The ArtSchool and the ArtsCenter in Carrboro, 1974–1994

Jacques Menache, who had earned an MFA at UNC the year before, began work on the ArtSchool in Carrboro in August 1974, and its first painting and drawing classes met about two months later in an upstairs studio on East Main Street. He said he started it after UNC's evening school stopped offering art classes. In 1980 the Daily Tar Heel called him the school's co-founder with his wife, Amy Menache; the two added printmaking, children's art, dance, drama and what the paper called the town's first art gallery. In April 1976 the Gallery Theatre, started by actor and playwright Martin Holtz and an actress, gave its first plays as a benefit for the school at 150 East Main Street, and in October 1977 it opened Edward Albee's Listening and Counting the Ways, billed as the first American production outside New York.

In the fall of 1978 the Gallery Theatre was told to leave its space in Carr Mill Mall when the developer, Southern Real Estate, promised it to a group planning a disco. That deal fell through days later, and late in 1978 the school signed a $10,000-a-year lease for a former warehouse in the mall. On January 9, 1979 the Carrboro Board of Aldermen voted $2,000 to help it move. By 1979 the school had about 30 instructors and some 350 students a quarter.

A Sunday night jazz series began at the ArtSchool about February 1983; when it nearly ended in 1984, two organizers held a benefit that drew 300 people and took over its booking. On March 28, 1985 Menache said the school had outgrown its 7,000 square feet at Carr Mill and would begin leasing the former Piggly Wiggly supermarket on East Main Street, with an option to buy the shopping center for $600,000. That September it opened Changing Traditions: North Carolina Folklife, with classes and tours led by UNC folklorists.

By August 1986 a partnership formed with Menache had bought the whole shopping center for an arts-centered development; the school had to leave Carr Mill by December and was $45,000 short of its moving costs. At a reception on October 9, board chairman Richardson Preyer Jr. announced that the theater in the new home would be named for the late Earl Wynn, the ArtSchool's chairman from 1980 to 1985, and Glaxo gave $20,000 toward the $936,000 capital campaign. On October 28 the Carrboro aldermen widened a limited permit so the conversion of the supermarket could go on. The school closed its Carr Mill home on December 14 as its lease ran out; Menache said it still had to raise $400,000.

By late March 1987 the school had taken the name The Arts Center for its building of about 21,000 square feet at 300 East Main Street, which was to hold a 355-seat theater, a dance studio, a gallery, classrooms and a senior citizens' room. An anonymous donor offered $75,000 if the center raised $150,000 by June 30, and the A. J. Fletcher Foundation gave $25,000. On June 3 the ArtsCenter hoisted a steel gable over its entrance to mark a $30,000 gift from Burroughs Wellcome, its largest donation; the opening had slipped to July for lack of money. The building opened officially on July 13 with the first event in the Earl Wynn theater, though permanent chairs and carpeting were still to come that September.

Menache resigned in April 1988 amid what the Daily Tar Heel called a storm of controversy. Giles Blunden served as interim director, and in September the center chose Aubrey Bowie, former executive director of the Fine Arts Center in Camden, S.C., from about 60 applicants as its director, effective October 15. The center said it was holding three times as many events as before and up to 100 classes a semester.

After a 1986 fund drive fell about $500,000 short of its goal, the ArtsCenter came near bankruptcy early in 1990. Pressed by its landlord, Main Street Partners, to pay more than $28,000 in back rent by February 21 or lose its lease and face a $150,000 loan call, the center proposed on February 13 that Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Orange County form a nonprofit to buy its half of the building and lease it back; Chapel Hill council member Nancy Preston, who sat on the center's board, called the request appropriate. On March 29 the board voted 20 to 2 to sue Main Street Partners, the partnership that owned the West End shopping center building, claiming the center was the rightful owner because the original purchase option had been in its name, and approved a letter of intent to keep negotiating a purchase. The three governments were weighing a plan to buy the building jointly for about $491,000 over 15 years, and the center had raised $90,000 of a $150,000 goal in a month. In June seven local banks foreclosed on a $150,000 loan to the center, leaving its 36 guarantors to pay the debt; the board set up an escrow account at NCNB for their payments and on July 3 elected Fred Good interim chairman. By late August the banks had collected about $100,000, and NCNB's attorney sent letters demanding $5,000 each from guarantors who had not paid. A task force working with the Chapel Hill Public-Private Partnership raised money over the summer and the board was made smaller, and by October Good, as board chairman, said the debt was down to $240,000; Chapel Hill had given $6,300, Carrboro $3,300 and Orange County $3,000. Studio Five, a gallery at the center for local photographers, opened on September 22. On October 29 the Chapel Hill Town Council voted 5 to 4 to give the center $8,751 of hotel-motel tax money and hold the rest of a recommended $15,000 until it saw the center's audit, with Joyce Brown, Nancy Preston, Arthur Werner and Joe Herzenberg voting no; Roosevelt Wilkerson said an organization led by an African American would have been closed by now, and Mayor Jonathan Howes ruled him out of order. On November 26, after Alderman Frances Shetley reported that Carrboro had given the center $120,301 since 1978, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen voted 4 to 3 to hold a December 11 public hearing on its request for $11,250 toward its rent. The center, which had just hired Eileen Helton as general manager, also asked the Chapel Hill Town Council to keep paying $2,033 a month through the fiscal year.

By August 29, 1991 Glaxo Inc. had given the center $25,000 and agreed to match any town grant up to $25,000, as the center asked Chapel Hill for $14,000; Carrboro had granted it $15,000 for 1991-92 and Orange County $5,000, and it had formed a 17-member teen council. On September 23 the Chapel Hill Town Council gave it $14,000, half of the town's hotel-motel tax money for cultural services, for a community film series, as the center worked off a $14,528 deficit; council members Joyce Brown and Roosevelt Wilkerson voted against it, saying other groups should have been told the money was available. On January 22, 1992 the center appointed a Chapel Hill High School junior and a UNC sophomore to its board of directors, raising it to 14 members. In July Freda Ramey began organizing North Carolinians Against Unfair Spending in the Arts and a petition drive charging that the center did little for Black and other minority artists or for poor and young residents; Helton and Good answered that about a third of its performances featured Black artists and that three board members were Black.

In March 1993 the ArtsCenter began a Thursday evening Renaissance Coffee House for performance art, music, poetry and talk with the audience. In January 1994 the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce's Major Campaign Review Board approved its $900,000 drive: $575,000 to buy the East Main Street building it leased, whose owners had agreed to sell by April 1996, $200,000 to retire debt and $125,000 for operations. In February the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation gave it $10,000 for its children and families programs. On September 27 the Carrboro Board of Aldermen pledged $15,000 a year for each of the next 10 years in a nonbinding resolution meant to show banks the center was a sound investment; Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird called it a vote of confidence, Alderman Frances Shetley voted against it, and the center, renting month to month, had raised about $215,000 toward its $575,000 goal.