NC State’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design, at 1903 Hillsborough Street in Raleigh, is open to the public and free to visit. Free parking is available adjacent to the building.
- Monday: closed
- Tuesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Wednesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Thursday: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
- Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (open until 7 p.m. first Friday of month for First Fridays)
- Saturday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Sunday: 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Upcoming events at Gregg Museum
Here are some of the upcoming events at Gregg Museum. These are free and open to the public.
See more events on Gregg Museum’s programs page.
Tai Chi in the Garden
Thursday, July 11th
6 p.m.
Instructor Imari Colón with East Cloud Kung Fu leads a class in this ancient martial art.
Opening Reception – The Prints of Beauvais Lyons
Thursday, July 18th
6 p.m.
Movie in the Garden
Thursday, August 22nd
7:30 p.m.
Sharktopus. Bring lawn chairs, blankets, and enjoy a movie under the stars.
Current exhibitions at Gregg Museum
Left Handed Liberty: Self-Taught Art from the Permanent Exhibition
The Gregg Museum’s permanent collection has included self-taught art (sometimes called “art-brut,” “outsider art” or “visionary folk art”) for more than thirty years, and now includes more than 550 examples. Many of the pieces in this exhibition were originally acquired by Robert Lynch, a Native American (Haliwa-Saponi) attorney who grew up near Enfield, NC, and attended UNC and Harvard Law School before moving to New York City to work with the Dance Theater of Harlem. In 1975 Lynch returned to North Carolina to live in his childhood home, write poetry, and begin studying and collecting self-taught art. Shortly before his death (of AIDS, in 1989, at age 42), he sold most of his collection to North Carolina Wesleyan College to help defray his medical expenses. NC Wesleyan transferred the Lynch Collection to the Gregg Museum in 2015.
Many of the artists featured in this exhibition responded to hardship and trauma by making art. After something traumatic happened, they began making things, and soon discovered the act of being creative somehow helped them overcome their difficulties. Since the process is, at least to start with, pursued only for their own satisfaction, they hardly cared if the results looked “professional” or were achieved with typical art supplies like oil paints and sable brushes. The impulse to get busy and just do something was insistently immediate and wholly personal. They reached for the closest, most readily-accessible, and most affordable materials at hand, and simply began, even though they may have had no visual art training or formal education. Often it didn’t even occur to them they were making art until someone else called it that, yet the urge they responded to—the urge to make something that facilitates continued existence—is one of the defining characteristics of what makes us human.
Borderlands-Evidence from the Rio Grande by Susan Harbage Page
February 7 to July 28, 2019
“Borderlands” is Susan Harbage Page’s testimony and a commemoration of the courage, fear, hope and determination that continues to drive countless people to risk everything in search of a better life.
For more than a decade, she has traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border near Brownsville, Texas, to record the journeys of immigrants entering the United States. By collecting images with her camera and gathering found objects at the scene, she has created what she calls an “Anti-Archive” that documents this still-unfolding event. She comments, “In 2007 I heard an NPR story which stated that 20 percent more women and children died than men when crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. I couldn’t get that figure out of my head. I wanted to know why. I wanted to see for myself what was happening on our southern border. I self-funded a trip to the border in Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. I had worked previously in the area in 1996 photographing impromptu shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. On that journey I crossed the border for the first time in Los Ebanos, Texas where the last hand-operated cable ferry floats you across the border.”
Explorations-Science Sculptures by Christina Lorena Weisner
February 7 to July 28, 2019
EXPLORATIONS features the work of Christina Lorena Weisner, who incorporates scientific instruments, found objects, and elemental materials into her sculptures and installations, often integrating the equipment’s original functions in her work. “Ideally [my] sculpture will encourage viewers to consider the macro and micro processes through which we interact with the physical world on a daily basis. I consider myself a process-oriented artist,” she says. “I choose to begin with an object rather than a concept. … The objects I choose simultaneously reflect the nature of matter itself and humanity’s determination to make use of and understand it.”
Weisner uses scientific instruments, scientific processes and approaches as a vehicle to better understand complex natural phenomena like earthquakes. One of the works on display incorporates ocean seismometers that not only measure vibrations caused by visitors in the gallery but also pulls data from the USGS’s website, and then signals the sculptural array to respond by ringing glass spheres. Another is a mechanized sculpture incorporating a sonar device used for exploring the sea floor; and several others deal with a massive meteorite impact that formed Europe’s largest cosmic crater (the Ries Crater).
Weisner’s work invites the viewer to consider the deep geological time of water, rocks and the landscape to the more fleeting temporality of living beings through objects, scientific instruments, technology and scientific discovery.
Southern Surreal-Materpiece Furniture by Tilden Stone
When a screw is twisted on what looks like a “Hoosier”-style cabinet—complete with bins for flour and corn meal—it parts down the middle, the sides fold back, and a working piano comes into view. Then a bit of ornamentation above twists aside to reveal a secret drawer—and then it in turn twists aside in an unexpected direction to lead to yet another a concealed compartment.
Many of the fantastic creations of Tilden J. Stone, a heretofore little-known grand eccentric and master furniture maker born in 1874 in Thomasville, NC, feature unusual compartments and false fronts, trompe l-oeil virtuosity, and bizarrely real and surreal shapes incorporated into the actual structure of the pieces.
Orphaned at a young age, Stone ran away to New York City as a teen, where he lived on the streets until a skilled cabinetmaker took him in, made him an apprentice, and taught him his craft. He then joined the Merchant Marine, and spent most of the next thirty years sailing the high seas, going around the world more than ten times and making some thirty-seven voyages to China. By the 1930s, when he retired from his career afloat, he had risen to the position of Senior Officer on the S.S. President Wilson.
During furloughs between voyages, Stone made furniture for his family and friends. Many of the pieces reflect the extensive travels that had exposed him to a wide variety of different styles of woodworking. His penchant for installing intricate locking-puzzle mechanisms in many of his creations is thought to be due to his familiarity with ancient Chinese tricks for building magic boxes, learned from local carvers in ports like Singapore and Macao.
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