Gregg Museum Announces New Southern Heritage Exhibitions
Raleigh, North Carolina – The Gregg Museum of Art & Design at North Carolina State University announces a powerful collection of four exhibitions and related programming that reflect on wellness for all, Black Southern heritage, and community togetherness. Anchored by 2026 Artist-in-Residence Maya Freelon’s immersive exhibition Grounded, on view October 29, 2026 through May 29, 2027, the season represents a new chapter for the Gregg Museum’s relaunched Artist-in-Residence program—one that places artists at the center of research, storytelling, teaching, and community engagement.
Grounded features new site-specific installations in dialogue with more than 20 works including photography, paintings, and vibrant, larger-than-life layered tissue paper sculptures spanning
two decades of Freelon’s career. Freelon invites visitors on a journey through the Gregg Museum—a space shaped by the architectural influence of her father Phil Freelon, NC State College of Design alumnus, designer of the Gregg Museum’s contemporary building, and principal architect for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
“Looking both backward and forward through the lens of the Gregg Museum’s space revealed recurring themes of transformation, loss, and healing across my artistic practice. The juxtaposition of these new immersive environments alongside artwork by my father, architect Phil Freelon, and great-grandfather, a pioneer African American Impressionist painter during the Harlem Renaissance, bring new meaning to this retrospective collection of my career,” said Freelon, who was raised in Durham, NC and previously taught at the College of Design. “Serving as the Gregg Museum’s Artist-in-Residence has made this experience especially meaningful, creating opportunities to engage with students, faculty, and community members through shared creative exploration.”
The season, collectively called Grounded at the Gregg, also offers oral histories, scientific inquiry, and artworks from the Gregg Museum’s permanent collection, connecting themes of land and ancestry through historical and community perspectives and inviting audiences to explore what it means to be “grounded” with the past, present and future. By weaving together art with scholarship across disciplines, the Grounded at the Gregg season demonstrates how a university museum can uniquely foster these conversations.
“At NC State, we have the ability to bring together artists, scholars, and students in ways that spark new possibilities for understanding ourselves and the world around us,” said Director Sara Segerlin, who joined the Gregg Museum in 2024 from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary. “By connecting community histories, contemporary artistic practice, and interdisciplinary inquiry, this season honors the stories that brought us here while creating space for new discoveries. We hope visitors leave with a deeper understanding of the people and places that shape our world.”
In addition to Freelon’s Grounded, season highlights include Crafting Sanctuaries: Black
Spaces of the Great Depression South organized by Art Bridges Foundation and curated by Tamir Williams, PhD, featuring rarely seen photographs of the private homes and communal spaces of Black Southerners in the 1930s and 40s; Community Stories: Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage explores dignity, belonging, and imagination within North Carolina’s Black communities in collaboration with NC State Associate Professor Ajamu Dillahunt-Holloway, local partners, NC State students, and the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission; and Grounded companion exhibition You Are Here: Geolocating the Self through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar by ariana Farquharson, Freelon’s former teaching assistant and College of Design faculty member at NC State, on view at NC State’s African American Cultural Center.
Featured Exhibitions
Community Stories: Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage
July 2, 2026 – February 27, 2027
Gregg Museum’s Thomas E. Cabaniss Gallery at the Historic Residence
Community Stories: Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage presents a series of vignettes exploring spaces of dignity, belonging, safety, and imagination within Black communities across North Carolina. Featuring historical photographs, images, artworks from the Gregg Museum collection, including a handmade guitar by Freeman Vines, and ephemera from community partners, the exhibition reflects on place, memory, creativity, and spiritual resilience across generations. Through stories of triumph and adversity, Community Stories honors the ways Black Americans have sustained and uplifted their communities through family, entrepreneurship, cultural expression, and soulful imagination, while inspiring future generations.
Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South
August 6, 2026 – January 16, 2027
Gregg Museum’s Robert Keith Black and J. Ormond Sanderson, Jr. Gallery
Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South expands the popular visual memory of the Great Depression by highlighting rarely seen Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of rural Black Southerners and their spatial worlds. Spanning the work of seven FSA photographers and six Southern states, the photographs in this exhibition reveal how Depression-era Black Southerners shaped their domestic and communal spaces into sanctuaries—sites of expression, comfort, and refuge—during a period of unprecedented economic turmoil and racial violence in the country. Inspired by Crafting Sanctuaries, the Gregg Museum additionally features connections within its permanent collection that illuminate North Carolina stories.
Crafting Sanctuaries is organized by the Art Bridges Foundation, and curated by Tamir Williams, PhD, with support from Ibby Ouweleen, Art Bridges Curatorial Research Assistant and Javier Rivero Ramos, PhD, Art Bridges Associate Curator.
You Are Here: Geolocating the Self through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar
October 28, 2026 – February 28, 2027
Presented at the NC State African American Cultural Center
Digital humanist and creative storyteller ariana Farquharson debuts the satellite exhibition, You Are Here: Geolocating the Self Through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar, at NC State University’s African American Cultural Center Gallery. Created in conversation with Gregg Museum of Art & Design and Maya Freelon’s immersive installation Grounded, the exhibition features 2D prints, 3D prints, and animations of AI-generated abstract forms called “diasporic wayfields.” Through ancestral notions of inherited and inhabited fluidity and critical collective reflection, You Are Here invites visitors to locate self and home. In doing so, ariana expands Freelon’s exploration of her own origins.
Grounded
October 29, 2026 – May 29, 2027
Gregg Museum’s J. Norwood and Valeria C. Adams Gallery and Randy and Susan Woodson Gallery
Through new site-specific installations in dialogue with works spanning two decades of her artistic journey, Artist-in-Residence Maya Freelon invites visitors on an immersive journey through Grounded at the Gregg Museum—a space shaped by the architectural influence of her father, Phil Freelon, an NC State College of Design alum and principal architect for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Grounded, which spotlights Freelon’s signature use of vibrant color and layered tissue paper inspired by her maternal grandmother, debuts an art experience shaped by heritage and legacy that contrasts dueling dimensions of fragility and strength through material and memory. Works created across different phases of Freelon’s career, alongside artwork by her father and great-grandfather, Allan Freelon, Sr., a pioneer African American Impressionist painter active during the Harlem Renaissance, reveal recurring themes of loss, healing, transformation, and interconnectedness.
Blurring the line between personal history and collective experience, Grounded pushes beyond a traditional retrospective by offering an evolving meditation on what it means to remain connected—to self, to family, to community, to earth, and to the histories that shape us—and transforms the Gregg into a sanctuary for well-being, reflection, and discovery.