NYT loves on Levine Museum
New York Times critic-at-large Edward Rothstein, who often writes about museums, had some pretty nice things to say about Charlotte’s own Levine Museum of the New South in Saturday’s national edition. He lauds both the permanent exhibit, "Cottonfields to Skyscrapers," (while also mentioning the LMNS President Emily Zimmern told him that the conclusion of the exhibit, which tells the familiar story of Charlotte as a major banking center, is about to be revised) and the current exhibition, "Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor."
He seems especially impressed with the straightforward storytelling approach that the Levine takes — that is, it tells the full story of the South since the Civil War, unblinking, warts and all. (If you’ve ever been to the Atlanta History Center, in which boosterism runs rampant through the core exhibit on Atlanta’s history and then hits an entirely new, positively cloying level in the story of the Atlanta Olympics, you’ll empathize with Rothstein’s point that Southern museums usually fail in this regard.) Rothstein’s review is a proud moment for the still-young Levine Museum (where, it should be noted, my wife works, though she did not threaten to withhold dinner if I did not write this blog post) and a fine moment for our city too.
