  One of the unanswered and most fundamental questions in physics regards the
nature of the confinement mechanism of quarks and gluons in QCD. Exotic hybrid
mesons manifest gluonic degrees of freedom and their spectroscopy will provide
the data necessary to test assumptions in lattice QCD and the specific
phenomenology leading to confinement. Within the past two decades a number of
experiments have put forth tantalizing evidence for the existence of exotic
hybrid mesons in the mass range below 2 GeV. This talk represents an overview
of the available data and what has been learned. In looking toward the future,
the GlueX experiment at Jefferson Laboratory represents a new initiative that
will perform detailed spectroscopy of the light-quark meson spectrum. This
experiment and its capabilities will be reviewed.
