Art, monsters, and Gothic Revival in North Carolina
In which I go adventuring among artworks, rare books, and manuscripts - and notes on historic houses and museums, and dining recommendations.
A Monster Studies library encounter in Chapel Hill, NC
Last month I spent a week as the Dorothy Ford Wiley Visiting Professor of Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. I stayed in Carrboro, a tiny, pedestrian-friendly hamlet of pleasant eateries, a twenty-minute walk from UNC.
I gave a formal research lecture, enjoyed meetings over meals with faculty and grad students, and poked around the Louis Round Wilson Library Special Collections.
The library’s collections range from a fifth-century BC lead scroll from Sicily to contemporary comics. The North Carolina Collection, the Southern Folklife Collection, and the Southern Historical Collection contain textual, visual, sonic, and artifactual treasures pertaining to local, regional, and colonial history.
I also appreciated books on natural history and collecting, part of the $6.2 million rare book donation made by financier Florence Fearrington (UNC alumna, 1958) in 2020, and even paged through books once owned by C. S. Lewis, containing his hand-written annotations.
In my last hour on campus - after the library closed but while the tiny North Carolina Collections Gallery I kept scurrying past muttering “must visit” was still open - I encountered a Monster Studies story.
Chang and Eng Bunker, the Siam- (now Thailand) born nineteenth-century conjoined twins after whom the phrase “Siamese twins” had been coined, had lived in North Carolina, and the Wilson Library held materials about them!
After initial head-thumping about how I’d missed these by not walking into the gallery all week (I DID visit other galleries; more later), I conceded that I had seen some of the materials before, that my book manuscript did not stand or fall on material about Siamese twins, and - best of all - that Bunker-related materials had been digitized.
Born in 1811, Chang and Eng were physically joined at the hip. During their teens, they acquired agents and began travelling the world for a living, visiting the UNC campus in 1834. They eventually settled in North Carolina, and bought a retail store.
They naturalized as US citizens, chose the surname Bunker, gave up the store in favour of farming, bought land in Surry County and, in 1843, married Adelaide and Sarah Wilkes, North Carolina sisters of European descent. They alternated three days in each household. Their families numbered twenty-one children.
During the Civil War, one son of each twin joined the Confederate army. The family lost money during the war; after it, Chang and Eng began touring again, this time with their family. They died in 1874.
My initial reaction on seeing that two of the twins’ sons had fought for the Confederates was surprise. But Chang and Eng’s actions was in keeping with Southern landowners.
This is what landowning looked like in the antebellum South. The Bunker archive includes an 1845 bill of sale for two enslaved children of African descent, “Mary aged 7 1/2 years and Nicy aged 5 1/2 years”, who were “bargained and sold” to “Chang and Eng Bunker”.
How did the Bunker twins feel about slavery? Did they see parallels between their spectacularized lives and the system of racial categories based of skin colour and matrilineal descent that defined Mary and Nicy as property? I don’t know, and perhaps I shall have little else to add after reading further. People don’t write down all they think.
The William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center is a free university museum providing a speedy run-through artworks from across space and time. The founding beneficiary, William Hayes Ackland (1855-1940), stipulated in his will that he be interred in the museum itself, in an effigy-topped sarcophagus - and so he is.
Ackland had inherited his fortune from his half-sister, Emma Franklin, whose father Isaac Franklin was, as a museum label put it, “co-owner of the largest slave trading operation in the United States, and holder of vast plantations in Texas, Tennessee, and Louisiana”.
Winston-Salem: from Gothic Revival to contemporary art
While giving a talk at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, I visited the Reynolda House Museum of American Art. This century-old historic house built for R. J. Reynolds, founder of a local tobacco factory, sitting on a sprawling estate assembled and designed to include a model farm, village, and garden, is now a historic house, museum, and art gallery.
Currently showing is Stephen Towns’s Declaration & Resistance, a magnificent exhibition of quilts and paintings telling the story of African American lives and labour since the late eighteenth century.
Towns’s quilts were captivating. Look at the feverishly orange moon in The Chain Gang (2021)! Is that a meteor shower amongst prickling of stars? The quilts vibrate with colour. The stark black-and-white uniforms of the prisoners, the candyfloss cartwheels, and mauves and greens of hills and forest dial up the sense of falling into the scene, mimicking the uncanniness of the night, infusing it with the adrenalin and delirium of physical effort.
Dressing Up (2021) reveals an elegant Black woman in a skyscraper city at a dress fitting. Three Black tailors adjust her marvellous outfit. The scene suggests precision and teamwork through bright tapes around the tailors’ necks - tapes that also bring to mind the shackles of chain gangs.
In the context of the whole exhibition, these tapes and the vivid, gigantic sun/moon - a feature of many of Towns’s quilts - invite viewers to wonder what, and how much, had changed in the intervening period.
In Winston-Salem I stayed at the Graylyn Inn, an extraordinary 1930s Gothic Revival manor house complete with outbuildings, mews cottages (where I stayed), and a keeping room for ice cream (which I was, alas, too restrained to sample after an excellent, albeit dessert-free, dinner).
Gothic Revival was a go-to architectural style for wealthy members of East Coast, mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern society (and those rich enough to try to climb into “society” à la The Gilded Age). Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homes and university buildings from North Carolina to Chicago are often anachronic, time-machining you into the Middle Ages with romantic turrets, severe, horror-movie spires, wrought-iron fixtures, and human-heighted fireplaces.
The Graylyn Inn was built for Nathalie Lyons Gray, wife of another tobacco magnate, Bowman Gray. Nathalie bought land, assembling it into the Graylyn Estate, and had a house designed. The family moved in in 1932.
In 1946, they gave the estate to the medical school at Wake Forest University. (Weirdly [to me, anyway], Bowman and Nathalie’s younger son Gordon re-purchased the estate and then donated it to the university. No doubt they had their [tax?] reasons.)
In 1980, a fire destroyed the top floors of the Manor House while the Winston-Salem Symphony was performing on the lawn. Seven thousand symphony goers had the dubious distinction of witnessing the conflagration. The university promised to restore the house to its original, 1932 condition and to open it as a conference venue.
Old World touches still infuse the Inn, giving it an unmistakably American Gothic Revival character - from the attentive butler who welcomes you at the door when you stumble in from the mews cottages at 7am in search of breakfast, to the miniature suit of armour in a stairwell.
Durham, NC
For another mashup day of Gothic Revival and art, I headed to Duke University, in Durham, NC on what turned out to be cherry blossom canopy day.
The Nasher Museum of Art (free admission since 2022) provides another rich survey of the arts of the world, and has a strong contemporary collection.
I was delighted to see one of Nick Cave’s soundsuits. Initially conceived as a reflection on the 1991 police attack on Rodney King and the subsequent Los Angeles riots, Cave’s soundsuits were imagined as a way of concealing the wearer’s identity and embodiment, thereby protecting them from racially motivated attacks. Soundsuits also offer a way of imagining alternative lives and worlds.
Dining roundup
For quick lunches near the UNC campus, try Roots Natural Kitchen (grain bowls and salads) or Tru (bespoke sandwiches).
Great dinners were had at Hawthorne & Wood, Market and Moss, Tandem, & Luna Empanadas (Chapel Hill/Carrboro). In Winston-Salem, 1703 has a gigantic tent for outdoor seating and a modernish, Southernish, celebratory menu.
Links
Bill of sale for Mary and Nicy, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.
Chang and Eng Bunker digitized materials, UNC Chapel HIll.
William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, UNC Chapel HIll.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem.
Graylyn Inn, Winston-Salem.
Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University.
If you like Nick Cave, he's a pretty substantial part of a really interesting recent documentary film on the founding of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) called "Museum Town." Most of the film is about how an old mill complex was transformed into a giant modern art gallery, along with the reactions of town residents to this unusual proposal for trying to revive a former factory town with high unemployment, but there are long sections following Cave as he prepares an installation in one of the enormous art spaces.
So interesting! I knew a little about Chang and Eng Bunker but just a little. Why do you think they chose to settle in North Carolina? The possibility of owning property perhaps?