of art & design
In the mid-1960s, North Carolina State University Chancellor John T. Caldwell and Henry Kamphoefner, Dean of the University’s School of Design, designated a committee to acquire art that would enliven and enhance the campus. Using funds from the Harrelson Bequest, the committee began acquiring works from the North Carolina Artists Exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art.
During this same time, the Erdahl-Cloyd Student Union began holding traveling exhibitions and exhibitions of works of art by students. When a new student center opened in 1971, the exhibitions program continued there and began featuring works by local artists groups and from services such as the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services (SITES).
By the end of the 1970s, the plan to acquire art to adorn spaces around the campus had evolved into the idea that art also should be collected as a study tool. In 1979, Ben F. Williams was hired as N.C. State’s first curator of art and charged with building a collection that reflected the curricula of the university’s School of Design and its Colleges of Textiles, Engineering, and Humanities and Social Sciences. Not only should students, faculty, and staff benefit the collection was to serve as a resource for the community and region as well, as befits a land-grant university.
The curator’s function was also to expand and enhance the exhibitions program in the student center, establish a community group to fund and identify sources for acquisitions, and ultimately, to build an art museum for NC State. Among the first donors were Henry and Mable Kamphoefner. During his years as founding dean of the School of Design, Dr. Kamphoefner, along with his wife, collected avidly from design school faculty and staff, as well as from dealers and artists the couple encountered in their travels. Their gifts to the university established a precedent for the kind and quality of work to be accepted in the future and helped ensure that work by early faculty of the School of Design and that of some students would remain at the university. Today the collection holds works by Duncan Stuart, George Bireline, Joe Cox, Wayne Taylor, Ron Taylor, Roy Gussow, and Ray Musselwhite, all affiliated with the School of Design.
After Williams retired in 1981, Dr. Charlotte V. Brown became the curator of art. One of her first actions was to establish a membership program, Friends of the Gallery, with a board of directors and art acquisition committee. By the mid-1980s, the office of the curator had grown to include other staff, so a Visual Arts Program was established with Brown as director. The collection continued to grow as ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, photography, graphic arts, and industrial design products were acquired.
In 1988 the Art Acquisitions Committee decided to include outsider art art by self-taught artists in the collection. At the time, study of this important aspect of art was just beginning. The first international symposium on outsider art was held at the gallery during an exhibition of some of the 2,500 works by artist Annie Hooper that the Jargon Society subsequently gave to the gallery.
In the late 1980s, Chancellor Bruce Poulton and university advancement began raising private funds to build a museum, construction got underway in 1990, and in 1992 a new Visual Arts Center officially opened as an addition to the student center. The building includes galleries, offices, and storage space for the nearly 10,000 objects that today comprise the collection.
In 1998, the Visual Arts Center became known as the Gallery of Art & Design. Two years later, the university’s gallery, theater, and music and dance departments formed Arts NCState to jointly promote these cultural programs both within the university and throughout the state and region.
As the gallery’s collection has grown, so have its uses within other university disciplines. Faculty and staff use objects to raise and discuss issues of design and aesthetics, and the collection helps students understand and clarify the ways in which objects embody social and cultural values, illustrate historical events, and exemplify methods of production and their associated economic systems. In addition, the collection preserves, maintains, and documents significant cultural traditions in the state and region, serving as an institutional memory.
The Gallery of Art & Design’s exhibition program has expanded as well. Each year, the gallery hosts several temporary exhibitions, some organized in-house, some by other art institutions. Notable exhibitions in the past decade include The New Narrative: Contemporary Fiber Art; The Art of Building in North Carolina; NC Clay 1992; Bob Trotman: A Retrospective; Mark Hewitt, Potter; Samuel Yellin, Metalsmith; Buildings on a Small Scale: The Collection of Steven Burke and Randy Campbell; Modernist Eye: The Art and Design of Nathan Lerner; North Carolina Pottery Masters: C.R. Auman and C.B. Masten; and Passionate Collectors: Sonia and Isaac Luski.
Many gallery-organized exhibitions have traveled to other museums, including 150 Years of North Carolina Quilts: The Pattie Royster James Quilt Collection; Cultures Revealed: Appliqués from Around the World, Selections from the Nell Battle Booker Sonneman Collection; Close to Home: The Neugents; and Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Permanent Collection.
Becoming the Gregg Museum of Art & Design