After viewing the galleries and museums, I felt inspired, invigorated and much more connected, and it’s made me truly realize the beauty of art: It’s all in the interpretation. Anyone can purchase a pricey picture and hang it on the wall, but it’s when you find the ones that speak to you, that strike a chord somewhere deep inside you and make you feel something, well, then you can appreciate what you are seeing. All of the following galleries are unique in their own way. I’ve had the opportunity to chat with gallery owners, artists, patrons; I’ve seen things I never thought I’d see. When my tour was over, I was taken aback that all of this had been under my nose for a year and a half and I’d never experienced it.

When speaking to the gallery owners, I noticed that they share a common thread: They all want to be part of a larger community. We are fortunate to have a taste of everything here in Charlotte: Art that is strictly for viewing, art that is strictly for sale; galleries that offer works of all media to those that concentrate on one or two specific media; galleries meant to be entered with energy and frivolity to galleries meant to be entered with quiet contemplation – the list goes on and on. It shattered the image of the art world that was in my mind. Each gallery is a piece of a larger puzzle, fitting in with the next to create the big picture known as the Charlotte art scene.

Uptown
Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture
551 S. Tryon St.
(704) 547-3700
Tuesday-Saturday 10-5, Sunday 1-5
www.ganttcenter.org
The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture (formerly the Afro-American Cultural Center) has found its home in Charlotte, and we are lucky it has chosen us. The center not only provides visual art, but also music, theater, dance, and arts and education programs. The massive 46,500-square-foot center sits in the heart of Charlotte’s central business district in the area once occupied by the historic Brooklyn neighborhood, which was at one time the thriving center of the black community and home to the Myers Street School. The school bore a prominent exterior stair configuration that was often referred to by the biblical term “Jacobs Ladder” and signified the importance of education and advancement of African-Americans. The Gantt Center has done a wonderful job to pay this structure homage through its modern interpretation in the form of the stairs and escalators that carry visitors up to the main second-floor lobby from both ends of the building while framing the central glass atrium. Coming soon is the exhibition “Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell,” which opens on February 12. Driskell is a renowned Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Maryland and is an artist, art historian, collector and curator, and is one of the most recognized and respected names in the world of African-American art and culture. You can meet Driskell at the center from 6 to 8:30 p.m. on February 12.

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art
420 S. Tryon St.
(704) 376-1101
Monday and Wednesday-Saturday, 10-5; Sunday 12-5; closed Tuesday
www.bechtler.org

It is no secret that the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art has generated quite the buzz in Charlotte, whether you consider yourself part of the art community or not. Having officially opened its doors to the public on January 2, it is only the second museum in this country designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta. It seems a perfect fit. The museum’s current collection includes works by the most important and influential artists of the mid-20th century including Miró, Giacometti, Picasso, Calder, Hepworth, Nicholson, Warhol, Tinguely, Ernst, Le Corbusier, Chillida and many others, and Charlotteans are privileged in that only a handful of these amazing artworks have been on public view in the United States. Between the magnificent architecture, the history, the sense of community the museum brings, the location, and of course, the artwork that is housed inside, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is something to be experienced by the local community as well as the global community. Expect big things from the Bechtler.

Hodges Taylor Gallery
401 N. Tryon St., Suite 108
(704) 334-3709
Tuesday through Saturday 11-3, Monday by appointment
www.hodgestaylor.com

Many readers may already be aware that Hodges Taylor Gallery is the oldest gallery in Charlotte, making its debut in uptown in 1981. While focusing on art and artists in the Southeast, Christie Taylor and Dorothy Hodges have educated Charlotteans on contemporary art through paintings and works on paper, sculpture and fiber, ceramics and photography, among others. The gallery also offers consulting to corporate clients as well as individuals. Coming soon is the exhibition “Wayne McDowell: The Artist’s Process,” February 2 – March 31, which will focus on the process of creating art and will show how the “thinking” changes through the process over the life of a career, even though the artist may use the same devices. The work featured in the exhibition will span the past decade (2000-2010). Bookmark February 17 when Wilmington native McDowell will discuss his own thinking process using his artwork and processes in conjunction with the exhibit.

Levine Museum of the New South
200 E. Seventh St.
(704) 333-1887
Monday-Saturday 10-5, Sunday 12-5
www.museumofthenewsouth.org
For newcomers to Charlotte, a visit to the Levine Museum of the New South should be a mandatory reward for the dreaded DMV visit for a new license and license plates. In the heart of uptown sits this hands-on educational museum full of interactive exhibits brimming with information about the New South, a term that refers to the post-Civil War period from 1865 to today. The end of slavery brought about a need for re-invention on all levels, and the Levine Museum captures these times beautifully. Comprehensive for all ages, this museum is a must for all residents new and native, along with those who are simply passing through. For a brief but thorough introduction, duck into the small theater showing the 10-minute video “Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers” to kick-start your tour. Enjoy the exhibit “Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor,” which focuses on culture, storytelling and exploring traditions of new and longtime residents. Within the exhibit, visitors will find a new technology known as “video-talkback,” where visitors can record their responses to questions and the exhibit’s themes. The exhibit will become an ongoing and ever-changing conversation – newcomers and longtime residents trading stories and perspectives.

Jesus Saves: If this is your motto, you would love the retro block-lettering signage that says just that atop an old, abandoned, asbestos-filled church just off West Trade in the Wesley Heights area.

Frazier Park Tunnel Mural: Every time my dog and I walk through the tunnel under Fourth Street, I feel I’m transported back to “The Wonder Years” era when the parks were filled with children and picnics, rather than the homeless and drug pushers.  And the truth is, the latter is what I sometimes find along that path.  But with a little paint and artsy vision, the floral mural that decorates the otherwise dark tunnel transforms the mood.

Wind Silos: Whoever said you couldn’t polish poop clearly hadn’t met Ned Kahn – the artist who was able to sex up a dull, unsightly parking garage on West Trade with a mirrored mosaic of metallic fabric that moves with the wind.

The Green: Maybe it’s just the writer in me, but this uniquely playful homage to the literary world is my sugar-free version of Willy Wonka’s factory.  If you stop to read and admire the floating storybook pages or animated artwork, you might feel a sudden, inexplicable urge to pee, brought on by the audible walkway of water sounds.

Firebird: Seated outside the Bechtler Museum, it’s the latest edition to Tryon Street’s collection of commissioned art.  The sparkly, glittery outdoor sculpture of mirrored and colored glass is a great departure from the bronze, aluminum, or granite blandness that decorates the other parts of Tryon.  The Firebird adds a kooky joyfulness to our corporate city streets.

So next time you balk at a few extra dollars being spent on sexing up our city, just ask yourself –would you rather look at a girl in jeans and a T-shirt everyday?

~ Amanda Pagliarini

It’s an understandable reaction.  Museums, galleries, even art itself can feel inaccessible, daunting, intimidating, or simply irrelevant.  Why should people step into the Bechtler?  If they do go, won’t the “I’m not sure I get it or give a damn” sign flashing above their heads be detectable by the artsy people?  What can be gained from a trip to the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture that couldn’t be read in a book?  Isn’t a dance performance just a dance performance, a musical performance just music?  How does a static painting or object have any real affect on a person? Or on a city, for that matter?

These are all questions I’ve asked myself.  And I like art.  I spent my first 25 years of life in Washington, D.C., where there is a gallery or museum for every Starbucks.  Twenty of those 25 years I spent in a dance studio.  In college, when I wasn’t studying the art of language, I was cramming my feet into ballet shoes or learning the creative science behind choreography.  And still, I can at times find myself among the masses in Charlotte who believe our city’s booming art world has nothing to do with me.

During her 2009 Oscar acceptance speech, Penelope Cruz addressed this question of relevance so divinely that it has since shifted my perspective.  With trembling conviction, Cruz shared,

“I always felt that this was, this ceremony was a moment of unity for the world because art, in any form, is and has been and will always be our universal language and we should do everything we can, everything we can, to protect its survival.”

Art is our universal language.  It requires no translation, or level setting.  Art doesn’t care where you came from.  It is unconcerned with your background, education or economic status.  It doesn’t demand that those who look at it be cultured or sophisticated.  Art doesn’t hold an expectation or required reaction.  It just wants you to come and see it.

Experiencing art offers individuals a freedom they rarely find anywhere else in life.  You can see what you want to see, feel what you want to feel, and no one can tell you that you’re wrong. Art allows two people to stand side by side and look at the exact same thing yet see it differently – and when they share their differing perspectives, rather than judge, defend or dismiss, they cock their heads and attempt to see what the other sees.

If art can imitate life, I simply don’t know of anything more relevant to us all.

~ Amanda Pagliarini

It’s a crisp, sunny late-autumn afternoon in uptown Charlotte, the kind of day the city’s leaders dream about as they try to transform Charlotte into the exemplar of The New Southern City. The sunlight glints off the office towers and freshly constructed museums and catches the bulk of Bank of America Stadium. Here it is, you imagine the folks at the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority saying. No longer are we an oversized small town built on the backs of banking and churches. Here stands a perfect intersection of commerce, culture and entertainment, intermingling until the lines among them dissolve.

That’s the hope, anyway. And in the middle of this vision of soaring glass and concrete sits a peculiar red-tile structure that represents perhaps the boldest gesture yet in the city’s nascent reinvention. On this day, John Boyer swivels from desk to laptop in his third-floor office that overlooks South Tryon Street as he prepares for the Jan. 2 opening of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art.

The last several weeks have been hectic, but “it’s going fine,” says Boyer, the Bechtler’s president and CEO. “We’re in great shape with the installation of our inaugural exhibit, which is going to be too beautiful for words.”

It’s taken a long time and years of tug of war among Charlotte’s arts community, city officials and Andreas Bechtler – the retired Swiss businessman and artist whose family collection the museum will house – to get to this point. Now it’s almost ready, a cornerstone of the long-awaited Wells Fargo Cultural Campus of museums, cultural centers and performance spaces uptown. The Bechtler’s main exhibit space has about 70 percent of its art installed. The exterior sports the “Firebird” sculpture, a 17-foot, 5-inch Phoenix of mirrored and colored glass that surely must be the most incongruous creature to ever spread its wings on South Tryon.

Implicit in the sculpture, and its incongruity, is a question: Is Charlotte ready for this?

For the arts, sure. The Cultural Campus includes a new, expanded Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and a new Mint Museum of Art, scheduled to open in October 2010. But the Afro-Am Center and the venerable Mint have history, tenure. The Bechtler represents, in its presence and its collection, what modern art historians have referred to as “the shock of the new.” Or, put another way: Can a museum housing the works of Picasso, Max Ernst and Andy Warhol thrive around the corner from the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the corporate and tourist heart of stock car racing?

The Bechtler’s challenge from the beginning “has not only been in installing the exhibits. It’s building an entirely new institution from the ground up, both literally and figuratively,” Boyer says, turning away from his computer. “We’re making certain assumptions about our audience and market. Charlotte has the Mint Museum of Art, the McColl Center (for Visual Art), the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, the Blumenthal (Performing Arts Center), even The Light Factory.  That demonstrates to us that there is an appetite for ambitious, potent, meaningful engagement with art in this community.

“I know there have been some jokes about whether Charlotte is ready for the best of mid-20th century European modernism, but I figure they just have to prove to me that Charlotte’s not ready for it.”

Start with the building.

Compared to the other Cultural Campus and office buildings that surround it, the four-story structure at first seems small and undistinguished. Then you get closer.

The exterior and columns supporting the cantilevered fourth floor above the entrance appear to be made of mortarless brick. It’s an illusion. They’re red-clay terra cotta tiles, arranged in steps and grades for texture. Each tile is attached to the building’s skeleton, made of strong but lightweight aluminum armature wire. The arrangement in steps creates the effect of a series of straps holding the building together. The surface also creates its own kind of art, manipulating light and shadow depending on the weather and the time of day – or night.

“At night, it’s absolutely scrumptious, man,” Boyer says, stopping at a fourth-floor terrace overlooking the open-air atrium. “Really, really pretty.”

This is the work of Mario Botta, the renowned Swiss architect and friend of Andreas Bechtler’s. Botta designed the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea. When Bechtler was convinced that uptown Charlotte would be a better setting for his collection than his own property at Mountain Island Lake, his sole condition was that Botta be allowed to design the building.

Inside, you’re surprised to find that such a compact structure could contain that much space – 36,500 square feet of it, including 10,000 in the main exhibit hall. It’s designed to catch as much natural and ambient light as possible so the effect, in Boyer’s words, is of a “cube of clay filled with light.” The backbone is the building’s glass-and-steel atrium, which seems to radiate light throughout. If you’re beginning to sense that the building itself is in effect a part of the permanent collection, you’re supposed to.

The floor plan tries to make maximum use of the available space by, among other things, locating collection storage, curatorial offices, the reference library and exhibit workroom underground, freeing up space above ground for exhibits.

And what exhibits they are. In late November, Boyer walked around the main third-floor exhibit space, pointing out the highlights of the Bechtler collection and sounding like a teacher roll-calling the giants of European modernism: Leger. Max Ernst. Picasso. Klee. Giacometti. Miro.

As prominent as the names are, their works are rarer, at least in the United States, than you might think. After World War II, American museums were caught up in a post-war exuberance for anything American, which led them to celebrate and exhibit mainly American artists – Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko. The Europeans tended to stay in Europe.

Which, of course, is where the Bechtlers were. The family, based in Zurich, owned stock in Pneumafil Corp., a manufacturer of textile machinery with a plant in Charlotte. Andreas Bechtler’s parents, Hans and Bessie, came from a family of art collectors who met and befriended many of the artists whose work they sought. (One of the collection’s pieces is a four-panel Andy Warhol portrait of the Bechtlers from 1973; there’s a young Andreas at far right, in jacket and tie.) Over 70 years, the family acquired about 1,400 pieces in assorted media, but mainly by European artists, dating from the late 1930s to the late 1970s.

Andreas Bechtler moved to Charlotte in 1979, then to Mountain Island Lake in 1997; there he founded the Little Italy Peninsula Arts Center, with studio space for artists to work in a peaceful, bucolic setting. A few years later, after his parents died, Bechtler had an idea to build a small museum on the property as an adjunct to the arts center and display the family’s collection.