The Asheville Art Museum will present Pop 'n' Op, an exhibition featuring works from the 1960s and 1970s that are considered part of the Pop/Op era. The exhibition, on view March 18-May 14, 2017, brings together over 30 works by Pop and Op artists who rose to popularity in the 1960s. 

Throughout the 1950s, Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world. Its practitioners—artists like Jackson Pollack, Willem De Kooning, and Mark Rothko—aimed to express their inner psyche through energetic brushstrokes, spontaneous drips and contemplative fields of color on monumental canvases. While their popularity rose throughout the decade, the Abstract Expressionist painters came to be seen as elitist and disconnected from the real world, attitudes that opened the way for significant changes in artistic production.

A group of artists arose in the 1960s who ushered in a new order, seeking to distinguish themselves from the previous generation. Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Indiana and Claes Oldenburg recognized the power of advertising and mass media as visual forms of communication. They began incorporating aspects of commercial art into their paintings, prints and sculptures. Their use of hard-edged abstraction, flattened planes of color, and iconic consumer imagery created an aesthetic that, compared with the Abstract Expressionists, felt cool, sleek and more tightly connected with everyday American culture.

This exhibition is one of the many “pop-up” exhibitions the Museum is presenting at 175 Biltmore Avenue, On The Slope, and in partner venues throughout Western North Carolina while 2 South Pack Square undergoes its state-of the-art transformation.

The Museum is presenting the following events in conjunction with the exhibition at Asheville Art Museum On the Slope (175 Biltmore Avenue). Details at ashevilleart.org.

• Slow Art Day -- April 2, 11am
• Opening Reception -- April 7, 5–8pm
• Art Break -- April 28, 12pm