Southern Photographers at the NC Museum of Art

The exhibition Director’s Cut now up at the North Carolina Museum of Art through September 13th, 2015, features a selection of photographs that were given to the Museum in honor of Dr. Lawrence Wheeler’s 20th anniversary as Director of the North Carolina Museum of Art.  

Wheeler's tenure has seen significant growth and development for the Museum, and nowhere more so than in the photography collection.

When Wheeler arrived at the NCMA in 1994, there were 22 photographs in the Museum’s permanent collection. Today there are over 400.

Images included in the Director's Cut show represent a significant addition to the Museum’s photography collection.  

There are works in this show by major photographers of the 20th century, including Distinguished Southern photographer William Christenberry,  as well as innovative works by contemporary photographers.  

I am happy to say that represented among these gifts are photographs by a number of Southern photographers in addition to Christenberry, including Durham-based photographer Christopher Sims (see image directly above), Asheville-based photographer Ralph Burns, Durham-based photographer Alex Harris (see image at the top of this blog entry), Atlanta-born photographer Tierney Gearon, Durham-based photographer Frank Hunter, and formerly Chapel Hill but now Princeton, NJ-based photographer Jeff Whetstone. 

Director's Cut is a small but very high quality show, very much worth a visit if you are in Raleigh, that celebrates the renaissance of interest in photography at the NCMA under Larry Wheeler's leadership, and points to even better times ahead.