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SECCA shifting gears: New director prepares to close for repairs
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Published: April 20, 2008
Four months after the state took it over and three months after a new director came on board, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art is in a regrouping mode. It is awaiting structural repairs that are likely to temporarily close the museum down later this year. And it might be closed for as long as a year, according to Mark Leach, its new director.
In late 2007, after extended negotiations between its former board of directors and state officials, SECCA became a subsidiary of the N.C. Museum of Art. The latter museum's director, Lawrence J. Wheeler, selected Leach as SECCA's new director. After working as a curator and administrator at Charlotte's Mint Museum of Art and Mint Museum of Craft + Design for more than 15 years, Leach began working at SECCA on Jan. 15.
One of his first decisions was to reinstate SECCA's original free-admission policy. SECCA had begun charging admission fees a few years ago to help raise sorely needed revenue, but the policy probably kept away some potential visitors.
At the top of Leach's agenda for revamping SECCA has been the hiring of several new staff members. Soon after arriving he hired a new installations manager/registrar, who is already on the job. Last week he said that he has also hired a development and membership officer and a manager of public relations and marketing, both of whom are scheduled to begin work in May. Meanwhile, Leach said, searches for a curator of exhibitions and a curator of education have generated three leading candidates for each job, and he expects to hire applicants for both by June, when these new staffers will begin writing grants for future exhibitions and educational programs.
Leach said that 16 members of a new advisory board have been selected, and he hopes to find four additional members with particular skills and connections before the board has its first meeting, scheduled for May 5. Also since Leach took office, the Windgate Charitable Foundation, of Siloam Springs, Ark., has awarded SECCA $42,500 to commission the building of new exhibition furniture.
The biggest and most pressing expense facing SECCA will be major repairs that its galleries and some adjoining structures need.
The state legislature has allocated $1.8 million to pay for those repairs, based on an inspection by state construction engineers and other specialists. Leach said he and other state officials will soon meet to select a designer to oversee the repairs, and that the work will probably begin in the fall.
At that point, he said, SECCA will be closed to the public for six months to a year while the repairs are being made. Options are being considered for continuing SECCA's exhibits and other programs in other locations during the interval.
In the meantime, Leach said, operations will continue at the center, which last month opened three new exhibitions organized on fairly short notice. These shows will remain on view through June 30, and Leach said that no new exhibitions have yet been scheduled beyond that date.
The largest of the current exhibitions is tagged with the rather pedestrian main title "People and Places." Like the show that immediately preceded it in SECCA's Ted Potter Gallery, it's a contemporary photography show organized with the assistance of SECCA's new parent institution, the N.C. Museum of Art.
The preceding show consisted of works that the state art museum owns, by North Carolina photographers. "People and Places" contains 59 photographs from the collection of Allen Thomas Jr., who manages a law firm in Wilson. Some of the same photographs were included in a similar show from Thomas' collection that the state art museum mounted three years ago. It's an impressive collection, to judge by these two shows.
As indicated by its title, the current exhibition consists largely of portrait and landscape photographs, including several images that have been staged or manipulated. Highlights include relatively straightforward, informal portraits by Tom Hunter, Sarah Anne Johnson, Mona Kuhn and Erwin Olaf. Related images of special interest in the show include dada-influenced black-and-white photos by Roger Ballen and Tseng Kwong Chi's self-portraits in different locales around the world. Noteworthy among the show's digitally manipulated images are the ones by Carla Gannis and Anthony Goicolea.
Of the two smaller shows running concurrently at SECCA, one brings heroically scaled ceramic vessels and related works by Mark Hewitt together with wall-mounted quilts by Jan Campos. The British-born Hewitt is one of North Carolina's most important contemporary potters, and these richly glazed, flawlessly formed pieces are typical of his work. They're nicely complemented by Campos' striking quilts, whose juxtapositions of solid-colored polyhedrons on neutral backgrounds bring to mind minimalist paintings.
The other show, in SECCA's Main Gallery, titled "Time," is made up of projected video works by three Greensboro artists — Chris Cassidy, Max Negin and Amy Lixl-Purcell — all of which use time-lapse strategies to comment on our temporal perception.
n "People and Places: Selections from the Allen Thomas Jr. Photography Collection," "Line Dance: Jan Campos and Mark Hewitt" and "Time" are on view through June 30 at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, at 750 Marguerite Drive. Admission is free. For more information, call 336-725-1904.
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