Two Selves on view at Mint Museum Randolph beginning March 5, 2025

By Annie Carlano

Rose B. Simpson is one of the most visionary artists of our time. She is the granddaughter of distinguished architect, potter, scholar and activist Rina Swentzell, daughter of the pioneering figurative ceramicist Roxanne Swentzell, and descended from generations of matriarchal ceramicists. Simpson still lives in Santa Clara Pueblo, a Tewa tribal community in northern New Mexico.

Two Selves is made of coiled red and yellow clay and is about duality. The two figures — an adult-sized armless character with firmly planted feet and a childlike creature with outstretched arms and restless legs — represent the difference between the centered and accepting state of being, and the frenetic and grasping state of doing. Both lie within us in an ongoing struggle for dominance.

Simpson has said that the making of her mixed-media works is a spiritual act, a healing process from centuries of colonial trauma and life in the post-colonial postmodern world. Once each sculpture leaves her studio, she believes it will find its intended home, a place that needs that specific work and the message it carries. To protect this sculpture on its journey from her studio to its destination, Two Selves is adorned with talismanic jewelry.

Simpson received a master’s degree in fine art from Rhode Island School of Design and a master’s degree in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her works are in many museum collections, including the Cleveland Museum of Art; Guggenheim, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and LACMA, Los Angeles. She was included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and in 2023, she was appointed to the board of trustees of the Institute of American Indian Arts by President Biden.

Annie Carlano, senior curator of Craft, Design & Fashion

Following a multiyear transformation, the African Art galleries reopen at Mint Museum Randolph

By Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD

The Mint’s African gallery reinstallation has been over five years in the making. When I joined the Mint as chief curator in July 2019, I saw my first challenge as how to overhaul important spaces for which the Mint did not have a curator on staff. I had accumulated a decade of art history classes, none touched Mesoamerican or African art, reflecting the Western focus prevalent in graduate programs at the time.

Post-graduate school, I sat in on classes at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte led by associate professor of art history Lisa Homann, PhD, to fill gaps in my knowledge and because I was fascinated by the stories she told and challenges she faced in her field. All research involves a bit of spy work, but for Africanists, there is barely any thread to grasp in the complicated trail of making and ownership. When I joined the Mint, I knew that she was the Africanist I would want to evaluate the work in the Mint’s existing African collection and guide the collection forward.

The transformed galleries reopened in February at Mint Museum Uptown. Homann combed the Mint’s files and assessed each work to develop the installation now on view. A notable new work is one commissioned from David Sanou, a Burkina Faso masquerade maker, that not only brings an exceptional work into the Mint’s collection but offers new ways to think about how museums can collect and display work historically handled by non-experts (me included), but that remains essential for cross-cultural understanding.

The growth of the collection

The Mint’s African Art collection began in 1975 with a few key pieces, including a rhinoceros-hide shield from the Bantu peoples and a granary door from the Senufo peoples. For many years, the museum relied on donors to shape the African Art collection. Early on, African works shared space with other collections at Mint Museum Randolph, which housed everything from Contemporary Art to Mesoamerican pieces.

As the collection grew, the focus on African art expanded. During the tenure of curator Michael Whittington (1993-2003), new works were added. Though African art was not his area of expertise, he worked with scholars and focused on pieces that complemented the Mint’s broader collections, like ceramics, creating unexpected connections across time and cultures. Occasionally, exceptional pieces with detailed ownership records came available. A rich and beautiful example is the Hunter’s style Shirt, which has been on view almost continuously since its purchase in 1999. It serves as a focus of Homann’s new African gallery installation.

Around 2012, Michael Gallis, a UNC Charlotte professor, collector, and Mint Board of Trustee, encouraged the museum to deepen its commitment to African art. With his support, the installation expanded from one gallery to two and included new works from his and other private collections, either given or loaned to the museum. To prepare for the reinstallation, Gallis helped the Mint host
a symposium, led by Herbert (Skip) Cole, PhD, from the University of California Santa Barbara, to discuss the importance of African art in museums and as a field of study. This resulted in the 2014 Mint publication “Art in the Many Africas,” along with new galleries installed by Cole.

As the field of African studies has exponentially grown over the last 10 years, and further attention to how Western (mis)perceptions have subjectively defined the field for centuries, the expectations around collecting and displaying works from Africa continue to change. Homann explores this in her reinstallation, which draws from the Mint’s permanent collection; the private collection of Michael Gallis; and Asif Shaikh, a collector recently relocated to Charlotte. This is a fluid field and the Mint will continue to work with Homann and others to share reconsiderations and evaluations as they arise.

Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD, is chief curator and curator of Contemporary Art at The Mint Museum.

Read more about recognizing provenance in the galleries.

Re-envisioned African Art installation offers deeper cultural insight and focus on provenance

By Lisa Homann, PhD

Art isn’t created in isolation — it is shaped by the time, place, and people who bring it to life. That is why art historians rely on provenance, or the history of an object’s ownership, to better understand its story. Who made it? Why? How did it travel from its place of origin to a museum display?

When it comes to African art, provenance often poses unique challenges. Many museums in the United States only have records about ownership of a work of art in Europe or North America but lack information about African ownership. Detailed African provenance is the exception rather than the rule. Many records are incomplete or based on speculation, creating ambiguity rather than understanding.

In curating The Mint Museum’s African Art galleries, the approach is intellectual honesty over authority. Without knowing the name of an individual artist, the term “Unrecorded Artist” is used rather than attributing a piece to an entire culture or region. If there’s uncertainty about a work’s origin, it is described by its style and words like “possibly” or “probably” to acknowledge the unknowns. Without clear answers about who made a piece, or when, where, and why it was created, the focus is put on the types of objects rather than specific ones in the galleries. This approach explores the broader cultural and social roles
the works played, recognizing their diverse styles, materials, and purposes.

Provenance spotlights

To highlight the varying levels of provenance information, “provenance spotlights” are now dispersed in each section throughout the galleries. These spotlights share what we do know about an object’s history. The spotlights range from no data for a figural sculpture before it was donated to The Mint Museum (the most common possibility) to one showing scraps of paper found with a ceremonial hunter’s shirt that bear the names of several individuals (see image on page 33), offering clues as to who may have previously owned the work.

One particularly exciting spotlight is a Kimi Masquerade Ensemble, commissioned specifically for the Mint in 2024. Artist David Sanou (and a bodymaker who requests anonymity) created the ensemble in Burkina Faso. Sanou chose the iconography and color palette of the entire ensemble and allowed me to document him carving the headpiece. It is a rare instance of an African work of art in an American museum with fully documented provenance.

My hope is that visitors will not only admire the imagination and virtuosity embodied by these works but also appreciate the honest approach to sharing what we know and what we don’t know about them as individual objects. 

Lisa Homann, PhD, is an associate professor of art history at UNC Charlotte and the guest curator of the reinstallation of the African galleries at Mint Museum Randolph.

The newest rotation in the museum’s Romare Bearden gallery — Ever Present: Romare Bearden and Music — celebrates the artist’s love of and long engagement with music. From his earliest paintings to his final collages, music was a recurring theme in Romare Bearden’s art. This selection of more than a dozen examples of Bearden’s work, drawn entirely from The Mint Museum’s rich holdings, highlights some of the many ways he explored musical subjects in drawings, prints, and collages.

Music was a foundational part of Bearden’s life. His father, Howard, was a pianist and organist, and other members of his extended family had musical talents as well. A grand piano enlivened their apartment in Harlem, which was visited by a variety of musicians who were close friends of the family, including Fats Waller and Duke Ellington. One of Bearden’s memories of visiting relatives in Maryland as a teenager involved delivering cakes made by a family friend accompanied by her husband, a blind folk artist, who strummed a guitar as they made their rounds.

Bearden also enjoyed listening to music while he worked and likened the process of making art to that of playing jazz: “You do something, then you improvise,” he would say.

In this installation, many types of musical performances are featured, ranging from impromptu porch jam sessions to the immersive world of clubs and lounges. Sometimes the instruments and performers are easy to identify; in others the visual equivalent of the sounds and experiences they are creating is more prominent, abstracting the scene.

The installation also includes an example of Bearden’s own talent as a composer in the sheet music and record for the hit  song “Seabreeze” (1954) that he composed with Larry Douglas and Fred Norman. Visitors can scan a QR code and listen to the tune in the gallery. —Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD, senior curator of American Art 

By Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD

One of the things that I enjoy most as a curator is discovering and learning about artists and works of art that are new to me, and then sharing what I’ve found with museum visitors. The exhibition Southern/Modern is the result of this curiosity. 

While the South’s contributions to American literature and music during the first half of the 20th century have long been recognized, the region’s visual arts have remained underappreciated. A curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art famously scoffed in 1949, “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.” To date there have been very few major exhibitions to survey the region’s art, and none that have focused on the modern period during which the South has traditionally been seen, as noted by The Met’s curator, as a kind of artistic backwater.

The inception of an exhibition

While the general public likely does not consider the time it takes to bring a special exhibition to life, the fact is that most are the product of years of behind-the-scenes work. This can involve visits to other museums and private collections, preparing grant applications, creating object checklists, drafting loan requests, working with authors and publishers, and more — and that’s all before the art even arrives in the building! A typical exhibition containing numerous loans like Southern/Modern likely takes a minimum of three to four years to develop. Southern/Modern, however, has been in the works for over a decade!

I began thinking about this exhibition in 2008 as I got to know the Mint’s collection in depth in preparation for its reinstallation at the soon-to-open Mint Museum Uptown. As I dug into the Mint’s holdings and began to meet other colleagues at museums in the region, I found myself constantly surprised to encounter outstanding works of art by artists from the South who I had not heard of and who were not part of the mainstream history of American art. I thought that the best way to share this knowledge would be to organize an exhibition that brought together the best of this work, which had been studied and exhibited within the region but not benefitted from being brought together and seen as a whole.

To ensure that we were creating an inclusive and comprehensive survey, co-curator Martha Severens and I crowdsourced colleagues across the Southeast asking for feedback on our initial checklist to see what was missing. We also decided that while the majority of the artists in the exhibition lived, worked, and taught in the South, it also would be important to include the work of others from outside the region who created meaningful bodies of work based on their experiences and time in the South, such as Thomas Hart Benton, Jacob Lawrence, and Eldzier Cortor. We also included artists like Romare Bearden, who left the South at an early age but whose work consistently referred to his memories and experiences in the South. With many conversations and a great deal of research, Southern/Modern came together. 

While some of the work in Southern/Modern shows artists engaging with modernism by pushing their works towards simplification of form, bold coloration, and ultimately abstraction, many of the artists focused on addressing topics relevant to the era. Their works were “modern” in the progressive sense of calling attention to contemporary issues and often advocating for social change. Race, gender, urban growth, industrial development, land use and the environment, religion, family, social change, class differences … all of these topics can be found throughout the exhibition.

The exhibition not only depicts life in the South then, but makes apparent how relevant these same issues in the South are today. It features 100 paintings, prints, and drawings, gathered from over 50 public and private collections, which are significant for both their artistic merit and subject matter. We hope that after visiting Southern/Modern you will have a better appreciation for the powerful art created in the South during the first half of the 20th century and be inspired to think more about your own relationship to the South and what it means to be a “modern” Southerner in 2024.

Southern/Modern is generously presented in Charlotte by Wells Fargo and the Dowd Foundation. Major support for the tour and exhibition catalogue are provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Betsy and Alfred Brand Fund at The Mint Museum. Individual sponsorship is kindly provided by Julie Boldt and Dhruv Yadav, Lucy and Hooper Hardison, Posey and Mark Mealy, and Rocky and Curtis Trenkelbach.

Jonathan Stuhlman, PhD, is the senior curator of American Art at The Mint Museum.

This article originally appeared in the fall 2024 issue of Inspired magazine, the Mint’s member magazine.

By Page Leggett

Jackie Milad’s cultural identity informs her art. The Baltimore-based artist paints and collages large-scale, mixed-media abstracts that explore her Egyptian-Honduran heritage.

Before becoming a full-time artist, she worked as a curator and ran an art gallery. Her ties to Charlotte — a city she says “charmed” her — are many. The Mint Museum and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture have exhibited her work, she had a 2021 residency at the McColl Center, and is represented in the Queen City by SOCO Gallery.

On her first visit to the Mint during her residency at the McColl Center, she was “blown away by the curatorial work,” she says. “Having worked in that world, I’m always interested in curatorial decisions. I was really impressed with Jennifer [Sudul] Edwards’ artistic selections and the writing on the text panels. I knew I wanted to meether.”

As for Milad’s schedule, it varies daily. She might go to an artist’s talk, visit a museum or library, or make studio visits to learn about other artists’ processes.

What she does outside the studio changes, but her time in the studio is consistent.

“I adhere to a strict work schedule,” she says. “I didn’t always. When I had a full-time job, I’d work on art when I could find the time. Today, I work on art in my studio. And at home, I’m focused on my family.”

Inspiration often comes during a walk. The texture of tree bark that catches her eye may show up in her work, as will something she learned from the research she does in her studio. Like a French flâneur, Jackie walks to observe and be inspired.

“I try to be in the world with an open mind and open heart,” she says. “When I’m in that mode, a lot more is revealed to me. I’m a better observer. And being a keen observer is important to my success in the studio.”

5:45 AM The dogs — a greyhound and a whippet — wake my husband, Tom Boran, and me before our alarm goes off. Tom walks them while I “sleep in” until 6 AM.

6 AM I go downstairs and make a cup of matcha. When Tom comes home from his walk, he makes his coffee.
We sit in the dark together, drinking our caffeine and listening to music.

6:45 AM Things start to happen faster after a leisurely start to our day. Tiero, my 12-year-old son, comes downstairs for his breakfast. I make his lunch and Tom usually takes him to school.

7:30–9 AM I get my stuff done. I shower and make breakfast, which usually consists of a boiled egg with salt and pepper and sometimes hot sauce and a piece of toast or yogurt with homemade granola — I make it with peanut butter and chocolate chips — and lots of fruit. I keep it simple in the morning.

When I have time, I’ll take a 30 to 40-minute walk. In northeast Baltimore, we have lots of green space, old trees and a lake and park close by. Walking, whether in nature or on city streets, always resets my brain.

Once I’m home, I take care of replying to emails and other administrative things. I don’t have Wi-Fi at my studio, so I have to deal with it at home. I pack my lunch — usually leftovers from the night before. I’m lucky that my husband does all the cooking in our family.

9:30ish AM I leave for my studio, which is about a 20- minute drive from home. It’s quite an improvement over my previous commute. It could take up to an hour each way.

It is 800 square feet and housed in a 100-year-old former factory. We have old hardwood floors and big windows in a building where a lot of other artists have their studios, which is nice. Adjacent to the building are lots of trees, which is pretty unusual in the city. I have a great view of them from my window. And there’s a big park right next to the studio where I often walk. If you walk just a few miles from my studio, you’ll end up at the Maryland Zoo.

I don’t jump in to making art immediately, unless I left the studio the day before in the middle of a process. I’ll write in my journal, research, read. I’m especially interested in archaeology and history, and my reading on those subjects often influences my art.

Music plays a big part in my life, and I’m always listening while working. My husband is a musician, as well as a digital media artist, and he’s exposed me to so many genres. My eclectic playlist has everything from Puerto Rican dance music to heavy metal from the 1980s to more contemplative music.

Before I can start painting, there’s prep work to do. I prepare surfaces, cut scrap material, pick scraps of paper or fabric to use in my collages. I like working on several pieces at the same time.

I’m very active while working. I don’t just sit at my desk or an easel. I’m moving around a lot.

4 OR 4:30 PM I pick up my son from school. He’s generally stayed late to play squash or tennis.

5:30 PM Now, it’s my turn to walk our dogs. Tom makes dinner, while I do home stuff, which often includes helping Tiero with homework. And we always eat dinner together as a family. All three of us love movies and TV, and we’ll usually watch something together after dinner.

9:30 or 10 PM We both read in bed before we fall asleep, but I don’t do the kind of reading I do at my studio. Reading at home is all about escapism. I’ll read dumb fiction. Recently, it was a book called “Godslayer” — or something like that — pure escapist fantasy.

8 PM Tiero heads upstairs to read in bed. He’s usually asleep by 9 PM. Tom and I talk, catch up on our days. Because we’re such early risers, we also go to bed early.

Page Leggett is a Charlotte-based freelance writer. Her stories have appeared in The Charlotte Observer, The Biscuit, Charlotte magazine and many other regional publications.

Franklin Fifth Helena

‘A FANTASTICAL IMAGING OF THE INTERTWINED LIVES OF MOVIE ICON MARILYN MONROE AND HER PSYCHOANALYST DR. RALPH GREENSON’

By Jen Sudul Edwards

On November 4, 2022, Mint Museum Uptown opened a new major acquisition to the collection: Franklin Fifth Helena by Brooklyn-based artist Cynthia Talmadge.

An 8-by-11-foot room built within the gallery, the installation is comprised of sand-painted wall panels and a ceiling that create a fantastical imaging of the intertwined lives of the movie icon Marilyn Monroe and her psychoanalyst Dr. Ralph Greenson. The result is mesmerizing and surprising in every way: the sand — intricately mixed by hand and meticulously applied to the surface with fine paintbrushes— mimics the precise color studies of 19th-century Impressionists and Pointillists while utilizing a simple commercial material (Talmadge often buys her sand in bulk from wedding supply companies).

The recognizable objects layer and interact to create an imagined narrative about the relationship between Monroe and Greenson, who treated Monroe at the end of her life. While very specific in her references, Talmadge also explores the complicated ramifications of the cult of personality, the patient-doctor relationship, and how all of these affect the limited power and agency granted to women in this country.

Talmadge’s gallery, 56 Henry, arranged for outside donors to support the acquisition of the work by The Mint Museum, but the on-site build was extensive and complicated. The Mint’s architect-of-record, Aubrey Springer, oversaw the construction and permit process, which required additional lights and sprinkler systems to be installed to meet code, as well as extensive coordination with the Mint’s building staff, the Collections and Exhibitions team, 56 Henry, and Talmadge — who came to Charlotte for a week in October to help with the installation.

Learn more Talmadge and her fascinating and complicated process in the video below, generously underwritten by Aaron and Marie Ligon who are helping the Mint further build a competitive and compelling contemporary art collection.

Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD, is chief curator and curator of contemporary art.

Summer Wheat’s monumental Foragers underscores the Mint’s ongoing commitment to women artists, perspectives historically underrepresented in museums

By Michael J. Solender

Uptown visitors meet with a fresh sensory experience this fall as Mint Museum Uptown reopens its doors following the Covid-mandated lockdown. As guests enter the towering glass-paneled Robert Haywood Morrison Atrium, they’re enveloped in warm jewel-toned light bathing the space of the new 96-panel “stained glass” installation Foragers by contemporary American artist Summer Wheat.

And while the quiet beauty of hand-drawn, collaged and placed colored vinyl panels encourage many to slow their pace and reflect in the grandeur, the imagery of strong, powerful women, taking on traditional male roles of hunters and providers, makes a clear and confident statement—women are represented on their own terms, making vital contributions.

The messaging is not accidental. Wheat’s work is deliberate in pushing back on gender objectification and unidimensional portrayal often depicted in museum collections. “Histories we tell, and the histories told to us are never really true,” Wheat says, her slight Oklahoma drawl elongating her cadence. “They’re only telling one side of the story, and there’s a lot that’s left out.”

Wheat, a mid-career artist whose work has been displayed in museums only within the past few years, is bucking a trend unfavorable to women. Just 11 percent of all acquisitions and 14 percent of exhibitions at 26 prominent American museums over the past decade were of work by female artists, according to a recent study by art market information company Artnet.

Recognizing this historical underrepresentation of women’s voices on public display, the Mint is leading the way to better balance the scales. “We have a strong community partner and advocate in Wells Fargo whose values align so closely with the museum on this important social and cultural issue,” says Todd Herman, Mint Museum President & CEO, “Something  we really admire and treasure in the relationship we’ve had with Wells Fargo is they collaborate with us and push us further in ways that make the community better. Their Women Artist Fund and their support of our Foragers installation is a wonderful example of that.”

Charlotte knows Wells Fargo as a significant community partner and stalwart investor in our region’s diversity and success. Their foundation focuses on projects and innovation at the community level such as awareness and social change, increasing housing affordability, and access to capital for businesses. Last year, they contributed more than $14 million in support of projects and programing in the Charlotte region. In addition to programmatic work with quantitative measure, like the number of low-income individuals placed into safe and affordable housing, a component of the foundation’s work focuses on bringing perspectives and understanding to social issues through the arts.

“As company, we’re one of the largest small business lenders to women owned businesses,” says Jay Everette, Wells Fargo’s senior vice president of philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. “With the arts and culture sector of our [philanthropic] work, we realize putting a focus on female artists helps elevate and escalate women’s voices through promoting their artwork. Not only is Foragers a significant work by an important female artist, it’s also public art that anybody can come in and access without having to pay a fee.”

It was the Mint Museum’s 80^th anniversary celebration and the 2016 Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition that served as a catalyst for the formation of the Wells Fargo Foundation Women Artist Fund according to Everette. “We were beginning to formulate some of the strategies on this and through the exhibition discovered there were a group of other women artists leading the way in the movement.  But they did not have gallery representation. They were not being picked up by museums after the abstract expressionist movement.”

Inspired, the Wells Fargo Foundation set about to address and help reconcile the imbalance of female representation in museum collections. “The Women Artist Fund was established three years ago, and we’ve been successful in helping to place and acquire seminal pieces of art in permanent museum collections across North Carolina,” says Everette. Other museums benefiting from the program include the Cameron Museum of Art in Wilmington, The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, and The Blowing Rock Art Museum in Blowing Rock.

Admirers of Summer Wheat’s Foragers, on display through September 6, 2022, will be pleased to note that through the generosity of The Wells Fargo Foundation Women Artist Fund, the artist’s work With Side, With Shoulder, a large painting where Wheat’s technique extrudes paint through wire mesh, has been acquired for the Mint’s permanent collection.

Mary Myers Dwelle, one of the Mint’s female founders would undoubtedly be pleased.

Foragers is part of the exhibition In Vivid Color: Pushing the Boundaries of Perception in Contemporary Art that opens Oct. 16 at Mint Museum Uptown.

Michael J. Solender is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, American City Business Journals, Metropolis Magazine, Business North Carolina, the Charlotte Observer, and others. He develops custom content and communications for businesses and organizations.