“The submerged bit of the museum is much more of an iceberg than [a] picture gallery.”—Neil MacGregor, director, British Museum

Would you believe that work on our exhibitions often starts years before you see the works on the wall? At the NCMA, as at the British Museum, there is more going on behind the scenes than you might expect. Our fall college exhibition, A Life, Still, offered one group of college students an opportunity to dive under the iceberg to see what happens behind an exhibition.

Months before the opening of the college exhibition (planned to complement the special exhibition Still-Life Masterpieces), Museum educators started collaborating with students and faculty at East Carolina University through “Under the Iceberg,” a program designed to give students a hands-on experience of planning and curating an exhibition. The development of A Life, Still included large- and small-scale projects, from deciding on the exhibition theme and marketing the call for submissions to selecting the final works and arranging them in a thoughtful visual narrative.

ECU senior Anna Hajjar took away a better understanding of the resources required to put on an exhibition, noting that she had never before considered spatial limitations and obstacles, museum aesthetics, and promotion when imagining the exhibition process. She noted, “It’s not just about finding artwork and nailing it on the wall.”

For artist Kendall Temotio, a senior at ECU, the best part of the experience was “being on the other side of the table.” Temotio said, “Usually I’m the one submitting my work and waiting at home to hear the results. It was interesting to see how decisions are ultimately made. Now I can look at my own work when it is declined or accepted and better understand why or how the selections may have occurred.”

ECU senior Abigail Jones noted the importance of their cumulative decisions: “Everything from writing the wall texts to judging the works of art to understanding the layout of the show affects how well and smoothly the exhibition process will run.”

Collaborating with the Museum, these students helped recruit over 180 submissions from across the globe (172 two-dimensional, 12 video). The resulting collection represents college students from 21 universities, 13 states, and two continents. Visit the exhibition blog or see the show in person at the Museum through January 13.

—Michelle Harrell is coordinator of teen and college programs at the NCMA.

The two main factors I consider when I begin a lighting design at the NCMA are art conservation lighting standards and the aesthetics of the exhibition. In my work on Word Up, for example, I collaborated with conservators and exhibition designers to create a lighting plan that adheres to conservation standards while creating an overall feeling for the exhibition.

First I had to consider the effects of light intensity on the works of art. All light sources emit UV radiation that damages both the color and the structure of the materials; the more UV exposure, the faster the deterioration. The highest levels of UV come from daylight, and the lowest come from nonviolet LED sources. The halogen lighting commonly used in galleries falls closer to nonviolet LED UV emittance. Some materials are more susceptible to UV damage, such as textiles and paper, so these cannot be exposed to as much light as, say, marble or bronze. Many of the works in Word Up use layered paper, but the tricky part is that some of the more fragile works are right next to works that can withstand more light. I gently eased the lighting levels up or down, with added light on the walls to balance the look of the overall gallery. When you visit Word Up, notice the difference in lighting levels between the paintings on canvas, such as Nathaniel Lancaster’s Here’s to Coexistence, and works using paper such as Derek Toomes’s Hex #FF00FF.

The second thing I consider is the exhibition aesthetics and layout. I work closely with the exhibition designer and curator to create the environment they envision. For Word Up, a contemporary show, the overall feel of the galleries needed to be bright and evenly washed in light. The designers, Shannon Harris and Eric Gaard, felt that a major design feature for Word Up should be its title wall—the first thing, along with The Campaign by Shaun Richards, that visitors see as they come in the main entrance of East Building. So we started discussing specialty lighting treatments. Using lighting that was originally developed for theatrical purposes, I worked with the graphic designer, Dave Rainey, to develop a one-of-kind pattern for the title wall. It definitely got the reaction we wanted from day one:  every NCMA staff member who wandered by while it was being installed commented on how great it was, even saying it looked like flames of light!

Lighting is a powerful yet subtle design element in the museum environment. The next time you are in one of our galleries, stop and think about the lighting and how it has affected your experience!

Caroline Davenport is the lighting designer in the Exhibition Design Department at the NCMA.

Christ Appearing to Saint Martin in a Dream by Francesco Solimena

As Hurricane Isaac approaches the Gulf Coast, I am reminded that seven years ago this week Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the same coastline. It also reminds me of a story from 2005 that made one work of art in our collection become especially meaningful to me.

Each time I teach new volunteer orientation, I encourage the volunteers to find a work of art in the collection that “speaks” to them and to learn more about it. It can be for any reason: the landscape brings back memories of childhood vacations, the thick brushstrokes and colors amaze them, whatever it is. I suggest this so they will be able to share the permanent collection with visitors with real, heartfelt enthusiasm. When we share our own stories, it draws the visitor in and helps make art more meaningful.

For me that work of art is Christ Appearing to Saint Martin in a Dream by Francesco Solimena, a painting given to the Museum by Florence G. Montgomery in 1959. The painting refers to the legend of the Roman army soldier Martin of Sabaria. One cold day at the gates of the city Amiens in Gaul, Martin came across a shivering, half-naked beggar. Martin removed his cloak and cut it in two and gave the beggar half. In Solimena’s painting Christ appears to Martin while he sleeps, wearing half of Martin’s cloak as if he were the beggar transformed. The image alludes to Matthew 25: 40, “The king will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ “

Why does this work speak to me? Like most of the nation, on Monday, August 29, 2005, I sat glued to the television screen. Hurricane Katrina had crashed into Louisiana, then Mississippi, with 125 mph winds pushing walls of water miles inland. When the waters retreated, the devastation was unthinkable. I had never seen anything like it. Over the next week, I was torn emotionally by the scenes of destruction: piles of matchsticks that once were homes; cars and boats in piles miles inland; skyscrapers with their windows blown out; and, worst, people in the streets crying over loss and need. I felt compelled to do something to help.

Two weeks later I was on a small plane to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as a newly trained disaster relief volunteer with the American Red Cross. I had never done anything like this before, and I was nervous. Another volunteer from Raleigh and I hopped a ride from the airport to Biloxi with a nurse heading that way. As we drove south, and the destructive path of Katrina became more and more obvious, my head swam with questions: “Have I made the right decision? How can I make any difference here? Am I really meant to be here?”

After a restless night on a cot among hundreds of volunteers in an aircraft hangar in Gulfport, I met my group leader to head out for our first day of work. A dozen of us piled into a van. As we approached the building that would be our Family Services assistance center for the next two weeks, I saw the sign out front—Saint Martin’s Community Center.

I had always admired Solimena’s painting, but now when I see it, I am reminded that I was exactly where I needed to be.

Robert L. Mlodzik is visitor services manager at the NCMA.

There is something so wondrous about aerial views. You get a vast, uninterrupted view of the landscape below. Being 5’4”, I see the world from this average-height view—unless, of course, I lie down on the ground. I usually don’t get any higher than my kitchen stepstool! It felt like a privilege to be this high up.

In the plane I could see how the land had been divided between highways and streets, treelines and hills. When I wandered through the Modern and Contemporary Galleries the other day, I was reminded of this landscape while looking at Richard Diebenkorn’s Berkeley No. 8. Curator John Coffey says in the Museum’s cell phone tour that this painting “was inspired really by [Diebenkorn] flying over the Southwest on a commercial airline and just seeing the way that the land was all parched and also broken up into large fields and meadows, bisected by roads, and interrupted by streams and things.”

The plane reached 13,500 feet, and it was “go time.” People scrambled in an orderly fashion to jump out of the plane. They fell so fast they were gone in an instant, hurtling to the world below. (To give you a hint of what it looked like, push your pen to the edge of a table. Push it off the edge and notice how quickly it’s gone from view. It’s like that—but human beings are the pens, and the table is 13,000 feet tall.) It was my turn; the instructor counted “1 … 2 … 3 …,” and we jumped. I learned later that we averaged 123 miles per hour in free fall.

During free fall the instructor spun us around, and the ground became blurred. He released the parachute, and the immense rush of falling 7,000 feet in about 60 seconds came to a halt as we gently made our way back to earth. The ground now looked less like the abstracted landscape view of Diebenkorn and more like the landscape in Hans Thoma’s Wondrous Birds. The land below was lush with trees and calm. I saw a few cars rumbling down roads, but all I could hear was a breeze as we circled down to the ground.

It took another few minutes before we landed on the grass about 50 feet from where the plane took off. I was back to my normal 5’4” vantage point, still catching my breath, but looking forward to my next opportunity to see the world from a different perspective.

Emily Kotecki is associate coordinator of teen and college programs at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

In some ways Rhythms of the Heart: The Illustration of Ashley Bryan is an ideal exhibition for the NCMA, allowing viewers to make associations between it and El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa. Both are retrospectives of the careers of prolific men—one from North America, the other from Africa. Both El Anatsui and Ashley Bryan are true artistic masters with firm grasps of very different mediums. In El Anatsui’s case, visitors can explore wood sculptures, metal wall sculptures, and drawings, noting that the artist understands and has talent for each mode of creation; Ashley Bryan’s illustrations shine whether made from construction paper cutouts, linoleum prints, or poster paint. And finally, both artists share a deep connection to Africa, which comes across in the colors, subject matter, and design in each of their works.

While you’re visiting these exhibitions, don’t forget to ponder how these exhibitions connect to our permanent collection in West Building, too—the African Gallery and the Modern and Contemporary Galleries provide great starting points for comparison.

Have you visited Rhythms of the Heart yet? What other connections to our permanent collection or Spring–Summer 2012 exhibitions can you make? Leave us a comment below.

Jennifer Dasal is associate curator of contemporary art.

Rhythms of the Heart: The Illustration of Ashley Bryan is organized by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions.

Image: Ashley Bryan, Mountain View, 1967, from Moon, for What Do You Wait? (Atheneum, 1967), linoleum print, 16 ½ x 8 in., Courtesy of the artist, © 1967 Ashley Bryan

George introduces Doc Watson at Eno River in 1978. Ralph Rinzler is in the background.

It was a heavy blow to receive the first e-mail from my old friend David Holt, informing me that Doc Watson had been hospitalized after falling at home. I’m well aware that at age 89, a bad fall can be catastrophic. I first saw Doc perform on the National Mall in Washington at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival; I hope it’s not too trite to say the experience changed my life.

Who knows how many guitar players Doc inspired? While I played a little, I knew I could never achieve anything close to his level of skill. Doc was as much a virtuoso as any great musician you can name. All I wanted to do from that point onward was to create similar opportunities for people to discover such amazing artists who seemed so utterly modest and matter-of-fact about their genius.

I had the fortune to come back to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 1973 as a paid summer intern after my junior year at Duke University. So enthralled was I that I took a leave of absence from school to work for the festival through the fall. The following year, the university gave me funding to organize the first North Carolina Folklife Festival on the Duke campus. I wasn’t able to present Doc then, but we featured a number of his talented relatives from Deep Gap.

In 1976 I was invited to direct the festival on a grander scale at Durham’s West Point on the Eno Park as part of the bicentennial celebration. Afterward the Department of Cultural Resources hired me (with help from NCMA Director Larry Wheeler, who was deputy secretary of DCR at the time) to document and promote North Carolina’s folk arts and culture full time. It was a dream come true, but I didn’t feel I’d fully succeeded until I finally had the chance to present the great Doc Watson at the second North Carolina Folklife Festival in 1978. It was especially meaningful to me that my mentor Ralph Rinzler, the director of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the man who brought Doc into the wider world, came down from Washington to introduce him.

Since then I’ve had the honor of presenting Doc in various festival and concert settings, and he appeared at the NCMA three or four times. He was 87 on his last visit, but you wouldn’t have known it. He was strong in voice and playing as impressively as ever. But after that the years began to exact their toll, and the man I thought to be possibly immortal grew frail. We were set to present what we knew (though we couldn’t say it) would be Doc’s public finale on June 30.

The event was never meant to be just another Doc Watson concert, but rather a Doc Watson celebration, a chance for all of us to express our appreciation for the wonderful music and example he provided over five decades. We planned to surround Doc with his closest friends and picking partners and take a day to reflect on his remarkable life and career and contribution to our national culture.

When I spoke with David Holt within a few hours of Doc’s passing we knew we needed to carry on with our plans, now more than ever. We hope you will join us Saturday for this day of stories and song and celebration of a North Carolina treasure.

—George Holt is the NCMA’s director of performing arts and film programs.

The moments on the Eastern Cape where I discovered reminders of some of my favorite works of art from El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa were surprising. The rocks on the beach at Cape Vidal looked to me like Akua’s Surviving Children—deep brown formations being battered by the sea. The houses scattered on the hillsides in KwaZulu-Natal brought to mind the placement and shapes of Open(ing) Market; the colorful beadwork by native craftspeople, reminiscent of those spectacular wall sculptures. And most enchantingly, the tin can tops of Peak Project turned into musical instruments, strapped to the ankles of the revered Sangomas (traditional Zulu healers) as they danced.

This is not to suggest the homogeneity of the continent, rather the connections that help us relate—people to people. As Anatsui said, “I think the most important thing is that one is able to reach or communicate but not necessarily on the basis of one’s geography.” Through my American eyes, these small jewels of resonance were sweet reminders of home.

Melanie Davis-Jones recently returned from a trip to South Africa.

Wait a minute, I can hear you say. An illustration exhibition by a children’s book author? But what about me—I’m a grown-up!

I’ve got a good answer for you. Rhythms of the Heart holds its own, allowing viewers of all ages to enjoy a colorful trip through Bryan’s inspirational and energetic illustrations. Works in this exhibition feature Bryan’s unique artistic style, combining references to poetry, rhythm, African storytelling traditions, and African American spirituality. And it’s free!

Don’t let the subject matter fool you: though aimed at families and children, this exhibition can be enjoyed by all ages. Come explore over 60 energetic works of art that will surely add a bit of levity to your day. Just a “children’s book illustrations” exhibition? Check it out for yourself—this show, and its diverse subject matter, might surprise you.

Have you visited Rhythms of the Heart yet? What did you enjoy most? Did anything surprise you? Leave a comment below.

Jennifer Dasal is associate curator of contemporary art.

Rhythms of the Heart: The Illustration of Ashley Bryan is organized by the National Center for Children’s Illustrated Literature. This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources; the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.; and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions.

Image: Ashley Bryan, Hen and Frog, 1980, from Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (Atheneum, 1980), tempera on paper, 7 x 10 ½ in., Courtesy of the artist, © 1980 Ashley Bryan

Your art museum commissioned El Anatsui to create an extraordinary wall hanging for the new West Building. It is front and center, and you enjoy it every time you enter the building. It is one of his best.

The success and popularity of our work by this master inspired us to present the exhibition El Anatsui: When I Last Wrote to You about Africa. It is a fantastic review of the great work from his 40-year career. There are, of course, the breathtaking wall hangings woven from found metallic elements. But you might be surprised by the power of his sculptures, drawings, and paintings incised in wood.

You should not miss this exhibition. It is one of the most alluring and captivating shows the Museum has ever presented. And it is yours until July 29. The art world is envious of you.

Larry Wheeler is director of the North Carolina Museum of Art.

I look at them and think, “I want to wear them.”

The sartorial quality of his work struck me from my first gallery visit, and I continue to see the rich textures, colors, and languages of Africa embodied by his work (and not just the wall sculptures) all around me. Click through the image below to see the “Anatsui Style” Pinterest board, a visual sampling of my mind since the exhibition’s opening.

The result has emboldened my own fashion sense, boosted my creativity, and changed (erased?) my concept of what constitutes a coordinated outfit.

Can I pull off bright red with bright yellow? Mixed metals? Pattern on pattern?

Why, sure. That’s very Anatsui of you, Natalie.

Are you on Pinterest? Follow ncartmuseum. Join us for a Pinterest-themed meetup on Thursday, May 10.