I came across the Art Digest article in our file on the painting, and was surprised that little had been written on Harpo as an art collector. I had always loved the Marx Brothers (and highly recommend “Duck Soup” (1933) to the readers of this blog), but had never thought of any of them as the “gallery gazing” type. My curiosity was sparked, and I set out to find out more about Harpo’s collection. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking to Harpo’s son, Bill Marx, about his father’s interest in art.

LF: I’m curious to hear more about the Benton painting. It was in your family for so long, I’m guessing that you have some stories about it.

WM: Not really. There weren’t really stories. Dad and Mom were collectors, and they happened to consider Benton an important artist at the time. They collected—eclectically I might add—they had everything from Benton to Dalí to George Grosz and early LeRoy Neiman. Basically, they were interested in American artists.

LF: In your book, Son of Harpo Speaks!, you mention that your father painted as well. Could you tell me a little more about that?

WM: Dad started painting when he was in his thirties, and then he stopped painting because he had a lot of work. And then he had a heart attack, so went back to painting again and he painted numerous, numerous paintings for hospitals and charities. His stuff is all over the country. He went back to performing again, and then he had his second heart attack, and so he went back to painting. I do feel that it was a lifesaver for Dad. He would go into his studio for seven hours, and come out, and just had the best time. He had to have a creative outlet, and so he was pretty much always involved in the arts. He was painting all the way up to the very end.

LF: In your father’s autobiography, Harpo Speaks!, he mentions that he met Salvador Dalí. Do you know if he ever met Thomas Hart Benton when he was out in Hollywood?

WM: Now I can’t speak to that. Hang on. I’m going to send you something that will knock your socks off.

While still on the phone, Bill began emailing me images from his own personal archive—newspaper clippings about Harpo’s purchase of the painting, family photos of the work hanging over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo,” and (what really knocked my socks off!) a pen & ink study for the painting that Benton had sent to Harpo after the sale. The drawing was one of a series that Benton had made for a Kansas City newspaper to document a devastating 1937 flood.

Spring on the Missouri over the fireplace at “El Rancho Harpo.”

Before my e-mail to Bill, he had not known where the painting ended up (it had been sold after Harpo’s death in 1964) and he was delighted that it had found a home in a museum. Since its acquisition by the NCMA in 1977, Spring on the Missouri has become a favorite stop for visitors and school groups in our American art galleries. (I’ve noticed that on tours this work is the one that really gets people talking. The picture tells a story, and visitors—school children in particular, though adults as well—want to tell you what they think that story is.)

WM: That’s phenomenal. I never knew where it went, and to have kids come in and benefit from Benton’s extraordinary ability, it warms my heart. It keeps the world from going crazy.

To learn more about Harpo’s collection or to see examples of his own paintings, visit Bill’s website at “Harpo’s Place”.

Laura Fravel, GSK Curatorial Fellow

When I first visited 0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art as it was being installed, it was a spare group of seemingly incongruent works. It was impossible yet to understand their conversation. I was struck by Lisa Hoke’s organic wall covering, emerging from itself in radiating curls and waves. Kyoung Ae Cho‘s woven pieces, made from silk from corn stalks, were lovely and meditative and focused.

Walking into the installation the following week was a surprise and a joy. Most of the pieces had arrived, and the works were beginning to speak to one another and to me. On my third visit, the exhibition was open to the public, and the show’s message was fully realized.

In the first room are Tim Hawkinson‘s clocks. The old banana peel that ticks struck me as humorous and a bit melancholy, as did the candle with the moving wick. My favorite of his pieces is the medicine cabinet. Each item—an open lotion bottle, dental floss, deodorant—keeps time. Each is disposable, without value, devoid of the preciousness and sentimentality that we attach to so many possessions. But these charming little timepieces speak strongly, advocating the smallest things, showing us how our temporary, quotidian belongings tell the story of us and are keepers of our time. And I loved peeking around back to see the wires and mechanisms that power Hawkinson’s delicate timepieces.

In the next room is Beth Lipman‘s newly installed tower of glass objects, called Bride. It projects solidity despite the fragility of the glass. It held me in both a timeless and a very present space. Because the objects are clear glass, they exist in a fantasy world that cannot be touched, a crystal-magic world of memories and remembered dreams. It is fantasy, but it draws the fantasy out of personal experience. We are responsible for giving the piece meaning, but it happens effortlessly, unconsciously. It’s partially inspired by paintings at the NCMA, and we are very fortunate to have this work joining our permanent collection.

Nearby are Dan Estabrook’s small works on paper. They walk a line between delicate and aggressive. Like mementos or found relics, they hold a dream world’s sense of time and place. They remind me of Dali, with their dreamy surrealism and utter lack of self-consciousness, but the muted and antique tones make them seem like the dreams of people long gone rather than the dreams of the artist.

David Shapiro‘s work is a revealing and piecemeal self-portrait. He saved each receipt and ticket that he got over the course of a year, and then meticulously replicated each one by hand on vellum. It is a type of self-portrait, but it is also universal. He has devoted an exhaustingly large effort to turning average parts of everyday life into art. In another example of tedious and immense effort, Peter Matthews created his works by wading in the ocean for six to 16 hours a day and drawing and writing on a waterproof board whatever came to his mind. The intimate and idiosyncratic worlds he creates are most solitary and an indistinguishable map of one man’s mind.

The exhibition took a turn for me with Do-Ho Suh‘s vinyl house. As I approached, it didn’t particularly grab my attention, but once I walked inside, the exact reproduction of the artist’s first studio apartment in New York City grabbed my heart. It is sweet—not at all in a syrupy way, but in a thoughtful, loving, gentle way. It is not a replica of a house or an apartment. It is a home. It is not our home, but it very much carries the feeling of being our own. And this home can be disassembled, packed into a suitcase, and taken with you. There is a lot of soul in this piece, and it is lovely.

Next I walked under Lisa Hoke’s now-fleshed-out carnival of colors and was struck by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Last Breath. This breathing machine takes a person’s single breath and recycles and perpetuates it as long as the work is left on. It so moved me, the idea of taking something as personal as a breath and keeping it eternally. The work made me think about the obsessiveness and madness of wanting to hold on to the people we love, and the pain caused by the lingering in some untouchable form after they are gone. Next to this piece is Lozano-Hemmer’s The Year’s Midnight, which I found dark and funny and intriguing.

From here I moved into the last room of the show. It hit me with the full (but quiet) force of the exhibition’s depth and weight. Caetano de Almeida’s pollution drawings are a beautiful and horrifying record of time, the patterns created by leaving stencils on paper on the artist’s balcony in Sao Paolo, the air pollution coloring the paper outside of the stencils. They are evidence of the thoughtless and irreversible scar we ourselves have left on time. David K. Chatt‘s beaded objects are full of melancholy and longing. A stack of letters is sewn into a net of glass beads, bound by padlock, with the key sitting just beneath, rendered inaccessible by the pretty white beads that trap all of the objects. Finally: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s pile of candy. It is sad, and also generous, and touching. Mortality and immortality collide and contradict one another. Taking a piece can feel greedy and destructive, but mostly it feels like a gift, and humbling.

Being acquainted with the artists and their work before the exhibition did not prepare me for what each piece, taken together and as a whole, would say. Time touches and works on us each in a different way. Yet these artists have found a way to harness their unique relationship with time and create experiences that can be understood by all. I found 0 to 60 melancholy, and also gentle and hopeful and universal. I hope it is as pleasant and rewarding an experience for you as it was for me.

Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

If you have seen Beyoncé’s video for “Run the World (Girls),” you may remember her holding two hyenas on a chain.

She’s making reference to Hugo and his series The Hyena & Other Men. Hugo’s fascination with the “Hyena Men” came about after a friend e-mailed a picture he had taken of a man walking a hyena on a chain in Lagos, Nigeria. The men, called “Gadawan Kura” (rough translation: “hyena guides”), were surrounded by myth and mystery and largely assumed to be drug dealers, bodyguards, thieves, and debt collectors. In fact they are itinerant performers who tame and work with hyenas, monkeys, and rock pythons to entertain and to sell traditional medicine. They are all related, and the tradition is passed down generation to generation. Through a journalist friend and a Nigerian reporter, Hugo was put in contact with the Gadawan Kura, who agreed to let Hugo travel with them for eight days. Two years later, with the project feeling unresolved, Hugo returned to Nigeria and took more photos. These images are more intimate, more informal, and reflect the trust and understanding the artist had developed with the hyena guides two years earlier and maintained over the interim.

Hugo’s fascination with the men and their relationship with the animals—at times doting, at times brutal—led to this series. It was this paradoxical relationship, and not the spectacle that surrounded their performances, that led to Hugo’s portraits. Thematically, Hugo explores the hybridization of the urban and the wild; the interplay of dominance, submission, and codependence; and the fraught relationship we have with ourselves, nature, and animals. In his text on the series, Hugo writes:

When I asked Nigerians, “How do you feel about the way they treat animals,” the question confused people. Their responses always involved issues of economic survival. Seldom did anyone express strong concern for the well-being of the creatures. Europeans invariably only ask about the welfare of the animals, but this question misses the point. Instead, perhaps, we could ask why these performers need to catch wild animals to make a living. Or why they are economically marginalized. Or why Nigeria, the world’s sixth largest exporter of oil, is in such a state of disarray.

The NCMA has been fortunate enough to have one of Hugo’s hyena photos, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, on long-term loan. You can see it in the Modern and Contemporary Galleries in West Building.

Beyoncé’s use of the Hyena Men imagery raises questions about appropriation and exploitation, for the Gaduwan Kura and Pieter Hugo were never credited or compensated. The artist has said this about the singer’s video: “I don’t particularly like the Beyoncé song. It all seems so derivative—the music, the imagery … I’m sure the Hyena Men are wondering if they’re going to get paid!”

As for Beyoncé, she has released a statement acknowledging her use of “references” in her videos and stating, “I’ve always been fascinated by the way contemporary art uses different elements and references to produce something unique.”

Whatever your feelings on plagiarism, exploitation, and pop culture, I’m pretty sure we can all agree on the awesomeness of the original. We also have a second Hugo photograph, Naasra Yeti, from his series Permanent Error. It is equally as arresting, stirring, and beautiful. Come by and see them. You won’t be disappointed.

P.S. The New Yorker wrote about it first. So did The Guardian.

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

Image: Pieter Hugo, Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Ogere-Remo, Nigeria, 2007, chromogenic print, On loan from the collection of Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez

I’ve loved Nevelson since I was a kid, having seen her work in museums in Washington, D.C., particularly the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Nevelson’s balance of order and chaos—many different things contained within definite rectangles—always appealed to me. It seemed like a good way of thinking about aesthetic composition, history or politics, or even personal situations. Nevelson makes sense to me as a visualization of analytical thinking, which I equate to beauty.

Thank goodness Nevelson never used color. Black Zag CC is a uniform flat black. Her works are always monochrome—black, white, gold, even some clear Lucite. Color moves shadow into secondary consideration, and shadow is crucial to Nevelson’s boxes. Shadow conveys the tension between presentation and concealment, as well as whatever ambiguous intermediate levels she can establish between those poles. These are the compositional components of her sculpture, whether it’s freestanding or on the wall like this piece.

Black Zag CC comprises six rectangular areas, or boxes. Each is easily recognizable as a discrete element, although some protrude into or overlap the others slightly. But it’s not a tile game—you can’t imagine them rearranged. The particular box at the center must be the center box. This is a strictly composed work.

Still, I love how this piece divides neatly in several different ways according to how I choose to look at it. A modularity of vision, not of composition.

I can see it as having two parts. There’s the typecase on the right side, with its intense internal detail, largely presenting the shadows of its grid. So the rest of the piece becomes unified into one image, its convex faces reflecting light, conveying their flatness. The typecase seems like what’s inside all the other boxes, as if it’s been opened to reveal its inner workings. Only the very center of the work shows a compromise—a thin rectangular frame that echoes the fundamental unit of the typecase, floating atop a curved, 100 percent black depth.

Another way of seeing two parts is to concentrate on that central box. It images a camera, with the thin rectangular frame becoming the aperture and a set of vertical ribs in the shadows of the box becoming a large-format camera’s bellows. The five perimeter boxes almost become photographs of different subjects, spit out from the center like Polaroids.

From either of those dualities, I can then see the piece as having three parts. The complexity of the upper left area emerges as singular, with the protruding frame, the dangling, miniature column, and the secondary frame of a chair’s back. Certainly there are more levels behind even the chair back. It recedes almost infinitely.

And can I just say, I love the dangling miniature column. Is it the later “addition” to the work that the wall text mentions? I cannot get enough of the column. It bothers me that I can’t get down to its scale; I can’t get my vision in behind it to see what the back of it looks like. What a brilliant decision, to put a small dangling thing in this work, and to frame it so that it doesn’t simply protrude off the front and draw attention to itself as compositionally contrary to the rest of the work. It’s the only part of the work on the scale of one’s hand. Everything else is for the eye. But the column would fit neatly into your hand. You could carry it around. It wants touch, not gaze.

Once I am this far into the components of a few of the boxes, it’s easy enough to just decide to see all six boxes individually. The wonderful lower left box that looks like two vertical doors sliding open to allow a figure to step through. Its figure’s outline abstractly feminine—a skirt and a breast. The box captures a moment of excitement, a verge, an emergence, a single frame of a film. Then there’s the central lower box, playing organic leaf or frond forms across a background wall or lath. The play of curved line against straight line brings these two lower boxes together.

The central upper box becomes a cipher. It’s the least interesting box, on its own, but it anchors the others. They can seem to radiate out from it, since its two curves mimic a sun and a sky. Perhaps it’s a nod to landscape as the one underlying visual metaphor for all art.

Some of Nevelson’s body of work is overtly metaphorical or deals with gender norms, like Dawn’s Wedding Chapel. But I see this midcareer Black Zag CC as a sheer study in her compositional approach. How she decides to put this next to that, and how she builds different modes of correspondence between proximate things—the complexity just turns me on. It sounds stupid, but I get a little breathless sitting in front of it.

That complexity of thought, to me, is beauty. And it’s why I visit Black Zag CC whenever I can.

— Chris Vitiello is an arts and performance writer based in Durham.

Image: Louise Nevelson, Black Zag CC, 1964–71, final addition 1977, painted wood construction with fabricated, found, and bought elements; wire and metal hardware; and Formica frame, H. 48 x W. 59 x D. 9 in., Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina State Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest)

Looking out across the Grand Canal, I’m reminded of two landscape paintings at the NCMA: Capriccio: The Rialto Bridge and The Church of S. Giorgio Maggiore (circa 1750) by Canaletto and Venice without Water, June 12, 1990 by Donald Sultan. Both depict the Rialto Bridge yet evoke completely different emotional responses. Canaletto painted a postcard-worthy fantasy to “sell” the city to visitors. His painting appears realistic, but the historic landmarks shown beside the bridge are actually located in different areas of Venice (think Photoshop, 1750s-style). North Carolina artist Donald Sultan takes a much different approach in his work. His foreboding, tar-splattered image of the Rialto Bridge (based on a 1990 newspaper photo of the bridge over a waterless canal) reads more like an environmental awareness PSA, showing us the barren wasteland that a city known for its beautiful canals could become if changes aren’t made to maintain its waterways.

Each artist, in his own way, distorts the reality of this architectural symbol of Venice and of the city itself. But what is the reality? I can only answer for myself. My reality here feels like a dream. Layers of peeling paint and rusty watermarks on vacant, flooded buildings are not signs of deterioration. To me, they’re magic; they’re tactile symbols of the passage of time. Without the distraction of “real life,” I’m free to find beauty in every detail, whether it’s a rare sculpture on display at the Salvador Dalí exhibition or the sock-and-shirt-shaped shadows dancing on the wall behind a clothesline.

Visiting a city so rich in history and art makes me wonder: isn’t “real” art almost always a distortion of reality to some degree? And this distortion—which I like to view as the artist’s interpretation—seems to be the very thing that makes us stop, lean in, and take a closer look.

These two landscape paintings are featured together in Art of Game Design, an online course we’ve developed in collaboration with the North Carolina Virtual Public School to empower high school students to make real-world connections between works of art at the Museum, commercial advertising media, and game design. These paintings are also featured side by side in the Museum’s European Galleries in West Building.

—Cindy Byrd Yandle is writer and editor for the NCMA’s teen and college programs.

Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), Capriccio: The Rialto Bridge and The Church of S. Giorgio Maggiore, circa 1750, oil on canvas, 66 x 45 in., Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina

Donald Sultan, Venice without Water, June 12, 1990, 1990, butyl rubber, acrylic paint, and plaster on vinyl composite tiles, mounted on four Masonite panels, 96 x 96 in., Purchased with funds from the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Art Trust Fund

This loan is one in a series of paintings Warhol made by screen-printing the image of Elvis Presley 28 times onto a roll of silver-painted canvas in different combinations—singles, doubles, triples, and superimposed images. He created the work for a show at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1963 and sent the entire roll of printed canvas with a set of variously sized stretchers to the gallery. He left it up to the gallery to cut the canvas to fit the stretchers, resulting in five single images, six superimposed images, and two diptychs of paired images, including this one. Melding high and low, Warhol used a mechanical silkscreening process to make these works, intentionally creating what he called “an assembly-line effect.” He presents Elvis life-size and dressed as a cowboy (from a publicity still for the 1960 movie Flaming Star) and multiplies his star power by four.

Image: Andy Warhol, Elvis I and II, 1963; 1964 (?), silkscreen ink and spray paint (silver canvas), silkscreen ink and acrylic (blue canvas) on linen, 208.3 x 208.3 cm (each of two panels), Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Gift from the Women’s Committee Fund, 1966, © 2012 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Don’t miss a special Art in the Evening celebrating Elvis I and II on Friday, January 11, at 6 pm.

This time around artist Lydia Anne McCarthy created three images in conjunction with the Still Life Masterpieces exhibition. McCarthy, a graduate of the UNC–Chapel Hill MFA program, spent the past year living and working in Sweden. Her desire to return to Sweden, to the people, culture, and landscape that she fell in love with, informs the billboards she created. The work is an homage to her time spent exploring the landscape, a manifestation of her desire to return, and a recognition of the impossibility of longing.

In her photographs McCarthy evinces her memories of “wandering through the forest to pick berries and mushrooms; stray reindeer roaming the highways; and the stark rugged terrain spotted with lakes and filled with wildflowers,” but, forced into existence, they have decayed. McCarthy makes reference to traditional still-life paintings, as well as the tropes of advertising and studio photography, causing a disconnect between the beauty and allure of the form and the unappealing objects depicted within. The form produces an expectation of desire, but the content is undesirable, thus “creating tension between what is photographed and how it is photographed.”

McCarthy’s photographs are also steeped in the tradition of vanitas, a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17^th century. Vanitas symbolizes the inevitability of death and the transience and hubris of earthly achievements and pleasures. Skulls, rotten fruit, mirrors, and scholarly objects are often signposts of this tradition. Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s Vanitas Still Life (1668), with its skull, broken lyre, papers, and nearly burnt-out candle, and John Frederick Peto’s Student’s Materials (circa 1890–1900), depicting a book with its cover dangling by a thread and melted candle, are excellent examples of the vanitas tradition in Still-Life Masterpieces. The molding strawberries and cheese, animal skull, mirrors, and art books in McCarthy’s pictures are more than memories of Sweden—they are also traditional symbols of vanitas. These works are an acknowledgment by the artist that, like the fruit in Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, her own desire (to relive her time in Sweden) “is unsustainable and with time passing, will begin to decay.”

—Catherine Smith is a curatorial intern at the NCMA.

This work, made possible by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, is part of an ongoing series of outdoor art projects, Art Has No Boundaries, commissioned by the NCMA to encourage visitors to actively explore the Museum Park.

Images:
Lydia Anne McCarthy, Osthyvel, handduk, blommor och blåbär, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Mögliga jordgubbar i speglar, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

Lydia Anne McCarthy, Renskalle med böcker, 2012, Digital print on vinyl

What I didn’t expect was to be equally, if not more, amazed by the artist’s wooden sculptures.

Like his metal pieces, Anatsui’s wooden works are intricate, beautiful, and imbued with a profound symbolism that relates not only to African culture but to humanity as a whole. I was most awed, however, by the way they echo the wall hangings’ sense of movement and dynamism. Wood loses all of its stiffness and takes on an energetic, lifelike quality: the sculptures that refer to cloth appear to crumple and fold, and another, titled Imbroglio, seems to be actually writhing.

These wooden treasures excited me in a way that sculptures rarely had before. I now have a more open mind about art and look forward to taking many more non-Western courses. I also recognize how important it is to take a deeper look into an artist’s body of work, because sometimes your favorite piece may not be the most well known. Finally, I see how even the most unexpected materials can be turned into something incredibly beautiful—and this, I think, was exactly El Anatsui’s goal in the first place.

—Elana Hain, an art history student at UNC–Chapel Hill and a curatorial intern at the NCMA, is working this summer on research for upcoming contemporary art exhibitions.

Image: El Anatsui, When I Last Wrote to You about Africa, 1986, wood, Private collection, Germany

Balthasar van der Ast, Still Life with Basket of Fruit, 1622, oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 32 in., North Carolina Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina

What would you expect to cost more: a painting that might last, like this one has, for hundreds of years; or a flower that appeared in the painting, which might bloom for perhaps a week? Today you might hesitate to open your wallet wider for the flower, but there was a time when paintings such as these would have sold for far less than the priciest of blossoms.

In the Netherlands of the 17th century, floral still-life paintings hung in all the best homes from Haarlem to the Hague. The wealth of the burgeoning merchant class fueled the art market, and collectors were keen to show off their worldliness through the exotic and costly objects they acquired in their travels.

One way to demonstrate a cosmopolitan point of view was to display images of unusual flowers. Artists of the day would compose botanical fictions, including flowers that never would have blossomed simultaneously, gathered from far-flung points across the globe. Such images could demonstrate the owner’s refined taste for luxury objects.

How luxurious? According to some estimates, during the height of Dutch “tulip mania,” speculation on a single bulb of the much-coveted Semper Augustus tulip was equal to 30 times a Dutchman’s average annual salary. Purchasing a painting of one of those precious flowers was the closest that many well-to-do merchants might come to tulip ownership.

Jan Jansz. van de Velde, Still Life with Goblet and Fruit, 1656, oil on canvas, 14 ¾ x 13 ¾ in., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Anonymous gift, by exchange

By the time Jan Jansz. de Velde painted the work to the right, however, the tulip market had bottomed out two decades before. The crash left many once-wealthy investors destitute. The impact was certainly felt in the art market. Notice the differences in the two paintings, created just a few decades apart. The earlier work shows a profusion of objects, rendered in exuberant hues. The later image, despite the glittering goblet and the porcelain bowl, is a study in restraint and austerity.

What object is your most prized possession? Do you think you’ll feel the same about it five years from now? What about 10 or 20? Chew on that thought when you come to see Visual Feast, and then be sure to explore our permanent collection to discover what people have valued in different times and places.

Today’s guest contributor is Alana Wolf. A recent Atlanta transplant, Alana founded Public Acts of Art, an organization that showcases site-specific art in unconventional urban spaces. She has worked for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and contributed to projects for the Art on the Beltline, the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Feminist Art Project. As an intern for the Museum’s Education Department, Alana will be researching and writing on this fall’s exhibition Still-Life Masterpieces: A Visual Feast from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Look for more posts by Alana at A Life, Still.

This week the nation honors the thousands of volunteers who selflessly aid the ever-growing number of organizations providing critical services and programs to our citizens. This year’s National Volunteer Week theme is Celebrating People in Action. I can think of no more deserving group of people to celebrate than our very own volunteer corps.

Since the very beginning of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Museum has relied heavily upon the dedication and generosity of hundreds of volunteers who come together each year with a common passion for our institution. As the Museum has grown, this volunteer corps has enlarged to meet our expanding campus and programs.

Today volunteers and docents number more than 550 strong—significantly more than the Museum’s combined State and Foundation staffs. Last year alone these dedicated groups of people contributed 16,000 hours of service. This year with a burgeoning schedule of programs and a blockbuster exhibition that ushered 150,000 people through the doors, that number will only grow. It is no exaggeration to say the Museum could not operate without this incredible group of dedicated individuals.

It has been a true honor to work closely with this passionate team. I am humbled by the generosity and sheer tenacity of these fabulous professionals. No job is too big or small. Every visitor and member is important. Smiles abound, with little fanfare or appreciation for their tireless efforts. What unsung heroes! And binding us all together is a shared vision for this Museum and its outreach.

So this year as we Celebrate People in Action, let us simply say thank you. Thank you for all that you do and all that you are. You are truly indispensable to us all!

Caterri Woodrum is the chief deputy director and chief financial officer for the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation.

Image: (left) Volunteers work on weekly membership mailings. (right) Volunteer Sylvia Gill takes tickets at Rembrandt in America.