Charlotte’s art story starts with gold. The Mint Museum — North Carolina’s oldest art museum, founded in 1936 — now lives in two homes: the gleaming Mint Museum Uptown, a five-story centerpiece of the Levine Center for the Arts, and Mint Museum Randolph, in the 1836 building that began as the first branch of the U.S. Mint.
Uptown’s galleries sweep from ancient American art and European masters to contemporary glass, fashion and one of the Southeast’s finest craft and design collections. Randolph keeps the soul: colonial portraits, North Carolina pottery and elegant period rooms in the mint master’s old home turf.
Wednesday evenings are free at both locations — a Charlotte ritual. Two buildings, nearly 200 years of art, one mint of a museum.
