September 21st and 22nd - North Carolina Museums, part 1

After the reading, I had two more meetings in Chapel Hill.  I met Carolyn Allmendinger, who directs academic programs at the Ackland Museum of Art at UNC Chapel Hill.  It is her job to see how the museum can work with departments across the university.  If in the area, I love the place we went, Foster's Market.

Then I went on a tour with Larry Wheeler, the generous, pied-piperly charismatic director of the North Carolina Museum of Art.  The North Carolina Museum of Art was closed for renovation and, as Wheeler more or less began, “We’re in the business of reinventing the American art museum.”

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if the trick of institutional leadership is compelling people to fill that vacuum with their support, by the end of my time with him, I felt that if I had had a checkbook to donate large sums, I would have started busily scribbling in it.

We walked through the permanent collections of older works, including a breathtaking collection of Rodin sculptures whose presence in the collection is to Wheeler's credit, and then went to the new building.  Designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, it opens in the spring, and was well underway, but also in that state of architectural midstream process that I sometimes like even more than the final building.  (These pictures are by NCMA photographers Karen Malinofski and Christopher Ciccone, from the NCMA website.)

All of the usual suspects of modern construction materials were there – glass walls, steel frames, poured concrete, with bright yellow temporary surfaces.  With the vast galleries, the white walls, the high ceilings, the place felt comfortable, in the right proportion, open to the out of doors, full of clear, bright light.  

The building was the architectural equivalent of meeting a really dignified person who is also humble.  Nothing there seemed to be more showy than its purpose required, while also being state of the art.

The museum reminded me of the West Collection because it is about some kind of experience of art in the everyday environment.  They have rolling acres of park with sculptures.  Joggers see the same ones every time.  And the museum itself is a civic institution by charter and thus free.  

As Larry also said, they were re-recording their audio guides to be their senior most curators talking conversationally, as if they were walking next to you discussing the art.  

I wanted to take pictures of the building in process but Wheeler declined.  So, I got a picture of a Roxy Paine tree – to bracket the Roxy Paine mushrooms that started off the West Collection – and a construction site.