ON VIEW

Chakaia Booker: Weighted Balance

November 15, 2025 – June 1, 2026

Chakaia Booker: Weighted Balance presents works by American artist Chakaia Booker (born 1953), who for more than four decades has transformed discarded industrial materials into striking abstractions. Best known for her use of salvaged rubber tires, Booker slices, twists, and weaves this everyday material into sculptural forms that speak to resilience, regeneration, and change.

The sculptures and wall reliefs on view highlight Booker’s innovative approach to form, texture, and movement, merging influences from African textile traditions, modernist assemblage, and the physicality of labor. Her work reflects on cycles of industry, sustainability, and renewal, themes that resonate with Charlotte’s own manufacturing history.

In the museum’s lobby, Booker’s tapestry Pause (2023) extends her sculptural language into woven form, translating her signature energy and material experimentation into a new medium that underscores her ongoing dialogue between material, process, and transformation.

Hansjürg Brunner: The Trial

November 15, 2025 – June 1, 2026

This exhibition presents The Trial (Der Prozess) (1963–64), a portfolio of forty-five linocut prints by Swiss artist Hansjürg Brunner (1933–1998), created as illustrations for Franz Kafka’s novel of the same name. In Kafka’s story, a man is arrested and prosecuted by an unidentified authority for an unspecified crime, without explanation or due process.

Brunner’s sharply carved figures, bold lines, and compressed spaces capture the psychological intensity and disorienting atmosphere of Kafka’s narrative, emphasizing the alienation and struggle for agency at the heart of the text. The series reflects Brunner’s deep engagement with literature, social critique, and the human condition, translating Kafka’s words into a haunting visual language.

Brunner’s linocuts resonate across time, linking early twentieth-century expressionist printmaking with the cultural climate of postwar Europe. This presentation offers a rare chance to view The Trial in its entirety—a striking meditation on authority and justice that continues to feel urgent and compelling today.

David McGee: The Griot and the Nightingale

March 14, 2026 - August 23, 2026

This comprehensive survey exhibition traces artist David McGee’s (b. 1962, Bernice, Louisiana) career from the early 1990s to the present, featuring more than 100 paintings and works on paper—including rarely exhibited early work, large-scale figurative and abstract paintings, text-based works on paper, and selections from his most recent series.

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Assembly Lines: Modernism and Machines

October 18, 2025 - February 2, 2026

Drawing work from the museum’s collection and important regional and national loans, Assembly Lines: Modernism and Machines examines the profound impact of mechanization, industrial innovation, and technology on artistic production from the early 20th century to the present day. Tracing the ever-evolving relationship between the human hand and the hum of industry from the rise of modernism to today’s era of artificial intelligence, the exhibition highlights how artists have engaged with the possibilities, anxieties, and legacies of the Machine Age.

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Hansjürg Brunner