Saba Taj

Oil paint, glitter, appliques, gold leaf, spray paint on canvas

Location: Grand Staircase

Queer people of color, particularly the queer Muslims depicted in the artist's work, are often defined by the oppressions they face rather than the vibrant, liberating spaces they create. The artist explores liminality through queerness and intersectionality alongside the Islamic concept of barzakh, which represents the in-between—neither one thing nor the other, but both.

In her mixed-media paintings, she portrays her subjects in imaginative representations of barzakh—magical and full of possibility. They look back at the viewer, emerging from and blending with dreamscapes adorned with glitter, rhinestones, and beads—symbols of their queer and diasporic heritages. Her portraits celebrate the in-between and those who occupy it, exploring the rich spaces beyond binaries.

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Jason Craighead

Mixed Media on panel

Location: Main Lobby

Jason Craighead's paintings are a dynamic and expressive combination of acrylic paint, oil pastel, and graphite markings on canvas. The artist's works emit an infectious, fervent energy, where every splatter, drip, and scratch conveys the artist's emotional and profound spirit through gestural mark-making. "Our modern lives are entangled in a complicated world that is in turn joyful, tragic, confusing, dark, wild, and brilliant."

Craighead's creative process combines instinct and spontaneity with purposeful movement and references from emotionally significant books, films, and song lyrics. The effect of his work engages the viewer, inciting emotional reaction and engagement with his emotive narrative.

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Bland Hoke

Banjo parts (necks & pots), steel

Location: All floors, main view Mezzanine

In 2014, artist Bland Hoke was commissioned to make a temporary public artwork to celebrate the International Bluegrass Music Association’s World of Bluegrass Festival. For the next four years, Bland Hoke surrounded the bronze sculpture of Sir Walter Raleigh with the Banjostand every September. The contemporary bandstand was created from hundreds of cast-off banjo parts provided by Deering Banjos and served as a gathering and performance space.

In 2018, Hoke re-imagined the Banjostand as Plume: a kinetic, 80 ft. tall, one-ton sculpture. The completed artwork is inspired by the iconic feather in Sir Walter’s cap.

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George McKim

Acrylic on two panels

Location: Mezzanine

Working intuitively, the artist responds to the marks on the canvas, improvising and building compositions that are at once playful and serious. Their work represents an ongoing dialogue with art history and the material. Drawing on influences from Cubism, the Bauhaus movement, and Expressionism, they reinterpret these art movements and combine them into potent and unique offerings.

The artist embraces an inventive approach in the studio, experimenting widely with material, scale, and dimension. Their work combines oil, acrylic, collage, and drawing materials, often incorporating three-dimensional sculptural elements. The pieces blend a strong sense of design with a painterly aesthetic, creating a vibrant mixture of art history, personal experiences, current events, and nature, infused with a lively use of material.

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Bob Rankin

Acrylic on canvas

Location: Ballroom Lobby

Rankin works primarily in acrylic, depicting the landscape in a traditional manner and then transforming it through a range of interesting abstractions to create a finished work. Rankin's distinctive abstract work reflects a wide range of color relationships, surface treatments, and the excitement of discovery, which draws from his experiences and journeys of exploration around the world. As a result, his paintings are both vivid in color and high in energy.

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Leah Sobsey

Location: Grand Staircase

A cascade of 300 hundred blue and white butterflies of varying markings and sizes moves across and down the wall of the space. Like a swarm of butterflies found in nature. Each butterfly was photographed from the U.S National Park’s insect collections. The varying markings, tones of blue and white delicately move within the space. 

The butterflies were created using a Cyanotype photography process. The artist took photographs of the butterflies, turned them into negatives and then used the cyanotype process to treat the surface of the negative with iron salts and UV lights creating permanent images that where then hand cut and arranged to create the installation. 

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Mariam Aziza Stephan

India ink on paper

Location: North Hallway, 300 Level

Stephan draws and paints imagined landscapes that piece together scenes of conflict, abandonment, and disarray. The artist's parents were refugees: her mother from war-torn Afghanistan, and her father from Communist East Germany. “I think my parents' physical and psychological displacement affected how I was raised. Although I didn’t directly experience their struggles, their circumstances are deeply interconnected with my own.”

Stephan barely knew her mother, who died when she was only four. However, her absence was a constant presence. Using split-level structures depicting scenes of lifeboats cracked in half, fractured piers and scaffolding, or huddled shapes trying to escape or hide shows an abiding sense of helplessness in the face of loss and change. In these reconstructed landscapes that link ecological and psychological upheaval, the artist explores the enormity and power of external forces in contrast to forces small and fragile.

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Ely Urbanski

Monoprint on fabric (bleach)

Location: Near Stairs, 400 Level

Urbanski collects clothes from friends, family, and exhibition visitors, using them as matrices for fabric monoprints. Each piece carries a story, embodying the emotional connections and special occasions associated with its previous owner.

“I believe that what I transfer onto the fabric encompasses not just a visual image, but also the memories and energies of the clothing and their users.” While these connections may not be immediately visible, deeper engagement with conversations, stories, and behaviors reveals a person's character. Similarly, engaging with the work allows you to perceive the memories and spirit embedded in each piece of clothing.

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Stephen Hayes

Twine, wood, and ink

Location: South Hallway, 300 Level

Hayes’s work fuses past and present, addressing sociocultural and economic themes in American history, particularly capitalism and the commodification of beings. By emphasizing recurring imagery, he draws connections between individual pieces to engage with larger societal issues rooted in racial structures. He uses allegorical representations, such as horses, corn, and the pawn chess piece, to critique the ideologies that underpin racial dynamics in American society and our navigation of these ingrained systems today. “My art explores the historical threads of the transatlantic slave trade and reshapes cultural perceptions of Black subjectivity.”

Hayes makes art—woodcuts, sculptures, and installations, small and large—from found materials that draw on social and economic themes ingrained in the history of America and African Americans.

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Thomas Sayre

Mixed Media

Location: Outside of 402

The Tree Paintings series by American artist Thomas Sayre. Seeking visual expression for the awe he’d felt during a morning hike when sunlight found a grove of birch trees on a snow-covered Colorado mountain peak months before, the artist was drawn to the bark-like burn marks left on the hardwood floors beneath his welding table.

A nearly year-long experiment ensued, applying the wild scattered trails of molten metal unleashed from a 3,000-degree MIG welder to various white panels. As with his earlier Smoke series, the artist purposefully brought the physicality of a sculptor to the balancing act of capturing random chance.

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Peter Marin

Acrylic on canvas

Marín’s abstract painting references architecture, landscape, identity, and sacred geometry and uses the languages of color and structure.  As a Latino artist, his intention is to further the discussion on abstraction, moving it from formalist, reductivist proposals to a more richly layered vision that renders his personal sensibility.

Architecture is key in our perception of space and how we use geometry to construct our lives. Understanding the language of geometry and space is a central theme in Marin’s work.

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Mario Marzan

Acrylic and graphite on wood panel

Location: Main Lobby

The relationship between history and identity is explored through transitional states, similar to a makeshift tent that deteriorates over time. The artist investigates how time influences change in spaces, focusing on the intersections of history and cultural identity through aesthetic studies of fluid landscapes.

In their drawings, the artist recontextualizes simplified shapes and symbols from historical, natural, and architectural sources to create fractured landscapes. These forms are mixed and altered to adopt hybrid identities, with vibrant colors highlighting their contrasts. The color palette exaggerates a "Caribbean color" theory, presenting idyllic, exotic environments that reflect the paradise myth while showcasing the interplay between natural and geometric elements.

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Annie Blazejack & Geddes Levenson

Acrylic on panel

Location: Room 304

Annie Blazejack and Geddes Levenson collaborate to create fantastical ecofeminist narratives through their paintings, depicting precarious relationships between women and wild animals. Their work features saturated lighting in nightscapes where fluorescent colors and crisp lines contrast with muted hues, emphasizing the artificial stillness of each scene.

Infused with spooky humor, their art invites viewers to reconsider human-nature dynamics. Are the subjects allies or adversaries? In harmony or conflict? Their paintings resist singular interpretations, encouraging spectators to remain open to multiple narratives.

While appearing witchy on the surface, these works pose deeper questions: Is it possible to truly understand nature? Who should wield its powers, and for what purpose? They suggest that confusion can lead to new realities.

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Gayle Stott Lowry

Oil on canvas

Location: Outside Ballroom A

Inspired by the “theme of living with uncertainty and forces beyond our control, on a personal and collective level,” Lowry’s work is essentially an “exploration of the enormous effect that change and loss have on the environment depicted and those within it.” Thus, it is no surprise that she chose to depict the Raleigh skyline, an image that has been subject to much change over the years.

In the painting, we see old and new side by side—train tracks, the Raleigh Convention Center, high-rise buildings, etc.—juxtaposing and complementing each other. Some places are under construction or renovation. Surrounding all this are trees that litter the skyline, constantly changing and renewing themselves, dying and rebirthing. The timeless sky is depicted at dusk, symbolizing the promise of another end and beginning.

Gift from the law firm of Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP in honor of their partner, Mayor Charles Meeker, and his contributions to the City of Raleigh

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Jean Chavelier

Oil on paper

Location: Mezzanine, 200 Level

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Charlotte Robinson

Mixed media on canvas

Location: Mezzanine, 200 Level

Growing up in Texas, where she developed a strong attachment to the land from an early age, Robinson’s abstract expressionist forays owe a great debt to the landscape. Her study of the landscape and its ever-changing patterns inspired her work and a focus on environmental concerns.

This can be seen in Double Hands which explores the different colors, textures, and changes of the Texan landscape.

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George McKim

Mixed media on canvas

Location: Mezzanine, 200 Level

Ripple, an acrylic and spackling painting on multiple canvases, partially draws its inspiration from and is heavily influenced by the art movement Analytical Cubism. It takes the fractured geometric planes of Cubism and makes them actual three-dimensional planes, instead of being a painted illusion of geometric planes, thus making it a sculptural painting. The imagery is a simplified abstract figure against a background of overlapping fractured geometric planes at different angles that are painted with stripes that represent a ripple effect like in ripples in water. Ripple employs simplified, bold, gestalt imagery, large scale and a direct painting process as a means to an end.

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Doug Van De Zande

Black and white photography on paper

Location: Mezzanine, next to the Marriott Connector

Photographer and father of two, Doug Van De Zande viewed the entire world as his workspace. He sought to capture as much as he could of the world through his camera and had an eye for the things others may easily overlook.

This can be seen in his many black and white photographs, capturing the grit and dedication and hard-working spirit of construction workers. He captures the honest essence of the work and the workers that went into many of the projects in downtown Raleigh.

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