographers Matt Herron and Bob Fitch.

Drawn from the personal collections of the artists, these works reflect both the power and the beauty of the photographic medium when used as a tool for social change. The striking photographs are juxtaposed with the stirring and insightful words of activists James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hairier, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. The exhibition ends with a haunting portrait gallery: a selection of photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. taken by each of the photographers.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Museum is presenting Eyes on the Prize, a 6 part video series that first aired on PBS in 1987. The documentary, which includes contemporary interviews and historical footage, will air on six consecutive Suns. at 3pm, beginning Aug. 12.

We Shall Overcome was developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) and curated by Robert Phelan, an art historian, museum curator and former director of CREED Photos (a database project for civil rights).

Showing in the Museum's Holden Community Gallery is the exhibition, Buncombe County Folk Pottery, which will be on view from July 5 through Sept. 2.

Until recently the work by potteries in Western North Carolina has received less attention than the work of potteries in Seagrove, NC, and Edgefield, SC. However, as potters settled in Buncombe County, they developed their own styles and traditions, combining the influences of Seagrove and Edgefield with other influences, including Wedgewood and Arts and Crafts era styles.

In the nineteenth century most of the ceramics created in this region were utilitarian in nature: storage jars, jugs, plates, bed warmers and candlestick holders. The twentieth century brought metal cans, glass jars and other items that lessened the demand for utilitarian ceramics. At the same time the railroad, and later the automobile, brought tourists to the mountains, providing a new source of income for the potteries. As they sought to create works that would appeal to the tourists, some of the potteries created miniature versions of the functional wares they had previously created while others responded with more decorative wares.

Buncombe County Folk Pottery was organized by the Asheville Art Museum with guest curator Rodney Leftwich.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Museum at 828/253-3227 or on the web at (http://www.ashevilleart.org).

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