We made the CharlotteFive 2017 Bucket List! Described as the “Uptown Museum Trifecta”, making a visit to the Gantt, Mint and Bechtler Museums ranked #5 on this year’s list of things to do in Charlotte:

“(5) Visit the Uptown Museum Trifecta: Gantt, Bechtler and Mint.

Charlotte has some of the Southeast’s top museums and you’re officially out of excuses for having not already paid them a visit. Plus, it’s easy to make these museums extra fun. Check out the Gantt After Dark series with its rooftop DJ, or Jazz at the Bechtler featuring drinks and music alongside its modern art. And on Wednesday nights the Mint is free, so stop by for a peek of its latest exhibit. Pro tip: For bonus cultural points, pay a visit to other top Uptown museums like Discovery Place and the Levine Museum of the New South.”

Check out the full article here.

JANUARY 28 – JULY 8, 2017

Alison Saar: The Nature of Us explores themes of motherhood, the role of women, the intensity of their hearts, and their embodiment as nature by highlighting the works of renowned artist Alison Saar.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Alison Saar is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists practicing in the United States today. Her work evokes ancestors, African cultural traditions, the contemporary experiences of women – the significance of their hair – as well as the tropes of women and nature. Saar uses nature as metaphor in imagined intersections with the female body and frequently creates assemblages that transform found objects. Her career as an artist spans more than three decades. In addition, both her parents – Betye and Richard – and her sisters are artists.

Saar’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and her permanent site sculptures can be found across the nation, from Los Angeles to New York. She works primarily in sculpture but also incorporates prints, paintings, and works on paper in her practice, most often with a focus on the female form. Saar grapples with motherhood, the role of women, the intensity of their hearts and their embodiment as nature and its forces. This exhibition of new sculptures, mixed-media works, and prints, mounted by the Harvey B. Gantt Center, illumines these themes.

For more information on this exhibit, click here.

From September 30 – April 23, 2017, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art will present the Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered, an exhibition expanding on works from the museum’s collection including modern and contemporary artists. The impetus for the show comes from extensive new research into the collection and the artists in the holdings, many of whom have very little material available in English. Significant findings from the research will be included in the exhibition.

The Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered will include a number of themes beginning with an introduction to the Bechtler family and the artists with whom they were close including Adolf Luther, Joan Miró, Italo Valenti, and Eduardo Chillida. The exhibition will then examine the Discussion of Space, a central concern for many abstract artists including Victor Vasarely, Angel Duarte, Alexander Archipenko, and Gina Gilmour.

The artists Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Picasso, Marino Marini, Giorgio Morandi, Le Corbusier, Maud Gatewood, Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer, Antonio Zoran Music, Giuseppe Santomaso, Edouard Pignon, Bruno Meier, and Jim Nicholson will be presented with a focus on the many different 20th Century Political Positions taken by artists from identity politics to classicism’s comforting cry for a return to order.

The cultural critique of Pop Art will feature Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Miguel Berrocal, Pol Mara, Rüdiger-Utz Kampmann, and Sam Francis and Walasse Ting’s 1¢ Life (examined last fall in the Bechtler Museum’s Sam Francis survey).

A room devoted to different Philosophical Investigations by artists through their work, will include Chillida’s relationship to the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and Pierre Soulages and Hans Hartung’s existentialism.

Finally, the exhibition will celebrate Concrete Art, one of Switzerland’s most significant contributions to Modern art history, with a presentation of art and texts by Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Robert Gessner, Richard Paul Lohse, Willy Müller-Brittnau, Johann Itten, and Hans Hinterreiter.

Since January 2010, the museum has offered exhibitions that introduced the region to many artists and styles widely admired and collected throughout Europe and Asia, but rarely seen in the United States. Now, with the research yielded through the generous support of the Knight Foundation and MetLife Foundation, the Bechtler is able to offer more significant and insightful artists and artworks in Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered.

The Bechtler family has long been generous with their memories and information and this show expands their contributions, as well. The Bechtler family has shared their family’s memorabilia with the museum so that we can gain more insight of Hans, Bessie, and their children and grandchildren living with the art that Charlotte now enjoys and celebrating with the artists who made these works. The museum’s lobby will feature reproductions of photographs of the family, along with exhibition posters contemporary to the shows in which the Bechtlers first experienced the works we enjoy today.

This exhibition is curated by Jennifer Sudul Edwards, Ph.D., curator at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art since 2015. It will include an audio guide featuring quotes by the artists presented in the exhibition, and is located on the fourth-floor gallery.