A study of sixteen Cypriot sculptures in the Ackland Art Museum
Sixteen Cypriot sculptures in the Ackland Art Museum, the university art museum in Chapel Hill, described and analyzed by Gloria R. Park in 2000. Bibliography on leaves 80 to 83.
Storyline · 1985–1991
In 1985 the UNC trustees approved a $2.8 million renovation of the Ackland Art Museum. The museum moved out its collection in 1988, and the University-paid $3 million work, finished in April 1990, roughly doubled its gallery space. The Ackland reopened in December 1990 on the Day Without Art, received grants for a paper conservation laboratory, and opened more renovated galleries in March 1991.
On October 25, 1985 the UNC Board of Trustees approved a $2.8 million renovation that would turn the Ackland Art Museum's entire rear wing into exhibition space. By April 1988 the museum had moved out its 15,000-piece collection, mostly into storage in Wilson Library. The 30-year-old building's interior was to be gutted, classrooms turned into galleries and asbestos removed, nearly doubling the exhibition space, with reopening set for spring 1990.
In the week of April 9, 1990 builders finished the University-paid $3 million renovation, which roughly doubled the gallery space to about 11,200 square feet. The museum reopened at the start of December 1990 on the national Day Without Art for AIDS; assistant director Timothy Riggs said it marked the day by showing engravings after Thomas Cole's The Voyage of Life, the bequest of a person with AIDS. By January 1991 grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a private foundation were to equip a laboratory for conserving its more than 9,000 works on paper. On March 3, 1991 it opened its renovated Asian, Classical and North Carolina folk art galleries. A state hiring freeze had left it short of guards, so it had cut its hours on February 1 to Wednesdays through Sundays.
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Sixteen Cypriot sculptures in the Ackland Art Museum, the university art museum in Chapel Hill, described and analyzed by Gloria R. Park in 2000. Bibliography on leaves 80 to 83.
An Ackland Art Museum publication of 1999 on Joseph Curtis Sloane, who directed the museum in Chapel Hill from 1959 to 1978, built around works acquired during his directorship. It doubles as an account of how the Ackland's collection took shape.
Feasibility study of November 1980 for renovating the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, prepared by the Winston-Salem firm Newman Calloway Johnson VanEtten Winfree with McMichael and McCracken of Chapel Hill as consulting engineers. Thirty-one pages and eighteen unnumbered leaves with illustrations, treating art museum architecture and the museum's own building.
Published by the Ackland Art Center at the University of North Carolina in 1966, a short account of the art center on the Chapel Hill campus. Topics include art in Chapel Hill and the William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, making it a brief institutional publication from the center's first decade of operation.
Fifty-year history of PlayMakers Repertory Company, the professional theater founded in 1975 by Tom Haas with Arthur Housman on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill. Chapters by Bobbi Owen, Cecelia Moore and Gregory Kable follow the company leader by leader: Haas, David Rotenberg and Gregory Boyd, Milly S. Barranger and David Hammond, Joseph Haj and Vivienne Benesch. Appendices list productions, Department of Dramatic Art faculty, MFA graduates and administrators since 1975. Published by the department in 2021, 168 pages, online edition.
John Cook's history of Merge Records, the independent label that Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of Superchunk built in Chapel Hill. Chapters follow the label year by year from 1987 to 2009 and pause for profiles of Butterglory, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Lambchop and the Arcade Fire, ending on how it managed to stay small. Advance reading copy of the first edition, published in Chapel Hill in 2009, 289 pages with twelve pages of plates.
David Menconi's history of popular music in North Carolina, from the working-class roots of the state's traditions to the Chapel Hill and Carrboro rock scene of recent decades. Menconi, who covered music for the Raleigh News and Observer for nearly thirty years, builds the book on interviews and reporting, and Black musicians' contributions run through it. First issued in print by UNC Press in 2020; this is the online edition, 329 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2022).
A handbook to the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina, published by the museum in 1983 for its twenty-fifth anniversary. It combines a catalog of the collection with a history of the museum, which opened in 1958. Includes a bibliography on pages xviii to xx. 170 pages with illustrations, 22 cm.
Memoir of Woody Durham, who called University of North Carolina football and basketball on the radio from 1971 until he retired in 2011, written with Adam Lucas. Four decades of Tar Heel games as heard from the broadcast booth. Subjects include radio broadcasters and sportscasters, North Carolina, biography.
Alex Albright's history of the B-1 band, the group of Black musicians drawn largely from students and graduates of North Carolina A&T who became the first Black sailors of the modern Navy to serve above the rank of messman, and the first of more than a hundred Black Navy bands in wartime. The band was posted to the Navy Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill, the book's Orange County link. Published by R.A. Fountain in 2013, 194 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Brief biography of Frederick Henry Koch (1877-1944), founder of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, by Samuel Selden and Mary Tom Sphangos, with notes by Jonathan Daniels and others. It reprints Koch's own essay 'Folk playmaking' on pages 59 to 68. Published by the University of North Carolina Library in 1954, viii and 92 pages with illustrations and a portrait.
Reviewed in Educational Theatre Journal (1956).
Gay Mahaffy Hertzman's 1971 catalogue of the collection of the William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, the university art museum in Chapel Hill now called the Ackland Art Museum, printed by Herzig Somerville. William Hayes Ackland (1855 to 1940) left the bequest that founded the museum.
Archibald Henderson's short history of the Carolina Playmakers, the University of North Carolina's theater company at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 104 pages. Written while the company was still in its first decades, it gives a contemporary view of how the Playmakers saw their own mission as a people's theatre.
Exhibit publication from the Orange County Historical Museum for its special exhibit on working life, shown in Hillsborough from March to December 2024 and concerned with the county's trades and industrial arts. Produced by the museum in 2024, it documents Orange County and Hillsborough history through the work people did.
Jennifer E. Miller's account of the Hillsborough Artists Cooperative and its Skylight Gallery across their first thirty years, 1990 to 2020. Topics include art in Hillsborough for that period and the history of both the cooperative and the gallery. Published in 2021, it records a local institution in the town's art scene that would otherwise leave little written trace.
Cecelia Moore's 2017 study of the Federal Theatre Project in the southern states, with the Carolina Playmakers at Chapel Hill among its subjects. Topics include theatre in North Carolina in the twentieth century and the relation of theatre to society.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Renovating the Ackland Art Museum, 1985–1991.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/ackland-renovation-storyline-1985/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
