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.
Matt McConnell and Islamic Art
Thursday, January 17th, 2019
6 p.m.
Free
McConnell discusses his participation and work created for the 20th Edition Islamic Arts Festival at the Sharjah Arts Museum in the United Arab Emirates in 2017. The exhibition, one of the world’s most renowned Islamic Arts events, featured artists from 30 countries. Since 2001, McConnell Studios has created custom designed sculpture, lighting, and architectural installations for public, commercial, and residential clients.
In The Realms of the Self-Taught
Thursday, January 24th, 2019
6 p.m.
Free
Director of the Gregg Museum, Roger Manley . Every town has at least one—a house covered with hubcaps or homemade signs or flattened beer cans, or surrounded with hundreds of dolls dangling from the trees or shaped like a flying saucer—the kind of places one might take friends from out of town when one wants to amaze them with something really local and truly unusual. Gregg Museum director Roger Manley has visited hundreds of places like this, and leads the audience on a trip through the offbeat world of self-taught creativity.
Inspired Echo: Faculty Dances
Thursday, January 31st, 2019
6 p.m.
Free
Teaching Associate Professor and Department Head Beth Wright Fath (Health and Exercise Studies NC State), Panoramic Dance Project Director and Lecturer Francine Ott (Dance Program/Arts NC State), and Teaching Associate Professor and Dance Minor Coordinator Autumn Mist Belk (Health and Exercise Studies NC State) will present an evening of choreography surrounded and inspired by Vernon Pratt’s artwork.
Gallery Tour of Vernon Pratt’s All The Possibilities of Sixteen
Wednesday, February 6th, 2019
12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Free
Presenter William Dodge, Vernon Pratt collector and founder of The Vernon Pratt Project, is a local Raleigh architect and graduate of NC State’s College of Design. The Vernon Pratt Project has helped to facilitate gifts of the late Vernon Pratt’s art (on behalf of the Pratt family) to various museums and institutions, including the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, North Carolina State University, Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro, and the Western Carolina Fine Art Museum.
Exhibition Opening: “Explorations” by Christin Lorena Weisner
Thursday, February 7th, 2019
6 pm. to 8 p.m.
Free
“Explorations – Science Sculptures” 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 this 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.” Free and open to the public.
Exhibition Opening; “Borderlands” by Susan Harbage Page
Thursday, February 7th, 2019
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Free
“Borderlands – Evidence from the Rio Grande” 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. Free and open to the public.
Artist’s Talk: Borderlands by Susan Harbage Page
Thursday, February 21st, 2019
6 p.m. to 8 pm.
Free
“Border Wall, Progreso, TX” is but one photo in the exhibition “Borderlands – Evidence from the Rio Grande” by Susan Harbage Page. The artist will present a talk on her work, her “anti-archive”, and its testimony and commemoration of the courage, fear, hope and determination that continues to drive countless people to risk everything in search of a better life.
Artist’s Talk: Explorations by Christina Lorena Weisner
Thursday, February 28th, 2019
6 p.m. to 8 pm.
Free
Christina Weisner, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the College of The Albemarle in Elizabeth City, NC lectures on her work. Shown: “Ocean Bottom Seismometers” featuring reclaimed seismometers that create an experience of actual seismic data. Other featured works incorporate scientific instruments, found objects, and elemental materials in sculptures and installations, often integrating the equipment’s original functions in the work. Free and Open to the Public.
Current exhibitions at Gregg Museum
Rural Avant-Garde: The Mountain Lake Experience
Adams and Woodson Galleries
August 23-December 30, 2018
Painting with fire, dancing in ink, or exploiting decomposition, artists such as composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, poet/ceramicist M.C. Richards, photographer Sally Mann came to Virginia’s Mountain Lake for a series of art experiments involving scientists, scholars, and local folks. Other participants included visionary Howard Finster; Japanese sculptor Jiro Okura; official New York waste management artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles; East Harlem street artist James De La Vega; Zen scholar Stephen Addiss; and painter Ray Kass. Organized by the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts at Longwood University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Vernon Pratt: All the Possibilities of Sixteen
October 11 2018 – February 10, 2019
All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536) is Pratt’s most ambitious piece. Beginning in February 1980, he completed the first 78 of its 256 panels during a sabbatical, while working in a small studio on 115th Street in New York City. The rest were painted in Durham, with the last panel finished at 3:30 PM on October 20, 1982. The exhibition is the first complete showing of this massive 256-panel work centering around Pratt’s interest in systems and their variations, permutations, and the rhythms and harmonies within. At 18 feet high and 110 feet wide, it is the largest and most complex work of Pratt’s ever exhibited, and has been called his “magnum opus” by Gregg Museum director Roger Manley. Never assembled before, it has been hidden for 36 years and is presented only now for the very first time.
Born in Durham, NC, in 1940, Vernon Pratt attended Duke University for two years before transferring to the San Francisco Art Institute to finish his B.F.A. and M.F.A. In 1964, he returned to teach drawing and painting at Duke, where he was soon recognized as an Outstanding Professor.
Along with exhibiting his visual art throughout North America and Europe, Pratt also pursued a parallel career as a jazz musician, performing on saxophone and flute with Brother Yusuf Salim and others. He established a studio in a downtown Durham loft that became a favorite hangout, performance space, and informal salon for the area’s then small but rapidly growing community of artists and musicians.
Pratt’s life was cut short by a bike accident on December 14, 1999, five days after his 59th birthday. He died two months later, leaving behind a studio filled with thousands of enigmatic paintings and sculptures that trace his development from early figurative naturalism that employed broad strokes and bright colors, to a mature style involving an approach he called “systematic abstraction.” These latter works were rendered in subtle gradations of black, white, and shades of gray or else as progressions in pure black and white, applied in patterns determined by mathematical formulas.
The exhibition will also feature an original composition, “Denominators” by Rich Holly, Arts NC State’s Executive Director, based on Pratt’s examinations of jazz music and mathematics.
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.
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