Adventures in Banktown

---

Today is my first day in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Civic boosters call it the Queen City, since it was named for a queen of England.

Almost everyone else in North Carolina, including those who live there, call it Banktown.

The name is appropriate, since the city core is dominated by business-minded types in dark suits.

The whole area feels like an anomalous part of the Northeast stuck in southern North Carolina.

Charlotte, in fact, is the center of consumer banking in the US; they are attracted by the state’s notoriously lax (supporters call them "flexible") banking laws.

It was Charlotte banks, after all, who first came up with the type of “innovation” that led to people paying $30 plus in fees for using a checking account.

While I would never voluntarily do business with them, all those bankers have had a positive effect on Charlotte’s culture.

They want cultural cache to go along with business success, and have attempted to get it by financing a museum boom.

Some of these museums were my goal for today.

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art

The first of these was the Bechtler Museum for Modern Art.

The Bechtler family of financiers first rose to prominence in Switzerland, where they got heavily involved in Surrealist art circles.

They collected art from many of the artists involved, and ran multiple salons were people could exchange ideas.

Eventually, they got involved in the North Carolina textile industry.

When the family wanted to open a museum to showcase its collection, Charlotte was a logical location.




The building is a post-modern architectural wonder featured in every visitor’s magazine.

It’s made of orange concrete.

It features a large front courtyard underneath the upper part of the building.

The walls are scored with closely spaced horizontal grooves.

The architecture continues inside, with a large internal square courtyard surrounded by the gallery space.

One of the last Wall Drawings Sol LeWitt (see A Whole Lot About Nothing) ever designed covers one wall of this courtyard.

I’m not sure it was intentional, but the courtyard has amazing echos.




The art itself is spread over three floors.

One contained the permanent collection and the others held temporary shows.

The permanent collection was mostly surrealism and European abstraction from the 1950s and afterward.

Some were from big names and others were artists I had never heard of.

A surprising subset of the collection was quilts.

A number of big name artists had created drawings that were later turned into fiber.

Two of these works were by Joan Miro and Roy Lichtenstein.

The best work in the collection was not in the museum, but in the park across the street.

It was a large surrealist skull covered in polished mirrors by Niki de Saint Phalle.

The skull is hollow on the inside, allowing people to climb through.

The inside is covered in even more mirrors, turning the entire view into a fun house.

It’s meant to represent the transformation of a life through profound religious experience.




I ultimately left the museum wanting more.

While the work is unusual and well presented, the museum is also clearly designed to showcase the Bechtlers’ specific interests and tastes.

All of the work came from them, for starters.

The temporary shows are designed to showcase artists they like.

One of the shows was on the salons they used to run in Switzerland, as close to self-promotion as a show usually gets.

If that doesn’t get the idea across, it’s impossible to miss the Andy Warhol prints of eight family members in the lobby.

Mint Museum Uptown

After the Belcher, I went across the street to a branch of the Mint Museum of Art.

The main museum was founded in 1936 in what used to be a US Mint (hence the name).

It has more work than it can show at once, so the museum proposed, and the bankers funded, a branch in downtown Charlotte.

The building is another striking modernist design.

Its most notable feature is a sweeping staircase down the front, which covers an entire story of the building.

There is a plaque at the top giving thanks just to the people which funded it!

Inside is another multi-story atrium.

There are three very large paintings displayed in this room.

Along the fourth wall is a series of escalators, which give access to the various floors.




The Mint permanent collection has strength in very specific areas.

The first of these is crafts, with an emphasis on North Carolina in particular.

I like this type of artwork much less than painting, so I mostly skipped over it.

The second strength is American Art.

The work is arranged mostly chronologically.

All of the big names are represented, although often by secondary work rather than true masterpieces (their John Singer Sargent work is actually a sketch).

The variety of work by lesser known people, particularly Southerners, partially makes up for this.

The museum has a costume collection, selections of which are displayed among the paintings.

When the outfit matches well with the era depicted in the paintings, this worked surprisingly well.

The third strength is contemporary art.

Like the North Carolina Art Museum (see The Future is Now), this section was amazing, particularly work from Southern artists rarely seen outside the region.




This museum has two works that really stick out, because they were created in collaboration with local schools.

Tim Rollins is a legendary art teacher from the South Bronx who works with at-risk youth.

He has each class read a classic novel, and then create a collaborative artwork showing what the novel means to them.

These works have become collector’s items, and sales support the program.

They are signed “K.O.S”, for Kids Of Survival.

Tim Rollins held a similar program with members of Charlotte youth groups, and the result is in the museum.

The book was Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

The resulting painting is a wall of pages from the novel, covered in ever changing biomorphic forms.

The other work is by a local artist, Owning Queen Charlotte.

As noted above, the city is named for a former queen of England, and the main Mint Museum has one of her portraits.

This artist asked school kids with this former British monarch meant to them.

The answers were silkscreened over copies of the portrait.

Some of them are pretty surprising: “Immigrant” (Charlotte was a German noble at the time she married King George), “Enemy” (she was also queen during the American Revolution) and “Youth” (she was 16 at the time of her marriage).

---

Photos

Skull by Niki de Saint Phalle
This large surrealist sculpture is located across the street from the Bechtler Museum

Welcome to Banktown
Downtown Charlotte, looking more like New York than North Carolina

Inside the skull
Inside the mirrored cover skull. It represents a personal religious experience

The Green sculpture
One of many sculptures dedicated to literature

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art
The striking orange building of the Bechtler Museum

Mint Museum Downtown
The downtown branch of the Mint Museum, Charlotte NC. The staircase is visible behind the umbrellas.

Fish Foutain
One of three in the park

Westin Hotel
Cutting edge modern architecture in Charlotte

Former Duke Energy Building
More striking modern architecture in Charlotte