North Carolina is noted not only for its internationally known artists but also for its world-class museums. You’ll have an opportunity to experience both this fall with new exhibitions highlighting arts from the traditional to the cutting edge, along with outdoor arts and craft festivals.
Throughout this fall, “Charlotte Celebrates Bearden” marks the centennial of internationally renowned Charlotte collage artist Romare Bearden (1911–1988) with collaborations among arts and cultural organizations throughout the city around music, dance, literary and visual arts events, all of them touching on aspects of Bearden’s life and times. The celebration continues into January 2012.
In Winston-Salem, Reynolda House Museum of American Art shines a light on mid-20th century artists including Bearden with the show Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and in Graham the Alamance County Arts Council’s Beyond the Frame is an intriguing and playful display of J. Seward Johnson Jr.’s life-size, three-dimensional recreations of well-known Impressionist paintings by Monet, Manet, van Gogh and Renoir.
Raleigh is hosting two distinctly different exhibitions this fall. Rembrandt in America brings 50 paintings to the N.C. Museum of Art, and Deep Surface: Contemporary Ornament and Pattern at CAM Raleigh presents the cutting-edge work of contemporary designers working in architecture, product, graphic, fashion and digital media design.
If your taste runs to intimate galleries, you’ll find works by some of the best artists in the region at the Green Hill in Greensboro, Piedmont Craftsmen in Winston-Salem, the Penland Gallery in the western mountains and others
And you can head outdoors not only to experience fall color but colorful craft and performing arts at festivals including 17 Days in Greensboro, Six Days in November (Winston-Salem) and the Lake Eden Arts Festival in Black Mountain.
North Carolina is brimming with major museum and gallery exhibitions as well as arts and craft festivals this fall!
-David Potorti
Literature Director and Arts Editor