60 Years of the Department of Art and Art History – University of North Carolina Charlotte

August 2, 2024 - November 9, 2025

Mint Museum Uptown

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2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Department of Art & Art History.

Before 1964, aspiring artists in the city took classes at Mint Museum Randolph. Because of its history as both a museum and an educational site, the Mint has continued a close relationship with UNCC faculty and students over the decades.

As a result, the Mint’s permanent collection has extensive holdings of UNCC-connected artists, a selection of which is shown here. Over the half-century, the department’s faculty and students have incorporated all manner of making, not shying away from difficult subject matter. TJ Reddy arrived shortly after the department was founded. While he double-majored in history and sociology, not art, Reddy’s political engagement at UNCC— he helped found the Black Student Union and the Africana Studies Department—inform his artmaking as much as a painting class would have. In the early 1970s, printmaking student Marianne Lieberman incorporated second-wave feminism and pro-choice messages in her etchings and lithographs; painting professor Maud Gatewood included her lover Molly in her domestic scenes, creating an aesthetic that UNCC Professor Jim Frakes describes as “queer restraint.” In the 1980s, Rod MacKillop and Richard Stenhouse’s urban surreality captured Charlotte’s growing pains as a corporate center trying to grow a cultural heart. North Carolina’s craft legacy appears in Edwina Bringle’s weaving and the ceramics of Tom Mason and Roy Strassberg. David Brodeur and Maud Gatewood composed social criticism using the visual language of popular culture. Similarly, current faculty Maja Godlewska explores how that vernacular is evolving with social media and its continued control over how we navigate the world from the landscape to beauty standards.

Jim Frakes helps mark department’s 60th year with multiple exhibits

Professor Chronicles History of UNC Charlotte Arts Department

This exhibition which honors six decades of work from staff and alumni of the UNC Charlotte arts department’s, will be on display through November. His goal for the recent exhibits was to demonstrate what’s at stake, get the community more involved, and show appreciation to past faculty and alumni.

“I wanted to make sure that our retired faculty understood that they were remembered, and not just because they had been here, but because they did work that still matters,” he said.

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