This Fall Exhibition At McColl Center Honors More Than Its Historic Building

McColl Center will kick off a two-month exhibit Sept. 20 that, on its surface, celebrates a pair of significant milestones for one of Charlotte’s most distinctive—and sometimes underappreciated—arts institutions.

The exhibit, The Long Exposure, will mark the 25th anniversary of the center, housed in an old Presbyterian church at North Tryon and West 11th streets at the edge of uptown. (It’s actually the second of two anniversary exhibits; the first, Ties That Bind, ran from November 2024 to January of this year.) The Long Exposure also will serve as a kind of 100th birthday celebration for the building, although only the walls have lasted for a century; the rest burned down on a cold winter night in 1985.

But the exhibit represents far more than the commemoration of dates. Melissa Stutts, an artist and curator who rents studio space at the center, demonstrates why. “OK, so this is Shoshanna, also a very noteworthy artist,” Stutts says, referring to a photo she’s pulled up on her laptop. It shows a laughing woman clad in an artist’s apron in her own studio. “What is it about that image that jumps out for me, personally? It has a little bit of that long exposure. There’s a motion blur in there. So I know that Chris set up a camera and that the speed at which that shutter clicked caught her movement.”

Shoshanna Weinberger, fall 2022.

Shoshanna Weinberger, a Jamaica-born, multidisciplinary visual artist, was an artist-in-residence at the McColl in fall 2022, when photographer Chris Edwards took this portrait of her. As of July, it was a candidate for inclusion in The Long Exposure, which will commemorate the center’s quarter-century mark in a self-referential but public way: through portraits of the hundreds of artists-in-residence, who have served three-month residencies at the center and stayed in apartments behind it. (Both Stutts and Edwards are former staffers at this magazine.)

Stutts sorted through hundreds, perhaps more than 1,000, images for Ties That Bind and The Long Exposure. She discovered about 20 binders of negatives in the basement one day last year and told her friend Doris Kapner, the center’s senior creative director and a fellow artist, who was trying to assemble a fall exhibit. They’d been shot by Mitchell Kearney, whom the center had hired to take photos of McColl artists from 1999 to 2008. Stutts and Kearney selected 36 representative artist portraits for Ties That Bind and prepared more for digital display.

Asa Jackson, named the center’s president and CEO in January, was an artist-in-residence in spring 2024.

But the center still had hundreds of other images, shot after 2008 by Edwards and photographer and videographer Ben Premeaux. The total volume of the archive compelled Kapner and Stutts to split the retrospective into two installments. In early July—when we meet in the Dickson Gallery, McColl’s exhibit space—Stutts is still working through everything. “I’m going to take as much time as I’m allowed,” she says with a laugh. She and Kapner plan a dozen large images for formal display in The Long Exposure, and video monitors will show other artist portraits, photos and video of their work, and information about them. 

Edwards’ shot of Weinberger in her studio may not make the final dozen, but it’s the kind of image the center wants to highlight. It shows an artist in her element: in mid-gesture, her apron stained, laughing at or with something to her left. Another of Edwards’ photos is a formal portrait, in which she stares straight into the camera with a somber expression. Stutts and Kapner prefer the laughing shot. “Her personality is showing,” Stutts says. “It’s playful.”

Edwards says he wanted to capture artists in a way that reflects the atmosphere of the center—“You can just feel the creative energy when you walk in”—and shows artists and their work in both stasis and motion. “I’ve always just wanted to make people feel something,” he says. “Whether it’s mystery or beauty or light or someone’s eyes engaging with the viewer, I just want somebody to look at my pictures and feel.”

Italy-born choreographer Alice Gosti, fall 2018.

The exhibit’s point isn’t just to introduce artists to the public or honor their experiences at McColl Center. It’s to highlight the connection the center has to the community at large. McColl isn’t a museum or gallery, although it has gallery space. It’s a workshop, an incubator for art where anyone can come in, watch and interact with artists as they work, and perhaps find inspiration for their own artistic pursuits.

“We are in love with these artists. We cry when they leave. We get really emotionally attached,” Kapner says. “That’s what we want Charlotte to understand—that you can come here and have this amazing connection with artists, and most people just don’t know that.” 

The Long Exposure will run from Sept. 20 through Nov. 22 in the Dickson Gallery at McColl Center, 721 N. Tryon St. Admission is free with a suggested $10 donation.

—Lauren Bulla contributed.