Harvey B. Gantt Center

The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, formerly known as the Afro-American Cultural Center, is in Charlotte, North Carolina and named for Harvey Gantt, the city's first African-American mayor and the first African-American student at Clemson University. The 46,500 sq ft, four-story center was designed by Freelon Group Architects at a cost of $18.6 million — and was dedicated in October 2009 as part of what is now the Levine Center for the Arts.

About the building

Located at South Tryon and Stonewall streets, the four-story 46,490-square foot building is a "modernist structure wrapped in glass and metal", is 360' by 40' and located above tunnels connecting College Street and Stonewall Street to a parking garage for Duke Energy Center. To allow access by car and truck ramps on the narrow site (400' x 60'), the lobby is on the second floor and is reached by stairs and escalators which frame a central glass atrium and are based on Jacob's Ladder in the Book of Genesis.

The design was inspired by Myers Street School that was in the Brooklyn neighborhood, an African-American section of the city which was demolished as part of an urban renewal program in the 1960s. The school was Charlotte's only public school for African-Americans from 1886 to 1907. The Jacob's Ladder concept also appears outside the building. Another feature of the building is a rain screen, with perforated metal panels in some areas and windows in others, resembling a quilt with fluorescent lights that resemble stitches. Freelon Group won the 2009 Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture from the American Institute of Architects for projects that included the Gantt Center.

On the east wing wall is ''Divergent Threads, Lucent Memories'', a work by David Wilson of Apex inspired by quilts which recalls the history of Brooklyn.

On the plaza connecting the center to other area buildings, ''Intersections'' by Juan Logan uses Kuba patterns from Democratic Republic of Congo, with chevron and diamond patterns representing connections between different cultures.

The John and Vivian Hewitt Collection of African-American Art

Vivian Hewitt was the first African-American librarian hired by Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, and she taught and served as a librarian at Atlanta University. Her husband John taught English at Morehouse College. John and Vivian Hewitt, though not rich, put together one of the most significant collections of African-American art during their 50 years of marriage, starting in 1949. The art works were gifts made to each other over the years. The works were affordable for them at the time they bought them because white people had not started buying them, but as the importance of African-American artists became clear, that started to change. The Hewitt Collection was purchased by NationsBank (later Bank of America) in 1998, with the plan being to locate the works in an expanded Afro-American Cultural Center. The collection toured the country, and the 58 works now make up the majority of the Gantt Center's permanent collection. The 20th century African-American artists include Henry Ossawa Tanner, Ann Tanksley, John Biggers, Elizabeth Catlett and Romare Bearden.

Shortly before the Gantt Center opened in October 2009, 26 works by 20 artists went to the center. Other works from the collection were scheduled to appear in the gallery devoted to the collection over a two-year period.

History

In 1974, as an English professor and doctoral student at UNC-Charlotte, Mary Harper proposed an Afro-American cultural center for Charlotte. Working with Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, director of the university's Black Studies Center, she called her proposal "Vistas Unlimited: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Afro-American Cultural and Service Center". Harper and Roddey realized that people did not know a lot about the accomplishments of African-Americans, and particularly African-Americans from North Carolina. The center they planned would let African-Americans celebrate who they were and what their people had done. Harper and Maxwell-Roddey started with a festival in Marshall Park, the former site of the Brooklyn neighborhood. After a second festival in 1975, the women helped to start the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center.

For ten years starting in 1976, the Afro-American Cultural Center used 605 square feet in the former First Baptist Church known as Spirit Square. Other locations were considered including the McColl Center for Visual Art

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