Meet the new director of the Gaston County Museum of Art and History

The former assistant director of the Gaston County Museum of Art and History now serves as the museum's director, replacing former director Jason Luker, who resigned from the museum in October.

Alexandrea "Ali" Pizza, 42, served as assistant director starting in 2017, when she came to the museum from Belmont Abbey College, where she had been working as director of preservation and curator of rare books. After Luker's exit, she served as the museum's interim director. She was fully promoted to director, at an annual salary of $115,000, in May.

"I had my eye on the museum for quite a few years," Pizza said. "So when we moved to Charlotte, it was 2010, and I had three children three and under.  And we lived about a mile from all the museums within Charlotte… and yet the very first museum I visited was the Gaston County Museum of Art History, which was about a 45-minute drive with three babies in the car."

She was impressed by what she found.

"Gaston County Museum is accredited by AAM (American Alliance of Museums), which is a national accreditation. And I thought, this museum has a ton of potential," she said.

Pizza has a history of working in conservation. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in craft and sculpture at the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and a master’s degree in arts administration from Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina. She studied as the Nicholas Hadgraft scholar at the Montefiascone Book Conservation School in Montefiascone, Italy and served as the assistant conservator for the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.

"Books and paper were definitely my passion when it came to conservation," she said.

She moved to North Carolina in 2010 after her husband, Joseph, was offered a job as a professor of English at Belmont Abbey College. Pizza was initially reluctant to come to the area, but then she learned Belmont Abbey has a collection of rare books.

"There are over 23,000 rare books at Belmont Abbey College. … And I really just fell in love with the collection and the people, the monastic community," she said.

At the Gaston County Museum, rather than the physical work of rebinding rare books, her focus on conservation is "at a strategic level," she said. " So what can we do to promote preservation of the collection? And for the future?"

In 2021, Pizza aided in redesigning a facility to house the museum's collections. Between the collections building and the building that houses the museum itself, the museum houses more than 83,000 artifacts. Around 10-15% of that collection is art, and the rest is largely historical artifacts.

"They range from historic carriages to farm equipment, to historic… dresses from the 1800s. We have an armory collection," she said.

The move into the collections and archives facility allowed Pizza to use her experience in executing large-scale collection moves.

"And that includes teaching staff: how to clean mold, how to handle objects safely, how to rehouse them, what materials to buy that are standard in conservation," she said.

Pizza feels the museum has a bright future. Recent talks among county officials about defunding the museum sparked a backlash in the community, with, among many others, a former North Carolina senator and a former county sheriff addressing the Board of Commissioners directly to talk about the museum's importance to the community. The Board of Commissioners fully funded the museum for the coming year.

"I think that we have never been better poised for a successful future as we are now. We have been through some of the greatest challenges the museum has faced in its 47 year history in the past year," Pizza said. "We have a stronger and more engaged board than I have ever seen. We have a commitment from the commissioners to fully fund the museum. And we have some of the most talented staff members I have ever worked with. So I'm actually really hopeful and excited about the future. I think that there's a lot of work ahead. We need to build on the momentum that we've had from our community."

The museum has an exhibit planned for September called "Niche Knits."

The display will include stockings from a local hosiery mill, knitting machines that were used in the textile mills, and an interactive exhibit for children that will allow them to dress paper dolls in clothing from different eras.

"This is going to be a fun, bright, colorful exhibit," Pizza said.

The museum also has a fundraiser coming up, a murder mystery dinner on July 21 and 22 at the Esquire Hotel in downtown Gastonia. There will be costumed actors, live music, a silent auction, and more. Tickets are available on the museum's website and at the Esquire.

Going forward, Pizza says she wants the museum to "be a place that inspires creativity, pride, belonging."

"I want it to be a place where people gather to celebrate, to challenge themselves and to question how we relate to each other and to our shared humanity," she said. "The Gaston County Museum needs to provide relevance, provide fundamental meaningfulness in its exhibits and its programs that are important to human nature at its core."

The museum's biggest challenge going forward will be in figuring out what that looks like. Staff have been talking about reimagining the museum's permanent textile exhibit.

"What I would like to see is a museum that reflects the people who come through our doors. So a museum that is engaging, and that is interactive. So not those 'do not touch' signs and 'please be quiet' signs," she said. "But you know, if you press this button, you can hear an oral history from a textile mill worker, or you can hear what it was like to grow up in Lowell, as we sit here today.

"So I think what we really want to see is a new museum when you walk in the front door. And over the next couple of years, we're going to be really working hard with designers and our board and our community to determine what that looks like," she added.

She said that she not only wants to create a safe space for reflection, but a space that presents history in all its forms.

"Museum professionals for a long time have been talking about museums as places that are safe spaces for reflection, that provide knowledge and understanding and challenge visitors to confront the ways in which they view the world," she said.

This article originally appeared on The Gaston Gazette: Meet the new director of the Gaston County Museum of Art and History