We visited the new North Carolina Museum of Art this past weekend. The old museum was one of our favorite destinations for a local outing. We even considered having our wedding there, but were dissuaded by the grand canyon of mud and construction debris in front of the building when we went there to meet with their event coordinator. That canyon was from the construction of the new building for the museum, which opened a couple weeks ago. We waited two weeks before visiting so as to avoid the crowd.

From a distance, the new museum looks more like a storage warehouse than a palace of art. The outside looks like white, prefabricated metal sheets. Upon closer inspection, however, the walls turn out to be glass. Whereas the old museum looked like a pretty normal building that happened to house art, the new building is an ultra-modern construction with artistry infused into every nook and cranny, from the oval skylights to the oval urinals. The glass exterior and the white interior make the building feel airy, open, and light. As soon as we entered, my attention was drawn to two lit-up giant figures sitting on the walls:

The building may be new, but many of the pieces on display were  familiar. There were a couple interesting pieces that I don’t remember having seen before. One was a collection of a myriad of small stone faces, each distinct:

The other was an inverted Mona Lisa made of spindles of sewing threads. There’s a lens in front of the inverted mosaic that flips the image into a correctly oriented replica of the painting:

More photos from the museum: