A Box of Art in Asheville

Pam Myers calls the large, container-like structure hovering at the core of the expanded Asheville Art Museum “a box within a box.”

The metaphor is fitting in many ways, the museum’s executive director says. The zinc-clad structure—a space that museum administrators have been referring to as the “core”—is in the center of the soon-to-be opened museum. It pulls the new 65,000-square-foot downtown cultural institution together, tying together two other spaces—the museum’s space for special exhibitions and its long-time home, the historic Pack Library at Pack Place.

The core is also central to the museum’s mission, which is to showcase the nonprofit Asheville Art Museum’s permanent collection, one that has quadrupled in the last decade. The core will house rotating exhibitions from that growing body of work “because the collection is at the core of what we do,” Myers says. 

After nearly three years of construction, the Asheville Art Museum is scheduled to open this spring, a highly anticipated event that will elevate Asheville’s already considerable stature as an arts destination, many believe. For the first time ever, the museum will have tall ceilings and lighting, environmental and security systems that will allow it to host traveling exhibitions that have previously bypassed the city for metros like Atlanta, Charlotte and Greenville.

“The increased space will attract high-quality traveling exhibitions that have space requirements,” says Randy Shull, an internationally collected artist who lives in Asheville. “Contemporary artists working today work on a scale that is very ambitious, and it will be great to accommodate some of these larger visionary projects.”

“I’ve been asked for years,” Myers says, “why the Wyeth show is at Greenville and it’s not here? How come the Rauschenberg show is in Atlanta and it’s not here? How come the Rockwell show was at the High (Museum of Art) and not in Asheville? They were not here because we did not have the facilities to host those kinds of exhibitions. Now we will.

“The exhibitions that we can curate and can share have never been seen before in the region, probably not west of Raleigh,” she says. “The quality and scale of the exhibitions and the way in which we can showcase the collections will create an entirely new environment for people to explore the arts and to be inspired by them.”

The museum’s $24 million renovation and expansion will likely bring some very influential visitors to Asheville, says Wendy Outland, an Asheville-based arts administrator who works with artists and arts organizations on the business of art. “I have no doubt that people who are the highest-level staff in museums all over the Southeast are going to be coming to see what has been accomplished,” she says. 

Long Time Coming

The third oldest art museum in North Carolina certainly has come a long way since 1948, when local artists started it in a three-room building on Charlotte Street. The Asheville Art Museum quickly outgrew its quarters and, in 1950, moved to donated space in the old Northwest Bank building (later the BB&T Building, now Hotel Arras and Arras Residences). In 1970 the museum moved to Asheville’s historic Montford community near downtown, then six years later moved into space in what is now called the U.S. Cellular Center. The museum moved to Pack Place, a Pack Square city redevelopment project, in 1992, occupying the three-story, 12,000-square-foot, marble-faced library, the grandest of four that renowned library architect Edward Tilton designed in North Carolina.

In 1999, the Asheville Art Museum undertook an expansion project that increased its space to 24,400 square feet. Soon it started talking about expanding again. 

It needed more space to show work from its permanent collection (a mere 3 percent could be shown at any one time). It needed state-of-the-art storage space to protect the work not on view. It needed more space for its crowded library, which held more than 10,000 books, publications and other research materials. And it needed additional space for students, teachers and scholars who wanted to study the museum’s collection.

Talk in 2005 about the museum’s moving to a larger facility prompted it that year to look into expanding into the Pack Place space it shared with The Health Adventure and the Colburn Earth Science Museum. The museum decided on an expansion that would include restoration and renovation of the historic library building, renovation of space formerly occupied by The Health Adventure and some new construction that tied the spaces together. An interim expansion in 2012 added nearly 24,000 square feet to the museum, and in 2016, the museum set out to complete the project.  

Determined to come up with a design that honors the art museum’s mission and works aesthetically, museum administrators had already visited several museums and spoken to colleagues around the country. The team interviewed several architects before settling on Ennead Architects, a firm in New York. 

“In large measure, what interested us was how skilled they were at blending the old and the new and in creating spaces that were transparent and welcoming and connected the museum to the community,” Myers says. “What we’ve always felt was that the museum is a public gathering space that is an additional ‘living room,’ as it were, for the communities here. We think Ennead Architects did a great job doing that.”

For nearly three years, motorists driving past the museum have seen workers busy behind chainlink fences, deconstructing parts of the old Pack Place project to erect the new museum. Once crews completed their work last fall, the museum began its own, creating atmospheric conditions involving temperature, humidity and lighting that are optimal for the display and preservation of art. It had to make sure those conditions were constant before it could move its collection in. 

“A huge portion of this project is environmental control systems to create state-of-the art spaces for art preservation,” Myers says. “So heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting—you need to monitor all of those things. You need months of testing.”

The new museum is the sum of three separate buildings. The “core” space, once the entrance to Pack Place, houses the art-filled atrium and a suite of galleries for the museum’s permanent collection (that collection now contains more than 5,000 works of art, plus over 4,000 architectural drawings of buildings in the Asheville area). The three galleries on each of the East Wing’s first and third floors will allow the museum to curate and host exhibitions of varying size and scale. The wing can hold as many as six exhibitions and has a performance space for film and video, new media installations, musical performance and other events. 

The old library—the North Wing, the museum calls it—houses the administrative offices, as well as the museum library and classrooms. Illuminated by the original, north-facing windows, the workshop space there has the kind of natural light that artists love. Fittingly, studio space in the old library will serve children and teachers from schools and summer camps. Secure, climate-controlled areas will allow researchers, students and interns to study works in the museum’s collection, such as material from Black Mountain College and the Works Progress Administration. 

On the rooftop terrace—one of the few publicly accessible rooftops in the city—there will be a café with windows that frame the new sculpture garden, Asheville’s iconic City Hall and, to the west, a view that includes Mount Pisgah. Inside on the second floor, visitors, kids and families will be able to make art at ArtPLAYce for Children, an art space that proved popular during the museum’s 2012 interim expansion project. 

First Looks

The museum itself is a work of art. The core building is fronted by a glass wall hung on a steel frame. Covering the core are zinc plates whose random perforations, the result of an algorithm created by students at UNC Charlotte, reference the region’s association with Black Mountain College. Several internationally recognized artists attended or taught at the experimental college, including John Cage, whose randomized “chance” music continues to inspire composers.

Museums can be disconcerting, what with their twists, turns and windowless walls. Helping visitors keep their bearings in the Asheville Art Museum is the Oculus, a window punched into the core’s north face that takes in Pack Square, including the mirrored wall of the Biltmore Building. The Oculus, which frames the city as a work of art, could also serve as the site of an artist installation. 

“Or a selfie,” Myers quips. “When you come into the museum, you’ll feel at ease. You’ll know where you’re going, you’ll know where you’ve been and how to get back there. And you’ll know where you are (relative) to the city itself.” 

The museum’s opening special exhibitions will be on display for several months to give residents plenty of opportunity to explore the new digs. One exhibition will be a reinterpretation of works in its permanent collection, including recent gifts, “so people see the wealth and energy behind the collection growth,” Myers says. The other exhibition occupies both floors of the East Wing. Assembled by a guest curator who spent months visiting artists in their studios, “Appalachia Now!” is a juried exhibition of artists living and working in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. The exhibition will include dance and poetry performances.

The museum, located in the heart of downtown, will continue to act as a “cultural concierge” for the region, Myers says, answering residents and visitors’ questions about regional artists found in the River Arts District, in and around Marshall and in Mitchell and Yancey counties, for example. “It’s our job to help move people out into those communities,” she says. 

Nearly all the money for the $24 million project had been raised by last summer through the museum’s Art WORKS for Asheville capital campaign. The city of Asheville contributed $2 million, and the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority contributed $1.5 million. The State Employees Credit Union bought naming rights to the plaza for $1.5 million. Asheville Art Museum and Diana Wortham Theatre, the other occupant of the old Pack Place space, each have a $10 a year, renewable 30-year lease with the city of Asheville.

The museum has raised more than $1.3 million of a $2 million endowment goal that will support the museum’s exhibition and education programs and operations. Its new space and its ongoing support will “float everybody’s boat,” according to Myers. “We were looking to build a truly 21st century piece of architecture for the city of Asheville and the communities of Western North Carolina, a truly terrific contemporary building that serves to caretake the collections that we hold in trust and to create vibrant environments for learning and inspiration for the people who visit us.”

Others agree. “There’s no doubt that the grand opening of the Asheville Art Museum will make quite a splash in regional newspapers, magazines and on television all over the Southeast,” says Outland, who was Florida’s first public art director. “Asheville is already recognized for its abundance of art, but Pam Myers has taken it to a new level.

“The amount of work that goes into recreating a museum, it’s not just the materials and how they are designed and placed. There is an overwhelming number of issues that a director—and only a director—can oversee properly. Pam is to be congratulated for her vision and her determination in getting this project completed.”