Bechtler Museum of Modern is reopening, with a free weekend for all

Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, at 420 S. Tryon Street, has announced their long-awaited re-opening dates!

The museum will be opening on Friday, September 25th, 2020.

Admission will be FREE to all visitors Friday, September 25th, to Sunday, September 27th, 2020.

You might also be interested in the reopening plans for other Charlotte museums.

Please check back soon to see the Bechtler’s safe opening plan. Since North Carolina is allowing museums to open at 50% capacity, there will be a plan for limiting capacity. And they will also share information about the other ways that they will meet required guidelines and keep guests safe.

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If you plan to visit a different day, make sure to check out this Groupon for a discount!

Experience the debut of the museum’s newest exhibition, 1 Cent Life, which will be on display through January 3rd, 2021.

1 Cent Life, which will be on display in the Bechtler’s intimate second-floor gallery, features the work of Chinese-American visual artist and poet, Walasse Ting.

From the Bechtler Museum’s website:

Walasse Ting (1929–2010) was a Chinese-American visual artist and poet. Born in Shanghai, he left China in 1946 and lived in the British colony of Hong Kong for six years before settling in Paris where he anglicized his Chinese name, tacking on “sse” in emulation of the famed painter Henri Matisse. In Paris, Ting became associated with the CoBrA group whose expressionist style of painting was inspired by the art of children. In 1957, bolstered by newfound success as a painter, he relocated to the United States and settled in New York City.

In 1961, while living in a one-room studio near Times Square, Ting wrote a series of sixty-one poems. These poems communicate the wide-eyed ambition of a recent immigrant. They are simultaneously spiritual and secular, jarring and joyful. His use of free form text references both the tone and metrical patterns of classical Chinese poetry and the rhythm of the American Beat prose, Jazz music, and the urban environment. Each page radiates with a breathless immediacy that exudes a sense of the vital dynamism of New York City in the early 1960s as Ting was experiencing it.

I wrote 61 poems in ’61 in a small black room like coffin, inside room only salami, whisky…photographs from Times Square …no cookbook, no telephone book, no check-book. Two short fingers, typing talking about World & Garbage, You & I, Egg & Earth. – Walasse Ting

On display in the Bechtler’s intimate second-floor gallery, this exhibition features a rare signed limited edition of the 1 Cent Life portfolio and eighteen lithographs from the Bechtler’s collection alongside a selection of Ting’s poetry. Related educational programs will explore themes of the immigrant experience and identity and engage with the regional poetry scene.

The resulting portfolio stemmed from Ting’s desire to capture the zeitgeist of a creative community caught between European abstraction and Pop Art, specifically those artists who, like Ting, bridged both the European and American avant-garde movements. Containing sixty-two lithographs by twenty-eight artists, reproductions of French, Japanese, and American advertisements, postage stamps, photographs, Chinese seals, and sixty-one letterpress poems by Ting set in multicolored inks, the portfolio was edited by Sam Francis and printed in Paris by Maurice Beudet with typography by George Girard. In 1964, the1 Cent Life portfolio was published and distributed by E.W. Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland, where the Bechtler Family purchased their edition.

Also on display:

Ten
On display until January 31st, 2021

Since the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened our doors in 2010, we have hosted more than thirty modern art exhibitions. TEN features a selection of works from sixteen past fourth-floor exhibitions, all brought together to showcase the excellence and share the joy of the Bechtler collection as we look back at the past decade in celebration of our ten-year anniversary. Exhibitions featured include: School of Paris: Abstraction Post World War II, Niki de Saint Phalle: Creation of a New Mythology, Geometry and Experimentation: European Art of the 1960s and 1970s, Mid-Century Modernism: 1957 and The Bechtler Collection, Giacometti: Memory and Presence, Artistic Relationships: Partners, Mentors, Lovers, Modernism in Changing Times: Works from 1968, British Invasion, The Art Books of Henri Matisse, Sam Francis: Rapid Fluid Indivisible Vision, The House That Modernism Built, Bechtler Collection: Relaunched and Rediscovered, Celebrating Jean Tinguely and Santana, Wrestling the Angel: A Century of Artists Reckoning With Religion, and Bechtler Unseen: Works from the 50s and 60s.

The following weekend, October 3-4, is a Bank of America Museums on Us weekend where the Bechtler and other participating museums are free to BOA cardholders the first full weekend of every month.

The Bechtler Museum will continue to provide virtual programs, including music and film programs, which you can watch for free from home.