New cultural district emerging uptown

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art will open Jan. 2, 2010.

Picasso and Dale Earnhardt are about to become neighbors.

A new museum and arts district is unfolding in Charlotte's uptown, one that includes the NASCAR Hall of Fame, arts and cultural centers and a new theater.

First to come on line will be the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts & Culture, which is scheduled to open Oct. 24 at the corner of Stonewall and South Tryon streets.

A combination art and history museum and cultural center, the four-story building will contain 7,000 square feet of gallery space in its three main exhibit halls. An area on the fourth floor includes an outdoor terrace for special events.

The Gantt Center will display the Hewitt Collection, purchased in 1998 by Bank of America. It includes work from artists including Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Jonathan Green and Ann Tanksley.

Across the street, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art will open on Jan. 2, 2010. With about 35,000 square feet of space and designed to be intimate yet lively, it can house about 10 percent of the 1,300 pieces in the Bechtler collection at any time.

Out in front will be an 18-foot-tall Firebird sculpture. Its main gallery will be on the fourth floor, and the building will include an outdoor sculpture garden on a terrace with kinetic displays.

The Bechtler is the only museum in the Southeast dedicated to mid-20th-century European modern art. Andreas Bechtler, a Charlotte resident and native of Switzerland, assembled and inherited a collection of more than 1,400 artworks created by major figures of 20th-century modernism and donated it to the public trust. The collection includes works by Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Edgar Degas and Picasso.

Next door on Tryon Street, the new Mint Museum in Center City is going up with four stories of glass enclosing the building's atrium. A fifth-floor terrace, partially canopied, will be used for special events and is expected to be able to accommodate 250 people for a sit-down dinner.

In addition to housing the Craft + Design collections at the current location on North Tryon, the new museum will include the American and contemporary art collections now at the Mint Museum of Art on Randolph Road. The Randolph Road facility will be getting a new look, and galleries there will feature the Mint's ceramics, art of the ancient Americas, and historic costume and fashionable dress collections.

The Mint's new building is expected to be ready for occupancy in April 2010, and a grand opening should follow in October.

Also part of the complex is the Knight Theater, which will formally open in January 2010 as part of the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center's Broadway Lights Series.

The auditorium, with an orchestra pit that can accommodate 65 musicians, has a stage two-thirds the size of the Belk Theater's. It will provide an intermediate-size venue between the 2,100-seat Belk and the 430-seat Booth Playhouse.

NASCAR's $200 million Hall of Fame is scheduled to open in May 2010. The 130,000-square-foot facility fronting Martin Luther King Boulevard and Brevard Street will include parking for more than 1,000 vehicles, a restaurant, shops, broadcast studios and the NASCAR Newsroom.

Among the attractions will be a 250-set auditorium showing films on NASCAR history, a banked ramp called “Glory Road” leading to the second floor with 15 to 18 historic cars and the main exhibition hall.

Exhibits range from a full-size car transporter that serves as a racing team's trackside nerve center to Richard Petty's Plymouth Belvedere, which he drove to more wins than any other car. Among the interactive exhibits will be a driving simulator that re-creates a race experience

Oldest artifact in the museum: the rear brake drum and other remnants of a Stanley Rocket, a steam-powered car shaped like a canoe to take advantage of the aeronautics. In 1906, it set the world land-speed record at 127 mph at Ormond-Daytona Beach.

A year later it was clocked at 150 mph when it went airborne and disintegrated. A doctor having breakfast on the veranda overlooking the beach was among those who rushed down to assist driver Fred Marriott, whose eyeball was dangling from its socket. The resourceful physician used a breakfast spoon to put it back. Marriott, who lived to be 85, told that story for the rest of his life – adding he could see better out of that eye than the one that stayed anchored.

Also at the museum will be an item memorializing what is called "NASCAR's Darkest Day" – Feb. 18, 2001, when Dale Earnhardt was killed in the final stretch of the Daytona 500. The inches-thick report on the tragedy will be displayed under glass.

This affects comments on all stories.

@Nyx.AuthorDisplayName@ wrote on @Nyx.PostedAtTime@:

@Nyx.repliedToText@

@Nyx.replyAnswerText@

Reply to this Comment @Nyx.Recommender@ @Nyx.AbuseReporter@