Image above: Grounded (outside facade sculpture), by Maya Freelon
Get Grounded at the Gregg: The Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State University presents 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 – 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.
The season, collectively called “Grounded at the Gregg,” also offers photography, oral histories, scientific inquiry, and artworks from the Gregg Museum’s permanent collection, connecting themes of land and ancestry through historical and community perspectives inviting audiences to explore what it means to be “grounded” with the past, present and future. By weaving together art with scholarship across disciplines, Grounded at the Gregg demonstrates how a university museum can uniquely foster these conversations.
Grounded
October 29, 2026 – May 29, 2027
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 of Art & Design—a space shaped by the architectural influence of her father and NC State College of Design alum, Phil Freelon. Rooted in North Carolina and shaped by Freelon’s personal and collective memory, ancestry, and humanity, Grounded contrasts dueling dimensions of fragility and strength, transforming the Gregg Museum into a retrospective on well-being, connection, and discovery.
Community Stories:
Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage
July 2, 2026 – February 27, 2027
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, contemporary images, artworks from the Gregg Museum of Art & Design 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
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.
Organized by Art Bridges Foundation. Curated by Tamir Williams, PhD, with support from Ibby Ouweleen, Curatorial Research Assistant, and Javier Rivero Ramos, PhD, Associate Curator.
You Are Here: Geolocating the Self through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar
October 28, 2026 – February 28, 2027
NC State’s African American Cultural Center Gallery, located in Witherspoon Student 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.
All exhibitions are accessible, and admission is always free. Large-print gallery guides for visitors with low vision and other accommodations can be provided on request.
