Gregg Museum Voted Best Kept Secret in Wake County — Again

For the second straight year, INDY Week readers have voted for NC State’s Gregg Museum of Art & Design as one of the “Best-Kept Secrets” in the Raleigh area.

The Gregg was recently selected as “Best-Kept Secret” in a readers’ poll for INDY Week’s Best of Wake County for 2023. It was also a finalist for “Best Art Museum in Wake County.”

“Winning ‘Best-Kept Secret’ two years in a row makes me smile,” said Roger Manley, the Gregg Museum’s director and curator since 2010, “because it suggests how personal the greater community now considers their relationship to the museum. While it’s hardly a secret — after all, it’s in plain view from busy Hillsborough Street and NC State’s Memorial Belltower — people think of the Gregg like they think of a favorite park bench, a favorite restaurant, favorite shop, favorite barber or hairdresser and so on:  i.e., a place to share with their closest friends or a place to take out-of-town visitors when they are trying to show them how cool and impressive Raleigh has become. Just as everyone has a ‘my hangout,’ or a ‘my go-to spot when I want to relax and feel better,’ more and more they are talking about the Gregg as ‘my museum,’ where they know they’ll feel welcomed and know they’ll come away feeling more inspired and energized. They enjoy the gardens and landscaping as much as the exhibitions.”

Admission to the Gregg is free for everyone. Some of the current and upcoming exhibitions on view at the Gregg include:

• True Likeness (closes on July 23) 
• This is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect is on view through Oct. 7. The curator, Mark Sloan, is joining the museum on May 18 at 6 p.m. to lead a tour for the public. 
• Opening June 29 is a semi-permanent installation of objects from the Gregg Museum’s permanent collection of over 54,000 objects. These will rotate over time and much less frequently than usual exhibitions, with different sections changing rather than the entire gallery space all at once. 
• On Sept. 7, the museum is opening an exhibition in collaboration with the College of Design titled Leading by Design: Celebrating 75 Years of the College of Design. Leading by Design celebrates the design school’s legacy by showcasing artworks from the Gregg Museum’s permanent collection created by professors and instructors associated with it in its formative years along with an audiovisual element that marks its ongoing impact in the 21st century.
• On Nov. 4, the museum is opening an exciting traveling exhibition titled BLOW UP II: Inflatable Contemporary Art. This exhibition explores the imaginative ways that air is used as a medium to create large-scale sculptures.

Learn more about the Gregg, its exhibitions and other programming at https://gregg.arts.ncsu.edu/.