By: Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
The Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State University opened an immersive exhibition by Artist-in-Residence Maya Freelon, as the centerpiece of a season of Black history and art programming.
The “Grounded” exhibit pairs new installations with works from two decades of Freelon’s career, including her signature layered tissue paper pieces and vibrant color. Freelon’s maternal grandmother inspired her use of tissue paper. The show also includes work by her father, Phil Freelon, and her great-grandfather, Allan Freelon Sr., a pioneering African American Impressionist painter active during the Harlem Renaissance.
Phil Freelon, an NC State College of Design alumnus, was the principal architect of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the museum says the space hosting the show was shaped by his architectural influence. Museum materials credit him with designing the Gregg’s contemporary, LEED-certified wing.
Maya Freelon, Phil’s daughter, is an award-winning visual artist and educator whose work has been exhibited in Paris, Jamaica, Madagascar and Italy. The Huffington Post named her one of “30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know,” and her work has appeared on the cover of Walter Magazine and in the books “Art of the State” and Garden & Gun’s “Southern Women.” Institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture have commissioned or collected her pieces.
The satellite exhibition at NC State’s African American Cultural Center Gallery extends the conversation as digital humanist and storyteller Ariana Farquharson is showing in her exhibit, “You Are Here: Geolocating the Self Through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar,” created in dialogue with the Gregg and with Freelon’s installation.
The show features 2D prints, 3D prints, and animations of AI-generated abstract forms Farquharson calls “diasporic wayfields.” Drawing on ancestral ideas of inherited and inhabited fluidity, it invites visitors to build on Freelon’s exploration of her own origins.
“Grounded” is part of a curated season of the museum titled “Grounded at the Gregg,” which centers Black Southern heritage, community, and wellness. It also marks the relaunch of the museum’s Artist-in-Residence program, designed to place artists in campus teaching and community dialogue, with Freelon as the 2026 flagship resident.
Other exhibitions in the season include “Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South,” which draws on rarely seen Farm Security Administration photographs by seven photographers across six Southern states. The images show how Black Southerners turned domestic and communal spaces into places of refuge during a time of economic turmoil and racial violence, and the museum is pairing them with North Carolina-connected pieces from its permanent collection. “Community Stories: Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage,” on view through February 2027.
