At the Gantt Center, art that cannot be broken

This review by longtime Charlotte arts critic Lawrence Toppman was published by The Charlotte Ledger on September 22, 2026. You can find out more about The Charlotte Ledger’s commitment to smart local news and information and sign up for our newsletter for free here. Ledger subscribers can add the Toppman on the Arts newsletter on their “My Account” page.

Today’s Toppman on the Arts is sponsored by the Mint Museum. Potters Market at the Mint returns September 26 to Mint Museum Randolph. Shop one-of-a-kind works by 50+ of North Carolina’s top ceramic artists, plus live music, pottery demos, flower market, and more.

by Lawrence Toppman

Not all American culture this month reflects 9/11, even the exhibits that opened on the 25^th anniversary of the day the World Trade Center fell. Yet as I walked through two such exhibits at the Gantt Center and a third that opened the Friday before, I couldn’t help seeing similarities.

All three shows are about the ability to stand tall after tragedy, acknowledgement of a horrific past and refusal to be laid low by it. African-American artists are reflecting on the forced diaspora that brought sorrow to millions and affects our consciousness today, rather than a single tragic event. But the message of indefatigable resilience has something in common with the national mood after the terrorist attacks.

That’s clearest in “Repossessions,” where seven living artists riff on historical artifacts with dark pasts. These objects, which come from the 1860s through the early 20^th century, sit in two Lucite blocks near the center of the gallery: lists of enslaved people for sale, Confederate money, photos from cotton fields and the Georgia School for the Colored Deaf (run by a member of the Ku Klux Klan!). Remarkably, the artists “repossess” these objects with joy and humor, not just sad reflection.

Chelle Barbour’s “Surreal Plantation” has a science-fiction slant: Dignified women in modern dress, tall as the baobab trees next to them, engage the viewer in a montage in color, while the black-and-white photo behind them shows field hands transformed into helmeted astronauts about to launch into another reality. “The Black Deaf Futurity Center,” a collage on cloth, gives us images of black achievement in a tapestry where white oppressors have been turned into computer glitches or have faded away.

Lana Thomas takes a somber view in “The Slaughter List,” honoring each of 60 enslaved people from one plantation with a name and age engraved in gold on a sheet of handmade paper, taken from indigo plants like those they might have harvested. Marcus Brown’s “Chattel” frames a different set of names above metal shackles; touch them, and you get not only a queasy feeling but the recorded song “But Not My Soul,” reminding us our bodies are not our essences.

That’s also a theme in “Yashua Klos: Cornerstones.” Klos, who’s in his late 40s and was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, has spent the last decade exploring the intersection between people — often seen as floating through space or a void — and man-made materials that both support them and hold them back. The title refers both to building blocks on which edifices are erected and human beings, the cornerstones of any endeavor on Earth.

Klos has an unusual talent: He applies woodblock prints on paper to canvas, creating the illusion that his chunks of wood and stone exist in three dimensions. These fragments often subdivide or support his subjects’ giant heads, which often have a Rapa Nui-like impassivity.

Sometimes he’s literal: “Visibility or Give Me Death,” a spin on Patrick’s Henry proclamation about liberty, consists of those words spread across a cracked sidewalk. The artist must be seen in order to sell work; the individual must be seen to feel wholly alive.

More often, he’s metaphoric. The most emotional piece in the gallery, “The Great Wave,” is underpinned by blue foamy crests straight from a Hokusai woodblock print. Three men, one of them faintly Egyptian and two sleeping figures in modern American dress, recline on fragments of stone, as ghostly faces float up out of the rubble. The peaceful, dreamy image suggests that mortared cornerstones must ultimately crumble, but the race endures.

The most subversive elements pop out in the sophisticated “Sown Together: New Voices in Contemporary Textile Art.” Those of us who had grandmothers who wove or knitted probably associate textiles with cozy feelings, but most of these artists imbue their work with double meanings that are ironic, rueful, bitter.

The image that stayed longest with me — in fact, the most memorable in the building at the moment — runs 46 feet long. Nastassja Swift’s “Security Blanket,” a quilt stretched along three sides of a metal enclosure, contains images of herself and her brother as youngsters, a shyly smiling depiction of him in wildly colorful pants, and a prayer rug with books of history and philosophy piled on it.

All very homey, until you realize it’s a representation of his current jail cell. Yet it’s a positive image, too. It says, “You are not forgotten. You will learn. Faith will see you through.” In short, you cannot be broken, the thought that takes this piece beyond the story of one Black man in prison to a representation of the American spirit.

Lawrence Toppman covered the arts for 40 years at The Charlotte Observer before retiring in 2020. Now, he’s back in the critic’s chair for the Charlotte Ledger — look for his reviews several times each month in the Charlotte Ledger.