Nishani Frazier, a professor of history and the director of public history at North Carolina State University, first heard about Freeman Vines, the Black artist, blues musician, and guitar maker, through what she jokingly calls “the Devil’s Network”—aka social media.
She’d seen an Instagram post from the actor Billy Porter about a short documentary film he was executive producing on Vines, a self-taught luthier who died in late 2025. Co-directed by filmmakers André Robert Lee and Tim Kirkman, Freeman Vines offers an intimate portrait of the North Carolina artist near the end of his life, forgoing the conventional biographical treatment for a deep, lingering look at Vines at work in his shop.
One thing Frazier didn’t know when she first started planning the screening event, which took place on October 22, was that the Gregg Museum of Art & Design holds one of Vines’ guitars in its permanent collection. Entitled “Skull Guitar,” the work is currently included in the exhibition Community Stories: Sustaining North Carolina Black Heritage, on display through February 27, 2027—and there are many stories about how it got there, only one of which will be told here.
In Lee and Kirkman’s 14-minute documentary, Vines, then 82 and undergoing chemo for multiple myeloma, talks about his philosophy of life and art while hand-carving one of his distinctive guitars, which he would create from a variety of reclaimed and discarded materials—old wood, broken instruments, and other found objects. While his arthritic hands could no longer play the guitar, they could still sculpt one, and the film captures him as he continues his lifelong quest to make a guitar that has a particular sound, one that Freeman Vines once heard and hasn’t been able to replicate since.
It was a sound that Vines would follow till his end, creating hundreds of guitars in his lifetime—and refusing to sell any, although he often discarded them as soon as he realized the sound wasn’t there. Some of these guitars—his “hanging tree guitars”—were crafted out of wood salvaged from the tree used in the brutal execution of Oliver Moore, a Black man who was lynched before a crowd of 200 people in Vines’ hometown of Fountain, North Carolina, in 1930.
These hanging tree guitars are the subject of a book about Vines entitled Hanging Tree Guitars, published by the Music Maker Foundation, which features photographer Timothy Duffy’s images alongside text written by folklorist Zoe van Buren with Freeman Vines.
That these guitars are both works of art and relics of horrific racial violence is a reality that can be hard to hold. Vines himself thought there was something supernatural about the wood, warning folks that you wouldn’t want to play these guitars too long.
“Sometimes when the spirit calls you to do something, it allows the other things to fall into place,” Frazier said of her decision to screen the film at the Gregg, inviting not only the film’s directors but also Vines’ sister, Reverend Alice Vines, who appears with her brother in the film. (Their back-and-forth sibling dynamic, plus Reverend Vines’ spontaneous onscreen singing, are highlights of the film.)
“Skull Guitar,” the work exhibited at the Gregg, is one of Vines’ hanging tree guitars. Frazier urged care with its display.
“I said immediately, ‘That has to be cleansed before you put it on exhibit,’ Frazier said.
At a pretty quick pace, Frazier led the museum through a process that would allow the care and display of “Skull Guitar” to be rooted in and reflect African American cultural practices of mourning, of memory, and of protecting the spirit or imbued energy of the piece.
Frazier knew it would be an impossible ask to complete the requirements of a full cleansing because of general conservation expectations. Community members decided on a private ritual of supplication, using a collection of ceremonial objects which would be placed alongside the guitar (these objects are housed in a glass box, located immediately below “Skull Guitar,” almost like an altar) to “honor, protect, and sometimes cleanse unrestrained spirit force”—as the wall label explains.
“The ancestors were directing us what to do—it was by no means a suggestion.”
Nishani Frazier, professor of history and the director of public history,
North Carolina State University
These ceremonial objects—flowers, honey, incense—are usually forbidden in a gallery due to the possible hazards (bugs, smoke alarms), but for this ritual they were non-negotiable. To make it work, compromises were made in accordance with ancestral input.
“The ancestors were directing us what to do—it was by no means a suggestion,” said Frazier.
Translating those directions within the context of the museum’s needs became a balance that required the museum to adapt its practices and expectations to meet the community’s requirements and not vice versa. “The question in decolonizing museums is when to balance and when to overturn those expectations,” Frazier said of the process of working with the Gregg.
For years, art museums have been grappling with how to reshape their collections and dismantle the Eurocentric dominance baked into most. It’s a long-haul process that involves everything from repatriation and examining the biases of their curatorial narratives to institutional change at all levels.
Moving away from extractive practices and toward community-based engagement with collections is part of the decolonization process for museums. In this case, community engagement transformed not just the content of an exhibition, but how art is cared for and displayed, allowing community values and tradition to dictate how the art appears and is interacted with.
“I give the Gregg credit for this—it was not an easy process. A lot of museums do lip service, and I think it’s powerful they found a way to find a balance between conservation and collection practices,” said Frazier.
Community Stories is one of two concurrent exhibits at the Gregg that focuses on Black heritage. It culls historical photographs, artworks, and ephemera from community partners to illuminate and reflect on memory, creativity, and the generational spiritual resilience of Black communities across the state. It is a localized accompaniment to another current exhibition, Crafting Sanctuaries, which features Depression-era photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration of rural Black communities across the South.
Similarly in dialogue is a third exhibition, held in a satellite space at the university’s African American Cultural Center Art Gallery. You Are Here: Geolocating the Self Through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar, in which digital artist ariana Farquharson responds to Maya Freelon’s immersive installation Grounded, which also just opened at the Gregg.
In late February, when Community Stories closes, “Skull Guitar” will return to storage. Because of this collaboration between the museum and the community, when it is moved, it will be in an archival box that has been specially prepared and lined with protective salt. Frazier points out that such storage allows for both an acknowledged African American cultural tradition of spiritual protection and the necessary institutional practices of museum conservation. “You find the best of both worlds,” she said.
While the safety of “Skull Guitar” is assured, the safety of Black people is not—as we see far too often, racial violence and American terror are not in the past, but fully present today. In September, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley led a congressional delegation in calling for a federal investigation into the numerous incidents of Black people found hanging across the country—at least 10 reported lynching deaths just this year.
“I think the success of a lynch mob is silencing people,” said Freeman Vines co-director André Robert Lee, who lives in Philadelphia and identifies as “the descendant of refugees from the Jim Crow South.”
“Just having Oliver Moore’s name said and recognized is a victory in the face of people trying to erase his existence with the lynching,” said Lee.
For Lee, Freeman Vines “is a pushback hard against that demand to be silenced, because they can’t silence us. … I begged my great-grandparents to talk about their flight from South Carolina, and they just couldn’t talk to me. They wouldn’t—they would tell me to go away and stop bothering them, and ‘We don’t talk about that, and that’s in the past.’ And I never understood it as a kid.”
“As I got older, I thought, ‘Oh, I think I get it now,’” he continued. “It’s just too painful. It’s too hard to discuss. … With projects like this, I’m looking for answers. I’m looking for myself. I’m looking for my family. And I’m looking to stand up against that violence that is still present.”
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