Modernism in Greensboro

Modernism in the Piedmont had humbler beginnings than across the state. Gregory Ivy, considered by some to be the father of Modernism in Greensboro, came to the community in 1935 and established the Department of Art at Woman's College where his forward-thinking attitudes changed the way Greensboro viewed art and design. Edward Loewenstein settled in Greensboro in 1946 and advanced the Modernist agenda, but in ways that spoke more of a regional aesthetic married to the international movement. His aesthetic softened the sometimes hard geometries of the Modern style, and with collaborators, he generated a gentler version of Modernism at mid-century. Outside of his firm, very few espoused Modernism at any grand scale, although the community contains a number of important contemporary works by well-known Modernists.

In Asheville, the establishment of a new experimental college brought numerous international artists to North Carolina in the 1930's and 1940's, many of who were refugees from war-torn Europe. The Black Mountain College (1933-1957) demonstrated the promise of Modernism as a beacon of pioneering ideas and explorations led by Josef Albers, an artist native of Germany. Albers brought many of the teaching ideals from the Bauhaus and helped develop a fusion of Modernism and progressive explorations in a deeply intellectual and creative community. Among the many artists to teach and study there were Walter Gropius, Willem de Kooning, Barbara Morgan, Buckminster Fuller, Cy Twombly, and Robert Rauschenberg. In their collective work, Black Mountain College and its students considered areas like action painting, existential art, pop art, decollage and assemblage, beat art, op art, and kinetic art.

In the East, North Carolina State University hired Henry L. Kamphoefner in 1948, an architecture professor from the University of Oklahoma, to head a new school of architecture and design. Kamphoefner hired a number of faculty members: George Matsumoto, Matthew Nowicki, James Fitzgibbon, Duncan Stuart, Eduardo Catalano, Milton Small, Edward Waugh, and John Latimer. Through their work on campus in disseminating Modernism's message to students, and importantly in their tangible work on the landscape in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, these faculty members advanced Modernism's cause in traditional North Carolina east of Greensboro.