The Mint and Bechtler art museums focus on their own collections and collectors

As the new season unfolds for Charlotte’s art museums, the organizations are emphasizing their commitment to community engagement while preparing a range of exhibitions from Icelandic art to “the humble chair.”

The Charlotte Observer recently spoke with officials at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and The Mint Museum about what lies ahead for them and their visitors.

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

For the Bechtler Museum, its newest exhibition provides the opportunity to tell a story that until now has been unfairly overlooked.

The Bechtler will debut this month “Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: Flora.” The show, which runs from Sept. 23 to Jan. 21, 2024, features a multimedia project by the Swiss American duo that’s based on their discoveries about the overlooked American artist Flora Mayo.

In the 1920s, Mayo studied alongside Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and had a romantic relationship with him. While Giacometti is a revered artist of the 20th century, the Bechtler said Mayo’s work was relegated to a footnote in Giacometti scholarship.

Hubbard and Birchler “reframe this story from a feminist perspective.”

A related exhibit will run at the same time, “Giacometti and the Artists of the Grande Chaumière.” It features works by artists affiliated with the academy that was a gathering place for many avant-garde artists in the early 20th century.

Other highlights of the Bechtler’s new season include:

▪ “Eduardo Chillida: 100 Years,” commemorating the centenary of the birth of the influential Spanish sculptor, is set to run from Dec. 9 to April 14, 2024. Known for monumental sculptures, Chillida also created smaller sculptures, drawings, collages and prints, examples of which will be on view from the Bechtler’s permanent collection.

▪ “Alyson Shotz: Coalescence” focuses on Shotz, whose sculptures and installations use synthetic materials like glass, mirrors and stainless steel to harness intangible forces such as gravity, space and light. The one-installation exhibition centers around Shotz’s “Coalescence” (2006), on loan to the Bechtler from the Bank of America Collection. The sculpture of glass beads and wire hangs from the ceiling, resembling a cloud, a massive spider web glistening with morning dew or a cluster of atoms magnified to monumental scale. The exhibit goes from Dec. 9 to Aug. 9, 2024.

▪ “Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson: Infinite Space, Sublime Horizons.” This is the Icelandic artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. in nearly a decade, and her first monographic show in the Southeast. Jónsson, who has spent the last 30 years in Cleveland, blends painting, weaving and drawing in her works that the Bechtler said “blurs the boundaries between abstraction and representation, and between fine art and craft.” The show runs from Feb. 17, 2024, to June 2, 2024. It will feature 45 pieces, many of which have never been exhibited before, including large-scale paintings created on a loom.

Bechtler executive director Todd Smith tied what’s coming up in this season to one of the museum’s bigger events last year, “Pop to Now: Warhol and His Legacy.”

That show featured classic work by pop artist Andy Warhol, as well as artists he inspired like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. And it included contemporary artists whose work only exists digitally, through NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

“To be able to show NFTs at the Bechtler was a really important moment,” Smith said, “because it shows our audience that what we’re trying to do is celebrate our collection... (and) also make it relevant to what living and working artists are doing now.

“That’s really the thrust of where we’re going with our (new) exhibition program.”

He said that dynamic of relevancy also can be found in the Flora exhibition. “It takes some of the real strengths of our collection, the joy of our historical collection, especially the relationship of Alberto Giacometti to... Flora Mayo, and pulls their story through in a different way, through the eyes of two contemporary artists from Austin.”

The exhibit helps visitors appreciate the power of the Bechtler’s collection while also making it speak to contemporary life and engaging living artists. It helps make the collection feel “fresh and new, which was a hallmark of our founder’s collecting interests,” Smith said.

The Mint Museum

One exhibit the Mint is winding down actually served as the kick-off to what museum officials are calling “The Year of the Collector.” Open through Sept. 17, The Vault features objects from the private holdings of four prominent Black art collectors living in Charlotte.

Inside the Mint Museum ‘Vault’ exhibit, where couples collect and cherish Black art

The museum is carrying that theme into its new season, where visitors will be treated to presentations from a 3-D cultural history of chairs in “The Art of Seating: 200 Years of American Design” to a Gilded Age designed installation, “Walter Scott Lenox and American Belleek.”

There will also be a monthly Gilded Age film and speaker series tied to “American Belleek.”

“The Art of Seating,” curated by Jonathan Stuhlman, “takes an everyday object, a chair, and tells a historical story,” museum spokeswoman Michele Huggins said. “There are chairs included in this that have been thrown off buildings, that presidents have sat in, and overall it’s just kind of fun.

“It really is a walk through history by seeing these different chairs that have spanned the 19th and 20th century, and when they were designed and manufactured,” she added.

The show will also include interactive components, including an area where visitors can design their own little chair And there are plans to have public games of, naturally, musical chairs. That happens in uptown on Sept. 16; the event is free but registration is encouraged.

The chairs exhibit runs at the uptown museum from Sept. 16 to Feb. 25, 2024.

Also launching in September, the Lennox/Belleek exhibit aims to capture the evolving styles of porcelain ceramics in the United States, according to Brian Gallagher, senior director of decorative arts at the Mint.

The exhibition at Mint Museum Randolph covers the late 19th century period of the Gilded Age. During that tine, Gallagher said, “the belief emerges that everyone, regardless of economic status, deserves to live with beautiful things.”

That leads to American artists borrowing, mixing and matching ornamental motifs from the Islamic World, China and Japan, for instance. The craftspeople are “blending them together to create something that epitomizes this art for art’s sake philosophy but that is more accessible,” Gallagher said.

The show tracks different arcs, including the unexpected rise of Trenton, New Jersey, as a major producer of this type of porcelain, imitating what was being done in Belleek, Ireland. It also covers the stylistic development of the form from work modeled on European standards to a distinctive American aesthetic, according to Gallagher.

The Lennox/Belleek exhibit takes place from Sept. 23 to Jan. 21, 2024.

Then on Dec. 9, “Crafts Across Continents” debuts and runs to May 5, 2024. It features more than 50 objects from the private collection of husband and wife Gary Ferraro and Lorne Lassiter.

They are founding members of a Mint affiliate, the Founders’ Circle. Lassiter also served as vice president of the American Craft Council. Ferraro is a retired professor of cultural anthropology at UNC Charlotte.

They collect for the fun of it, according to the museum, but are serious about collecting and are very knowledgeable about contemporary craft.

The exhibition will be presented in a domestic setting to underscore the theme of enjoying life through living with art.

Glass, ceramics, bamboo and textile objects by artists from around the globe are part of the exhibit, including glass sculpture from the Czech Republic, an installation by Danish artist Tobias Møhl, a mobile by Polish-trained artist Anna Skibska and a large glazed ceramic vessel by British artist Gareth Mason.

Observer arts editor Adam Bell contributed to this report

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