Looking Through: Glass from the Asheville Art Museum

Looking Through: Glass from the Asheville Art Museum considers glass as a medium of internal and external contemplation. These transparent glass works evoke a sense of inner worlds made visible. John Kuhn’s crystalline forms encapsulate complex, floating entities. The hands within Do-Ho Suh’s Untitled encourage the viewer to mimic the gesture with their own body, to feel the volume of air held within the bowl. The hazy faces floating on Ken Carder’s Vase dig into the psyche of the subconscious, while Jak Brewer’s diamond-like architectures reference the monuments of ancient Egypt, in which the earthly materials of sand and rock that are forged into glass echo the transmutation of the soul in the afterlife. Through abstract and bodily references, these artists transform the transparent into a mirror of the self.

The Museum holds over 175 works of glass in the Collection, including a large number of glass artists associated with the Western North Carolina region.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website