In the early 1990s, the North Carolina Museum of Art had been in its Blue Ridge Road location in West Raleigh for several years, but many of its iconic features had yet to be built: the outdoor theater, or the art installations across campus. Cows from NC State still grazed on the grounds, and a youth correctional center still sat on adjoining land.
During this era, as an undergraduate at Duke University studying art history, Valerie Hillings often ventured to Raleigh to visit the museum. Upon graduating, Hillings maintained ties to North Carolina, even as she embarked on a curatorial career that brought her from New York’s Guggenheim Museum to all five continents. When longtime NCMA museum director Larry Wheeler stepped down in 2018, Hillings threw her hat in the ring. The museum’s collection “enchanted” her, she said, and she was deeply impressed by how the institution had blossomed.
Now, after eight years at the NCMA, Hillings is departing to helm the new Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Under her tenure, the NCMA has continued its evolution—it weathered the pandemic and rolled out new resources for educators and kits for schoolchildren at libraries, executed the largest fundraising campaign in its history, broke ground on capital improvements on its two campuses, and saw the addition of iconic installations, like Raleigh’s whimsical musical swings and interactive kinetic benches.
Most notably, the museum underwent a concerted effort to deepen its ties statewide, especially with its Winston-Salem campus, and launched a reimagining of its permanent collection, the “People’s Collection.”
“We’re so proud that the welcome center and the swings are sitting in the shadow of the smokestack,” Hillings said in reference to infrastructure from the correctional center that has now been transformed into public art. “This space has gone from one of incarceration to welcome—institutionally, we’re very proud of that.”
After Hillings’ departure, deputy director Katherine White will step into the role of interim director while the museum embarks on a search for its new permanent leader. In advance of Hillings’ move to the Middle East, the INDY spoke with Hillings about the role of regional museums, the NCMA’s biggest challenges going forward, and, of course, her favorite painting in the collection.
INDY: You shepherded the NCMA through the pandemic. How did the museum’s role change during that time? What lessons or practices from that era have stuck around?
HILLINGS: We were very lucky: We are a state museum with a park, not a state park, and that helped us stay open during that period. We tipped a million visitors, the park became better known, and actually, more people came through our doors when we reopened.
The pandemic also forced us to think about reaching people through online content. We were one of the pioneers of doing virtual tours, for schools and such. It’s more customary for museums to do that now, but the NCMA was an early pioneer. We designed online offerings thinking about the collection belonging to the people of North Carolina.
The Internet also allowed us to add new hybrid context to our collection: For example, we’d post artwork and share music or a poem that was similar. It got us thinking about interesting questions, like, what happens when a dancer looks at a sculpture and imagines it as motion? Six years later, that spirit of cross-medium collaboration is still with us, and we’re still thinking about ways to incorporate it into our programming.
Your career has taken you to some of the world’s most famous international arts hubs. How do you view the role of a fine arts museum in a place like Raleigh as distinct from the role of a museum in, say, London?
I had been working on a lot of conceptual art, but the NCMA is a center that brings attention to North Carolina artists and brings attention to art types that might not be used by other modern and contemporary museums. In North Carolina, I started to realize how great pottery, glasswork, fiber art are.
A regional museum has the opportunity to be the platform for and celebration of the artists in and around its location. It doesn’t mean that they’re not seen elsewhere, but not in this volume. Here, you can highlight that, say, Beverly McIver is a great portraitist alongside any other artist.
Over the past few years, the Triangle’s local arts ecosystem has seen some big closures and shake-ups. How did you see the NCMA’s role in that local arts scene? Do you think the museum could have done more to prop up the whole ecosystem?
We regularly partner with different arts organizations, from Artspace to individual artists. We’ve done a lot of work with the local communities, and we see ourselves as an entity that supports local institutions, like the popup we did at CAM in 2022. Another example is, while the N.C. Museum of History is closed, NCMA is hosting their festivals. We also have artists in the community teach our workshops, and we want to continue to support that.
During your tenure, the NCMA has undergone a campaign to become more accessible, including to a statewide audience. Why do you think that’s important? How does the relationship between the Raleigh and Winston-Salem campus play into that accessibility?
There was not a lot of knowledge when I arrived that Winston-Salem had a big campus. I developed this notion of place when I worked at the Guggenheim, and I knew that Winston-Salem couldn’t be a replica of Raleigh: They’re a contemporary art center, while we’re the whole history of art. In Winston-Salem, we introduced programming such as book clubs or lounges where people played their records, and it’s been so successful. It has its own personality, and now we’re reciprocally giving each other ideas. We’re also embarking on an initiative in the seven counties adjacent to Forsyth County, to engage with those communities, so that the collection can be used for teaching.
In terms of reaching everyone in North Carolina: We want to be the state art museum, and a lot of that has had to do with how we engage with schools. Teachers can come to Raleigh and receive teaching opportunities around American art. We also offer online courses and virtual tours for people who can’t bring their students to the museum.
Last year, the NCMA successfully executed the largest fundraising campaign in its history. What doors have opened because of that campaign?
The campaign had different pillars: arts, community, campus, and then general support. Under the community pillar, we were able to launch two major programs: the Artist Innovation Mentorship Program and the NCMA To-Go Activity Kits, which we distribute to libraries throughout the state. We piloted that in COVID, started to use those in engagement in schools, and now we can support them in the long run.
Under the campus pillar, we were able to increase accessibility in both Raleigh and Winston-Salem as well as to design capital projects that bridge indoor and outdoor space. A lot of those projects have to do with social space, making sure we lean into connecting the parks to the museums in Raleigh, and the same thing in Winston-Salem. We asked ourselves, “What does that relationship between nature and art look like?”
In Raleigh, we found so much interest in conservation, which is how we keep art alive. Plus, it has science and mystery. So we’re redoing the second conservation lab we have to optimize for the work that our team does. We’re also putting a gallery that we piloted in the West Building into the East Building, where people can watch conservation happening.
What are the biggest challenges that your successor will need to tackle? In general, what are legacy arts organizations’ biggest challenges in 2026?
It’s not a bad challenge, but we’re in the process of finishing those capital projects. Raleigh’s will be completed by the spring. In Winston-Salem, it’s getting the construction off the ground, and there’s still fundraising to be done there to make those projects optimal.
We’re two years away from the next gubernatorial election. We’re part of a department that’s tied to a governor, and that can bring about change. It might not be a challenge, but it’s a reality: Who will our new secretary be? And then—the financial needs of institutions don’t tend to get smaller.
What are you most proud of from your eight years at the museum?
I am proud of the way we’ve centered our service mission during my tenure. We were featured in a New York Times article in 2022 talking about the importance of regional museums, and that’s truly what we are. We have owned our community partnerships and our role as a regional and state entity. That is our superpower. That doesn’t mean we don’t do masterpieces and things like that, but if you don’t do that, then you’re not doing what the museum was created to do.
Two fun questions to finish us off. If you could live inside the world of any piece of art in the museum, which would it be and why?
(Laughing): Mickalene Thomas’ Three Graces. Those ladies are so fabulous, in their bedazzled dancing mode, in their Cubist landscape. I think that would be a fun one.
And finally, as a parting gift, would you like to give our readers a fun fact about the NCMA?
In the 1990s, when Thomas Sayre made Gyre [the iconic three rings statue on the Raleigh campus], people kept asking him, surely you found all these treasures digging into the land! And he said, we found one thing. An old fork. We wished there had been more finds to inform them about the land and its history. But there was just a fork.
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