The Mint Museum welcomed a record-breaking 17,000 visitors to its new facility in uptown Charlotte during its grand opening weekend on 1-3 October, 2010. The debut of the Mint Museum Uptown was accompanied by a 24-Hour Grand Opening celebration, featuring free admission, live entertainment, and art activities for all who attended.

The building also includes a café, the Lewis Family Gallery, painting and ceramics studios, classrooms, a 240-seat auditorium, a Special Events Pavilion with outdoor terrace, and an expanded street-level Museum Shop featuring crafts of the Carolinas and showcasing merchandise that complements both the permanent collection and special exhibitions. Following the opening of the Mint Museum Uptown, the Mint Museum Randolph, located in the historic Eastover neighborhood, will reinstall its galleries dedicated to the art of the ancient Americas, decorative arts, and historic costume, among others.

The Mint Museum and Bank of America have collaborated to present the inaugural exhibition New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection (1 October 2010 – 17 April 2011), comprising over 60 works from the bank’s art collection. Widely regarded as one of the world’s finest corporate art collections, the Bank of America Collection is noted for its quality, stylistic diversity, historical depth, and attention to regional identity.

The exhibition contains a broad selection of regionally-diverse practitioners and offers an opportunity to experience significant works by visionary artists of the past decades. The exhibition will feature paintings, sculptures and works on paper by an array of artists, including Milton Avery, Jennifer Bartlett, Roger Brown, John Chamberlain, Janet Fish, Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, John Marin, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Nevelson, Jules Olitski, Edward Ruscha, Miriam Schapiro, and Frank Stella.

Beginning with works from 1945, the exhibition highlights the strengths of Bank of America’s postwar collection and reveals a range of creative philosophies, approaches and artistic movements, reaching into the early 1990s. Historically-significant works focusing on intense color and geometry as an organizing principle, such as Frank Stella’s Damascus Gate and Ellsworth Kelly’s Black and White Triangle, reveal the monumental scale and rigorous structures of late 1960s through early 1970s Minimalism. Postminimalist works from the 1980s, such as Elizabeth Murray’s Split and Join and Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden, present a return to imagery, while still retaining defined formalist structures.

The vibrant and irreverent canvases of Ed Paschke and Roger Brown exhibit the influence of outsider art and Surrealism. This influence was a hallmark of the second generation Chicago Imagists, a regional offshoot of Pop Artists. The influence of popular culture and media fueled diverse works by Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Longo. Paintings by some of California’s most heralded artists—including Edward Ruscha Clock Speed, James Weeks Ocean Park Studio and Wayne Thiebaud Dark Cake—demonstrate a surprising and complex relationship between abstraction and realism. Deborah Butterfield’s cast lead horse sculpture, as well as Lynda Benglis’s biomorphic reliefs and John Chamberlain’s steel assemblage, comprise some of the compelling sculptural works within the show.

New Visions: Contemporary Masterworks from the Bank of America Collection is organized by The Mint Museum, Charlotte, N.C., and provided by Bank of America Art in our Communities™ program. Through this program, Bank of America has converted its collection into a unique community resource from which museums and nonprofit galleries may borrow complete or customized exhibitions. By providing these exhibitions and the support required to host them, the program helps sustain community engagement and generate vital revenue for the nonprofits, creating stability in local communities. From 2008 to 2010, Bank of America will have loaned more than 30 exhibitions to museums internationally.

The bank did not set out to collect art, but through numerous acquisitions over the years, art came into their possession. “We were the beneficiaries of a trend that began in the 1950s and 60s and peaked in the 90s, when so many banks ran into difficulty,” said a spokesperson in the bank’s New York City headquarters. Bank of America was the beneficiary of that trend and several years they resolved to use the collection to support communities where it does business and, ‘give something back that would allow us to share what we have in a meaningful way.”

In a statement released by Bank of America, they describe their Art Exhibition Program to include fully-curated exhibitions from their extensive collection of paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures and art objects, which will travel to museums around the country, and exhibitions created in collaboration with curators from major museums.

Museums participating in the program include the Mint Museum of Art (Charlotte), the International Center of Photography (New York), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the St. Louis Museum of Art, , the Boca Raton Museum of Art and a number of other institutions across the country. These exhibitions will allow audiences to experience extraordinary works of art from the Bank of America Collection, some of which have never been on public view.

“We are pleased to offer this unique program to museums and to share our collection with the widest possible audience,” said Rena M. DeSisto, Bank of America’s Arts & Culture Executive. “From our perspective, sharing these pieces of art with the public through our museum partners is the best possible use of the collection. Not only is there a cultural benefit, but we are bolstering institutions which serve as economic anchors for their respective communities.”

“The scale and scope of this program is unmatched in the art world,” said Millicent Gaudieri, Executive Director, Association of Art Museum Directors. “Bank of America – which is renowned for having one of the most expansive art collections in the world – is addressing a real need among museums. Not only do these exhibits have extraordinary curatorial value, but they help museums by covering most of the major costs associated with the exhibit. This program will be very popular, both for the museums and their visitors.”

In addition to this collaboration, The Mint Museum is also part of Bank of America’s Museums on Us™ program. Through this unique program, anyone with a Bank of America ATM, credit card or check card has the opportunity to gain free admission to more than 120 cultural institutions across the country, including the Mint, during the first Saturday and Sunday of each month.

by Elizabeth Isenhour, Contributing Writer, with additional content by Richard Friswell, Executive Editor

For more information, visit www.mintmuseum.org