Opinion

LIZA ROBERTS: What politics divides, art can bring together

Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022 -- We share dismay over the issues that divide us. But we also share something constructive, something profound, and something deeply North Carolinian. We share the art of this state.

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Liza Roberts is a journalist and author of "Art of the State: Celebrating the Visual Art of North Carolina" which was published by UNC Press on Election Day, Nov. 8.

In the wake of the contentious midterm elections, North Carolina can seem especially divided. In some ways it undoubtedly is. But we all share something bigger, more meaningful, and certainly more unifying than partisan politics. That thing is art. It is more powerful than any party, more capable of generating dialogue and community, and we have more of it here – and better examples of it – than many states twice our size.

That’s true because North Carolina has a long history of supporting art in ways that defy our relatively modest wealth, population, and urbanity. The North Carolina Museum of Art is the nation’s first and one of the only art museums founded with state-appropriated funds. Our N.C. School of the Arts was the first public arts conservatory in the nation and is still one of the best, public or private. The first municipal arts council in the entire country was founded in Winston-Salem. When our state decided to create a cabinet-level agency to manage the state’s history, art, and culture, we were without peer. No other state had done that.
As a result of those innovations and many more, art has thrived and continues to thrive here. We foster artists and support their work in unique and robust ways, through state and privately-funded institutions including our excellent and outsized number of colleges and universities, plus museums and specialized institutions like the Penland School of Craft.

Indeed, our artists live in every corner of our state. They are native North Carolinians and newcomers; they are urban and rural; they represent different backgrounds, points of view, mediums, and messages. They are painters and sculptors and welders, they are weavers and blacksmiths and glass blowers, they make art out of tissue paper and wax and steel and canvas and paint, they make it from strips of silk, cut up wallpaper, discarded quilts, and shredded documents. They make it out of North Carolina clay.

This matters now more than ever because the art they make here opens our minds to new perspectives. It spotlights beauty and it offers solace. It asks difficult questions in new languages; it invites fresh insights and unlikely answers. It opens the door to empathy. It tells the story of this place, and in the process, it tells the story of our times.

When conceptual artist and MacArthur genius prize winner Mel Chin of Yancey County was invited to create a massive art installation in New York’s Times Square and he needed extra hands, he looked no further than the art students at UNC-Asheville. Together they built a sixty-foot-tall animatronic sculpture that resembles both a shipwreck and a whale skeleton to highlight climate change in the middle of Manhattan.
When the Vatican needed a portrait of Mother Teresa to serve as the Catholic Church’s official image on the occasion of her canonization, it chose Charlotte artist Chas Fagan’s work of art and hung it stadium-sized from the facade of St. Peter’s basilica. When in 1986 the U.S. Postal Service sought works of art for its National Park stamps, it chose a painting of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse by famed Kinston-based maritime painter Robert B. Dance to be among them. And when Time magazine chose the best portraits of the year in 2020, it picked Winston-Salem photographer Endia Beal’s portrait of the Reverend William J. Barber in Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church.

These are just a few examples among countless others of North Carolina artists making work on a national and world stage. There are many thousands more making world-class art here that stays here, art that enriches our North Carolina lives, that challenges us, that emboldens us, that asks us to appreciate the beauty around us and the state we all call home.

Regardless of party, there is a great deal we share. Yes, we share dismay over the issues that divide us. But we also share something constructive, something profound, and something deeply North Carolinian. We share the art of this state, and this is something worth celebrating.

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