The Ackland Art Museum is exploring options for its first major upgrades in decades, with aspirations to significantly expand its footprint and create an arts-focused district along the northern edge of UNC campus.
The museum — which operates as part of the university — is planning a $70 million capital project to expand and renovate its spot at 101 South Columbia Street in downtown Chapel Hill. On Wednesday, the UNC Board of Trustees’ Budget, Finance and Infrastructure Committee approved of the museum’s request for advance planning spending authority, using $1.5 million of existing grant funding to conduct a study to capture the project’s scope before issuing a request for designers. The full board gave unanimous approval on Thursday morning without discussion.
Materials provided to the Board of Trustees said expansion would add 40,000 more square feet to the current museum — which would be its the most significant update since renovating its gallery spaces in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The updates would help anchor an arts district, as described by Chancellor Lee Roberts and university leaders, aiming to tie together the stretch of campus that features the Ackland, the Hanes Arts Center, the Kenan Music building, and the on-campus performance venue Memorial Hall.
The preparations for the museum’s capital project comes after the board gave the Ackland similar spending authority a few years ago to explore expansion. UNC Chief Financial Officer Nate Knuffman told the Board of Trustees on Wednesday that the previous iteration ended up being a combination of too expensive and too reliant on outside funding models.
“This project is smaller in scale and scope,” Knuffman said. “It will be funded from 100% philanthropy. [It] will require no state appropriations or permanent university resources. The funding plan is more certain, we already have a substantial level of commitments.
“Also a difference [from before],” he added, “we also have new campus and arts museum leadership, and that’s really excited the donor base to support the new project.”
The Ackland Art Museum hired Shalini Le Gall as its latest executive director last year after the previous permanent director, Katie Ziglar, left in 2024. Coming to Chapel Hill after leading the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, Le Gall was tasked with “leading the Ackland’s proposed expansion and increasing reach and engagement with the arts” in the university’s June announcement of her selection.
“It’s so exciting, isn’t it, to think about the museum as this bridge between the campus and the broader community,” Le Gall told Chapelboro. “This is about serving people who are already so dynamically activating the Ackland and its collection — the thousands of Carolina and faculty, the thousands of K-12 students and educators. So [we’re] Thinking about that broader mission of public service, but again, as we think about the growth both at Carolina and across North Carolina, how a growing Ackland will allow us to better do that work is really critical.”
The project comes as another organization in the university’s visual arts community, Carolina Performing Arts, plans to create more dynamic artistic engagement through its “All. Together. Now.” festival set to debut next February. The multi-day event will span UNC’s campus and the broader Chapel Hill community. And as discussed during Thursday’s meeting, the Ackland’s vision is to similarly attract and involve more people outside of the museum’s walls.
“We really have an arts district there, if you think about it,” Roberts told local media on Thursday, describing the Porthole Alley entrance to campus and line of nearby buildings. “We just haven’t talked about it that way or programmed it that way. But we intend, with the expansion of the Ackland, to build an arts district there in that corridor. And we have also really tried to upgrade and expand the role of the arts within the university structure.”
Elizabeth Engelhardt is the UNC Vice Provost for Arts and Culture, helping oversee the connections between the different visual and performing arts institutions around campus. She said this advanced planning will allow the Ackland and university to begin determining how to create a place that tries to capitalize the artistic energy within the broader community while highlighting the existing strengths of the museum.
“Fifty-two thousand people walk through the door of the Ackland every year right now,” said Engelhardt. “We want them to start their day there, we’d love for them to end their day there. That’s students, that’s faculty members, that’s community members, that’s teachers, that’s people from all over the state. I think we’re rising to meet this moment. I know students tell us that they’re hungry for creativity, they’re hungry for places where they can talk to each other. We know that we, as people, are eager to think about what is the artistic capacity of this moment — we need that for creative breakthroughs [and] we need that for how we’re going to walk into the next generation of Chapel Hill, of North Carolina, of the United States.”
Additionally, the capital project aims to improve several aspects of the Ackland’s current building. On social media, the museum said it plans to “thoughtfully” renovate, with upgrades mentioned to the Board of Trustees including its HVAC, plumbing, electrical, emergency power, fire protection and other environmental systems.
As a university resource, the Ackland provides free entry to all community members and is open Wednesdays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Its latest in rotating exhibitions opened earlier in July: “Continental Shift: Recent Acquisitions of African Art,” featuring metalwork, textiles, beadwork and ceramics from across the African continent, and “Care and Concern: Recent Acquisitions of Modern and Contemporary Art.”
Chapelboro has requested comment from museum leadership through UNC Media Relations, which has said the Ackland will refrain from comment until the board’s vote on Thursday formally approves the advance planning spending authority.
Editor’s Notes: The Ackland Art Museum is an advertiser with the Chapel Hill Media Group. This article was written separately from its advertising agreement and is not sponsored. Additionally, this story was originally published on Wednesday, July 29, and has been updated with quotes and to reflect the Board of Trustees full board approval given on Thursday.
Featured photo by Aaron Keck/Chapel Hill Media Group.
Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
