Go South, Art Lovers, for Beautiful Craft and Design

North Carolina’s Mint Museum offers up quintessentially American fare to entice children and sophisticates alike.

O ne of my goals in writing is the liberation of good art criticism from the Acela Corridor. That’s why I spent last week visiting museums, galleries, and collectors in North Carolina. It’s a big place, and its big-hearted people welcomed me, a dour Vermonter. I traveled a thousand miles and saw lots of wonderful art.

We Vermonters boil everything, unless we’ve shot it, and Southerners fry it, all to far better effect since Yankee food is so bland. I had the best fried chicken in Asheville and fried cauliflower and fried brussels sprouts in Charlotte. All that sizzle is performance art, and enjoying it is a new kind of interactive act.

Critics focus on museums, galleries, artists, and controversies between Boston and Washington, with an unhealthy emphasis on New York City. Most live in New York, and most art journals won’t pay for travel. Snobbishness rears its head as well. How can anything good happen outside New York except, and they add this grudgingly, Washington, and maybe Boston? And why would discerning readers care about the arts beyond, above, or below?

The fact is, the art world beyond Acela Country is robust and, often, refreshingly honest. New York is fading as the art capital of the world. This has been happening for years, since artists can’t afford to live there. People shop online, even for art. The Internet has given good artists everywhere a platform to promote their work.

Nobody wants to go to New York, anyway. Between publicity hound Dr. Quackpot from the NIH and New York’s Governor Disaster, theater, music, opera, and art fairs aren’t happening anytime soon. New York’s museums, with the glorious exception of MoMA, are still keeping the public out as much as they possibly can. Until the arts open full blast, New York’s going to hobble along, renowned for its skyrocketing crime rate and crazy homeless cohort rather than its cultural riches.

So, last week, I visited Smithfield, N.C., to see the Ava Gardner Museum (which I profiled last Saturday) and the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Reynolda House in Winston-Salem, and the art-museum and craft centers in eclectic, beautiful, and crunchy Asheville.

I saw some good European painting — Pieter Aertsen’s Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms, from 1551, at the NCMA is the best, earliest still-life painting, anywhere — but the zeitgeist in North Carolina is both American and not necessarily painting, or any flat art, but craft. And the materials aren’t paint and canvas but wood, the ubiquitous American material, clay, metal, and textile.

This makes sense. New York, Philadelphia, and Boston are closest to the big money and big art centers of Europe, and the rich and powerful in each emulated their counterparts from the Old World’s past. They saw themselves as the New World’s makers of taste, and that meant capturing the cultural triumphs of the Old World for our improvement.

However cavalier the South is to New England’s Roundheads, the South was, until recently, far poorer and more insular. Its aesthetics revolved around the practical and the handmade. Baskets, quilts, and ceramics were the South’s Lamerie silver, embroidery for kings and popes, and Meissen porcelain. Craft, which is art as much as painting or sculpture, is often simple and of the highest intricacy, reserved but emotionally rich, and prompting arias from ash, clay, and cotton. This is why the South, especially the Appalachian South, is the place to go for quintessentially American design.

New England disposed its Native American heritage far earlier and more thoroughly, so it absorbed next to nothing from it. New England didn’t have an African aesthetic influence, either. The New England look was London suburban, and New York’s was Dutch and then Georgian, Regency, and Victorian.

So, all week, Southern design and craft were very much on my mind, except for the constant insinuation of hot political campaigns in North Carolina. As you know, I write only about art and aesthetics. I thought about Middle Class Joe Biden even when I walked through the Mint Museum, one of the country’s best museums of craft and design. I’d just seen the presidential debate the night before. I heard dozens of political ads on the radio as I drove from place to place.

Biden will do another nationwide lockdown as quick as you can say, “China payoff.”

Plastic surgeons are designers, sculptors sometimes. Looking at Biden during the debate, I saw that he’s obviously had lots of work. It was a challenge at first to focus on all the good design at the Mint Museum given the memory of all that bad design.

You’d think with all those Chinese and Ukrainian bribes he’s gotten that Biden could afford the best. We don’t have a TV, so I miss the visuals, Praise the Lord, of popular culture and the news, but political faces are a bad art form in themselves, heavy on smarm and fake outrage. Biden’s has got to be the worst. During the debate, I studied it, stretched taut like a trampoline from one facelift too many, the hair plugs, and that fake, toothy smile as long and straight and white as a Steinway set of ivories. A smile unknown to nature, and the one thing about him that’s not crooked. He looks part buzzard, part carcass. He looks embalmed, too, but his face moves. How does that happen? Slime’s a lubricant, I guess.

Biden’s a swamp creature, and the Swamp in D.C. and all the Baby Swamps want nothing more than lockdowns. The power’s too intoxicating. Control is the Swamp’s favorite dope. Museums will close again, with good culture paralyzed for months more. Quarantining a healthy population has never successfully whipped a virus, in 5,000 years of human history. The Swamp is hubristic, though, and its top brass are all dullards.

At the Mint, I saw many good things that dislodged, eventually, the puzzlement of botched facelifts. Good design triumphs over bad.

The Mint Museum’s name is drawn from its initial home, once the regional U.S. Mint building. It was the state’s first art museum when it opened in 1936. I visited its uptown building, designed by the distinguished Boston architects Machado and Silvetti and opened in 2010. It’s a handsome, abstract pile with beautiful, spacious galleries over five floors. The spaces are inviting, comfortable, and various. As far as I can tell — the website needs to work on its institutional-history page — the building that once housed the Mint showcases its ceramics and fashion collection, both among the country’s best.

The uptown branch is called the Mint Museum of Craft + Design. I hate multi-branch museums. They are marketing nightmares and curatorially divisive. Fashion, which is indisputably art, is no less craft than a chair, yet it’s separated from the Mint’s contemporary wood, clay, and textile art. Special loan shows always should resonate with the permanent collection, and when these shows are in a different building, a conversation is impossible.

I only had time to visit the uptown building, which means that I will need to come back to beautiful, fun Charlotte. Not the end of the world, but unless there’s a compelling reason, and there’s none here, everything a museum does, including showing its collection, should happen in one place. In the old Mint building, there’s a show on Wedgwood basalt sculpture that sounds good, as well as the Mint’s fashion, old ceramics, and Native American art. Elitists will make multiple museum visits and cover two locations. Average people usually won’t. In a big museum, people will pick galleries to visit like a menu, but it’s important for all the choices to be there. I trust people to select the juxtapositions that make sense to them.

The special exhibitions were good, not deep but not dumbed-down, either. Vivid Color is a show about, well, vivid color and is what I call a “something to think about” exhibition. It’s about how color creates form and emotion. I liked it because the artists — Jennifer Steinkamp, Spencer Finch, Donald Sultan, Peter Halley, Jennifer Bartlett, among others — are all good, with attractive examples of their work.

A Crayola crayon grid was heartwarming. It’s like a periodic table of 220 Crayola colors with fun, nostalgic names like Goldenrod, Outer Space, and Banana Mania. Crayola has developed new colors and different sets of colors to respond to the times. This year, it released “Colors of the World,” 24 colors to reflect different skin tones. It’s not racist but racialist and, on one level, an eye-roller, but I don’t mind it because it’s a “something to think about” show.

Foragers, by Summer Wheat, is a special commission in the museum’s atrium. It’s part of the Vivid Color show. It’s color vinyl on mylar, four stories high, and about 3,700 square feet. It’s “a monumental tribute to all those anonymous female makers and laborers who have made North Carolina what it is today.” That’s imprecise, and I don’t see, as the artist tells us, “women supporting each other, marching together connecting to creatures from land and water, demonstrating their inherent link to natural elements and the intricate depths of the subconscious.”

That’s mostly incoherent, and what’s coherent about it is debatable. The object does have women in it, and it’s certainly a bold, beautiful work of art, but I see nothing in it suggesting the subconscious, fish and fowl, or marches anywhere, much less any impulse making “North Carolina what it is today.”

It’s best to ignore the gobbledygook and just look at Wheat’s work, which is good, and the grand Sheila Hicks wall hanging in the same space. Hicks is in her late 80s. Wheat is in her early 40s. Hicks is all about form and color — about aesthetics. Wheat’s too talented to allow her work to be hijacked by rhetoric with the taste and look of pablum, and pop pablum at that. It’s “I’ll tell you what you’re too dense to see” interpretation.

I enjoyed the Mint’s permanent craft and design galleries, called the “Ten Ten Ten” installation. It shows the work of ten artists in different media, and it opened in October, the tenth month, of 2010, when the Machado and Silvetti building opened. There’s some great work in clay, textiles, stone, metal, and wood, most, I believe, commissioned for the museum. I liked Albert Paley’s ecclesiastic-looking Cor-Ten steel chairs from 1992. Nacho Carbonell’s Wood Branches desk and chair from 2012 is both delirious and hysterical, furniture for a scholar on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I loved it.

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s Quilt Film Quilt is the cleverest work of art I’ve seen in a while. She’s a quilter who uses cut-up, old celluloid film as fabric, in this case a film on 19th-century women quilters made by the Fashion Institute of Technology. The clips she uses show women’s hands at work quilting. Her quilt’s displayed against a light box. I learned from the label that early movie cameras often used sewing-machine parts. Women who knew how to sew became early editors because of their skill in cutting and reassembling.

Some of the artists worked on their commissions in Charlotte. Icelandic Hildur Bjarnadottir made Urban Color Palette there in 2010, a textile of blocks made from the colors of the cityscape. Nancy Callan’s Spin, Weave, Gather, from 2018, is a group of glass wall plaques with linear designs evoking textiles, a big North Carolina medium. Both works are tough and strong. I like them so much because they’re not mealy-mouthed.

I have a few quibbles about these spaces. First, the Ten Ten Ten show feels like a temporary rather than permanent show. I’d call it “trends in 2010,” which would justify the arbitrariness of the artist selection but not the duration of its life with us. There’s no coherent theme except that somebody important liked ten artists coming from America, Ireland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Israel. I’m surprised the museum kept an inaugural show up for so long. It’s been refreshed by later work, but that doesn’t make it any more coherent.

Second, in the realm of curatorial malpractice, great three-dimensional work by Mark Lindquist, Kato Tsubasa, Kate Malone, and others is displayed against walls when it’s meant to be seen in the round. Third, the wall panels look beautiful, but the font, while thin, edgy, and cool, is hard to read. Good design has to be functional. It’s not an end to itself.

The Mint has a decent though undistinguished collection of paintings. They’re things it’s gotten along the way, largely from bequests and from the days when it was Charlotte’s all-purpose fine-arts museum. It’s almost all American. Grouse, from 1872, by Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins, is a superb dog painting. The dog’s name is Grouse, and it’s a great bust portrait. He’s a philosopher dog. I saw nice things by Ernest Lawson, John La Farge, Marsden Hartley, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and George Bellows. Romare Bearden is from Charlotte. There’s a room devoted to his work. There are big galleries for contemporary painting, and it’s mostly bad work.

The Mint is a craft and design museum, not a paintings museum, so I don’t know why it doesn’t sell most of its paintings and use the money to advance its core mission, which it does well. I have no objection to a board’s deciding it wants to change or recalibrate its mission.

During my trip, I saw three full-length paintings by Kehinde Wiley. Philip the Fair was at the Mint, on long-term loan. Wiley’s a one-shot artist. The label tells us that he “bestows the power and authority of Eurocentric painting onto his anonymous models who emphasize black masculinity and strength.” I agree, but that’s all Wiley does, and he does it over and over. He’s Mr. Same Thing. I wonder if he even paints the decorative wallpaper against which the figures live. That might be the work of studio assistants. He’s a high-fad artist, and that’s it. It’s why he was the right painter for Obama’s official White House portrait, and why the portrait expresses its subject so well.

The Mint’s a lively place, and I think children love it. Craft, and most three-dimensional art, is a great means of engaging kids in art. A basket, quilt, or table and chair are immediately accessible because they’re domestic objects, but, beyond that, children are quick to ask “How was this made?” — that’s an access point to big thinking about aesthetics.

The Mint does something I rarely see. It salutes its generous collector donors not only on the donor wall but in the galleries, in displays of work that collectors have given to the museum along with wall panels describing the donors and the inspiration behind their smart collecting. Wesley Mancini, for instance, gave some strong, handsome, indeed dazzling Kuba textiles. He’s an important textile designer in Charlotte. Corporate donors in Charlotte are recognized for their targeted gifts of money to buy art.

I like recognizing donors in a narrative way. It emphasizes the civic pride that thrives in Charlotte and that, over time, has made the Mint an international destination and a serious place to enjoy craft and design — the art that’s for everyone.