Before I stopped writing this column regularly in 2002, I used to compose a New Year’s Wish List each year about visual art in Charlotte. Now that I’m back for a while, it’s 2006, and I decided it was time to resurrect this fantasy.
We were beginning to learn back then that the yearning to be “world-class” had a prerequisite: to be art savvy, and to support the arts. All the arts.
We stalled. Our mayor helped stall us with his pogrom against public art, cynically designed to pander to his right-wing political base. But signs are that we are growing again. There’s some interesting new architecture in Uptown, embellished with good public art. While the Pelli Tower still cuts the best high-rise profile, ImaginOn on 7th Street is the most memorable and interesting building in Charlotte for many years.
So this year, my first New Year wish for Charlotte: If it still wants to be a competitive city on the world stage, it needs to value good contemporary art and architecture.
One way to make this happen is for the Bechtler Museum to become reality on South Tryon Street at the hands of Swiss master architect Mario Botta. What vibrancy this museum, and the unique Bechtler modern art collection housed within, would bring to our city!
As positive as this would be for South Tryon Street, I hope that the other end of Tryon Street sees some positive changes, too — near McColl Center for Visual Art. This artistic jewel is isolated “a block too far” from any simpatico development. I wish that Bank of America, who owns a lot of the land nearby, and the county commission, which owns the Hal Marshall Center, could make a common cause and develop several blocks of high-density housing, with affordable live-work studio accommodation for artists included in the mix. The McColl Center is great, but it needs the support of good development around it!
For more than a decade I’ve wished that the Mint Museum of Art would revive its Regional Biennial, something akin to the Arkansas Arts Center’s Delta Art Show, an event that commands respect across the Southwest.
There was a glimmer of hope that something like this would spring up again a few years ago when Mint organizer Susan Perry, who has since moved to Alabama with her husband, notified me that the museum would be offering the Charlotte art community an opportunity to “express the impact of Charlotte artist Romare Bearden on their own artwork” by entering the competition Celebrating the Legacy of Romare Bearden — open to artists from NC and SC.
At the time, the Mint Museum of Art had not offered regional artists a juried exhibition of any kind since the 1990 Mint Museum Biennial — more than a decade. This rekindling of a competition seemed to indicate a fresh start for a renewed program, but despite the efforts of Perry and others, this competition was not revived, and Celebrating the Legacy of Romare Bearden died on the vine.
Dependent upon a single, non-renewing grant, it should, with other support, have evolved into a regular exhibition. Likewise, the Mint Museum of Craft + Design should also establish an invitational or a competition, a juried national or even an international show of living artists.
Meanwhile, the Fayetteville Museum of Art is having its umpteenth Annual Competition for North Carolina Artists this year, and Community Arts Councils all around the state and region are sponsoring National Juried Fine Arts Exhibitions here and there. Where is the Mint in this entire regional scenario? Invisible.
A few years ago, the McColl Center (known at that time as The Tryon Center for the Visual Arts) trumped the Mint Museum when Pallas Lombardi, who was the Center’s Director of Residencies and Exhibitions at the time, juried What’s New, a competition for regional artists which was displayed at Spirit Square in March 2002. Now that The Light Factory is housed in Knight Gallery (one of the best exhibition spaces in the region), a competition of this sort would have to move elsewhere, of course. Where?
As our biggest players on the art scene, McColl Center for Visual Art and the double Mints can stimulate smaller players in the game of art. Since the Mint is absent in the art competition scenario, maybe McColl Center could replace the Museum in this particular realm, by establishing a competition for living artists. If I could wave a magic wand…
Greater visibility for the visual arts in the Charlotte media is another wish. Why not take the concept of Gallery Crawl as a great art scene in a public venue further? Take it live, to TV and radio, offering on-the-spot gallery crawl interviews in the galleries and on the streets, conducted with artists, art watchers and art administrators on North Davidson Street, Tryon Street and South End. Spontaneous live television spots on Gallery Crawl nights with evening strollers along our various art avenues could add some sparkle, flash and dash to the evening news — a different kind of theater than the latest parking lot shoot-out.
If we have to have billboards in this town, couldn’t some of them be art? We did this once. Can’t we do it again?
A final wish. Couldn’t Queen’s Table a) invite some art professionals to offer them guidance on their commissions; b) develop some taste; or c) go away and take their horrible sculpture in front of the new CPCC performing arts building with them?
I’d like to end my 2006 Wish List by hoping you don’t forget it’s the first Gallery Crawl of the New Year this weekend! Don’t just look; buy art! Happy 2006!
This article appears in Jan 4-10, 2006.
