The Bascom’s major exhibitions highlight the work of the artists who live and work in our region, Bascom instructors and students, Artist Fellows and Residents, as well as world-renowned artists whose work might not otherwise be seen in this region. The Bascom's 3 galleries and the Winkler Sculpture and Nature Trail are host to approximately 10 exhibitions each year, which pair with our Outreach and Education departments to attract 20,000 visitors to The Bascom. Free guided tours are available upon advanced request.

The Bascom Annual Theme: Place

As makers and creators, human beings experience the world as both a place given to them and as a place they can mark, shape, and mold. The places that become homes to us offer familiarity, comfort, and even companionship. Places seem to have their own identities – they act on us, call us to them, invite response. Many creative acts seem to emanate from the experience of place – a stunning landscape or a quiet interior can express or even recall the sense of a place.

Art itself can both represent a place (e.g., Monet’s Giverny) or become part of a place-making activity (e.g.,Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Surrounded Islands). The act of place-making can be both literal (building a house) and imaginative (Alice in Wonderland).

The year’s theme invites us to consider place and places as sources of beauty, as generators of community and belonging, as locations that invite response. Works shared this year celebrate the human experience of place and its resonance in art forms.

The theme of place also invites us to consider places as sources of longing, loss, separation, and dis-placement. As such, viewers are able to consider the ambivalence of the places we love – the ways in which we are too attached, or too detached from the land, the people, and the communities we inhabit.

As you consider the theme of place this year, we invite you to find moments to see, think, do, and be, in this place, our Bascom home in the western mountains of North Carolina.