Charlotte’s Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture has a monumental new reason to visit. The Earth Swallower, a solo exhibition by artist and MacArthur Fellow Walter Hood, is now on view through January 25, 2027 — and it literally rises through the building, its large-scale sculptures bursting through the gallery floor and shifting in the light as you walk around them.
Hood, a Charlotte native and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, works across art, landscape, architecture and urban design. He built this exhibition as a requiem, weaving together the Gullah Geechee basket-weaving traditions of the South Carolina Sea Islands, the iconic sweetgrass fanner basket and the memory of the land. One thread reaches back to childhood summers on Edisto Island, where Hood learned to read a landscape as art, history and home all at once.
The show grows out of research Hood began more than 15 years ago into how Black communities rebuild and reimagine the places they live. Standing before sculptures that seem to swallow — and re-emerge from — the earth, visitors get a story about resilience after disaster, about what rises again, and about the hands that keep old crafts alive. It is the first of five exhibitions in the Gantt Center’s 2026–2027 season, presented by Wells Fargo.
The Gantt Center, at 551 South Tryon Street in Uptown’s Levine Center for the Arts, is one of Charlotte’s happiest cultural landmarks — four floors named for local figures including Dorothy Counts-Scoggins and Judge Shirley Fulton. Plan your visit at ganttcenter.org.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
