UNC Greensboro, Reeling from Dissent Over Program Cuts, Gets $5 M. Contemporary Art Gift

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina Greensboro will recieve a gift of 270 contemporary artworks and funding worth $5 million from Carole Cole Levin, a North Carolina-based artist and philanthropist.

The gifted works represent more than 150 artists, the bulk of whom were born in the U.S. and half of them born before 1950., and will start to be exhibited in spring 2025. The additional funds will also allow the museum to renovate its building and create programming for a teaching museum called the Cole Levin Center for Art and Human Understanding. It is set to open 2026.

While talks around the gift with Levin began in 2022, following the death of her husband Seymour Levin the previous year, the situation at UNC Greensboro has changed dramatically in the interim.

Last fall, the school hired an outside consultancy to review programs with low enrollment rates, leading to reccomended cuts of foreign language minors and humanities majors. The campus then erupted in protest when an independent review published by Howard Bunsis, a professor of accounting at Eastern Michigan University, showed UNCG to be in “solid financial condition” and argued that the cuts were unnecessary and high salaries for administrators should be reviewed. In January, as students and faculty continued to protest, an associate dean at the school resigned, accusing the administration of a lack of transparency on the cuts.

In February 2024, the school’s chancellor’s office published a plan for 2024-2025 cuts to its overall budget. The office that oversees the museum, and a portion of $5.2 million that goes to its operations, saw its budget cut by 2 percent.

By August, students and faculty of the North Carolina college UNC Greensboro were still fuming from cuts to academic programs.

Levin, meanwhile, is also an artist, known for feminist sculptures and drawings. Her collection, of which the gift represents one third, includes many works by women artists including Mimi Smith, Nancy Grossman, Meret Oppenheim, Martha Wilson, Joyce J. Scott, and Eudora Welty.

Levin served on the advisory board for the museum in the 1990s and was behind exhibitions and acquisitions of women artists like Hannah Wilke and Lorraine O’Grady, whose subject matter on women’s bodies and race were considered controversial for the museum. At a benefit in New York in 2022, Grossman said Levin was key in “tipping the scale” over what the Weatherspoon was willing to show to the public.