THE FIREBIRD
Le grand oiseau de feu sur l’arche (The Grand Firebird on the arch)
Niki de Saint Phalle
From the outset of her career in the late 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle’s work defied easy categorization. She employed a wide range of materials and techniques, and her practice is best characterized by an interdisciplinary, socially activist, and playfully subversive approach to artmaking. From the mid-1960s onwards, Saint Phalle’s creative output became increasingly vibrant, feminist, fantastical, and monumental. Le grande oiseau de feu sur l’arche (1991)—known locally as The Firebird—is emblematic of such work. Standing over 17 feet tall and covered with thousands of mirrored tiles, the inspiration for the radiant sculpture is the Slavic fairytale of the same name, in which the magical firebird symbolizes beauty, resilience in the face of adversity, and liberation. Saint Phalle’s towering Firebird, with its wings joyfully outspread, greets visitors to the Bechtler Museum at the corner of Levine Avenue of the Arts and South Tryon Street. Installed in 2009, it has become a beloved public landmark of Uptown Charlotte.
Niki de Saint Phalle, Le grand oiseau de feu sur l’arche (The Grand Firebird on the arch), 1991, Mirror mosaic over polyester on steel armature. ©2026 Niki Charitable Art Foundation. All Rights Reserved / ARS, NY / ADAGP, Paris. Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, 2007.2069.
ATRIUM
Wall Drawing #995: Color Geometric Form (Outline)
Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #995: Color Geometric Form (Outline) (2001) is prominently displayed in the museum’s soaring multi-story foyer and is visible from the street.
LeWitt (1928–2007) was a pioneering Minimalist artist and a founder of the Conceptual art movement. In the late 1960s he expanded the definition of what art could be with his radical assertion that the idea is the most important part of a work, thus privileging the concept over its physical form. Begun in 1968, LeWitt’s wall drawings exemplify this approach to artmaking: for these works, he provided a set of instructions or diagrams to draftspeople who execute the piece. LeWitt likened his role to that of a composer who creates a score that can be performed by others for generations to come.
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #995, 2001, © 2025 Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Gary O'Brien
Painted directly on the museum’s large atrium wall, Wall Drawing #995 took a team of eight people eleven days to complete. To create the geometric shapes that comprise the composition, LeWitt used isometric projection—a method of depicting three-dimensionality on a two-dimensional surface. Painted in primary and secondary hues, the bright bars appear to pop out from the background, simultaneously producing a dynamic effect while demonstrating LeWitt’s focus on essential colors and forms. Wall Drawing #995 was the first work installed in the museum. It is on long-term loan courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt.
PLAZA GALLERY
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Collection, Reframed: Jiha Moon
June 13, 2026 - November 9, 2026
Collection, Reframed is the Bechtler’s annual summer series inviting contemporary artists to reinterpret the museum’s collection. In this iteration, Jiha Moon explores representations of women across time. Bringing together works by artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Gina Gilmour, Meret Oppenheim, and Walasse Ting, the exhibition examines themes of visibility and concealment, agency and identity. Featuring Moon’s work as well, Collection, Reframed fosters dialogue between historical and contemporary voices and invites visitors to encounter the museum’s collection through a new lens.
The exhibition spans across the museum’s first-, second-, and third-floor galleries.
LOBBY
David McGee, Colonial Wipeout from Complications of Water series, 2014-21, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston.
Colonial Wipeout from Complications of Water series
David McGee
Colonial Wipeout is the first painting of David McGee’s Complications of Water series, which is featured in the exhibition David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale in the museum’s fourth floor galleries. The painting demonstrates the artist’s ongoing engagement with art history: the lower register draws on Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave (c. 1830-32), restaging its graphic imagery of tempestuous seas. Yet McGee disrupts the composition with recurring motifs from his own visual vocabulary, including a dress shoe, boxing gloves, a hooked fish, and a small figurine of a station porter—objects that carry layered associations with struggle, displacement, labor, and survival. Above this charged seascape, an expanse of thick white paint spreads across the canvas, its dense impasto evoking both ocean foam and a gesture of erasure—as if covering something up or washing it away.
By merging a canonical depiction of the sea with symbols rooted in Black experience, McGee transforms a familiar art historical reference into a reflection on colonial power, cultural memory, and the forces that determine whose stories endure.
LIVING ROOM
Collaboration 1: My photographic memory of the inside of an abandoned old rural house in North Carolina filled with junk, low angle, hoarder Renaissance blue drapery Vermeer mildew white wall rusty metal cans living room
Damian Stamer
Damian Stamer, Collaboration 1: My photographic memory of the inside of an abandoned old rural house in North Carolina filled with junk, low angle, hoarder Renaissance blue drapery Vermeer mildew white wall rusty metal cans living room, 2023, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and SOCO Gallery.
ATRIUM STAIRS
Colours et étincelles sonores
Gregorio Vardenega
Color and Sound Sparks will play every day at 11:00 AM and 2:30 PM. Learn more about the sculpture and see it running by viewing the video.
Gregorio Vardenega, Colours et étincelles sonores, 1963-70, metal, plexiglass, steel, colored lights, and mirror. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.
Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. 2003.0070. Video by SmART Lab Production.