Qualla: Hickory Museum of Art

Hickory Museum of Art: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Merritt Chase, Public domain. Paul Whitener thought a city of 15,000 people in the Catawba Valley needed an art museum. It was the middle of World War II, the furniture factories were turning out ammunition boxes instead of dressers, and Hickory had no collection, no building, no curator. In November 1943, with funding from local industrialist A. Alex Shuford Jr., Whitener borrowed art from neighbors and hung it in the vacant Bradshaw office building downtown. About 600 people came to see it. Three months later, in February 1944, Governor Clyde Hoey held a ceremony in the ballroom of the Old Hickory Hotel and officially chartered the Hickory Museum of Art Association. Charlotte's Mint Museum, founded in 1936, was older. Nothing else in North Carolina was.

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Image: William Merritt Chase | Public domain

Hickory Museum of Art: The First Painting

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Cole, Public domain. A. Alex Shuford Jr. paid for the museum's first acquisition in March 1944: Burke Mountain, Vermont, by the National Academy of Design officer Frederick Ballard Williams. The price was $140. Whitener, a landscape painter himself, had artistic connections in New York City - the pai...

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Image: Thomas Cole | Public domain

Hickory Museum of Art: Three Buildings

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886), Public domain. Within a year of its founding, the museum moved into the white clapboard W.W. Bryan house on Third Avenue. It stayed there for fourteen years before relocating to the former Shuford Mills office building on Third Street and First Avenue NW in 1960. By 1984 it had outgrown that sp...

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Image: w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886) | Public domain

Hickory Museum of Art: Face Jugs and Howard Finster

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886), Public domain. Whitener's stated aim was for the museum to 'embrace all the arts and crafts of the upper Piedmont region of North Carolina.' The third floor of the building is dedicated to Southern folk art - what was once called Outsider Art, now usually called Southern Self-Taught Art. In 200...

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Image: w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886) | Public domain

Hickory Museum of Art: Accredited and Open

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886), Public domain. Hickory Museum of Art first earned American Alliance of Museums accreditation in 1991. It was re-accredited following a 2014 review - one of only nine museums to make that announcement that year. Of the country's 35,000 museums, only about 1,033 are accredited. To get there, a mu...

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Image: w:Asher Brown Durand (1796–1886) | Public domain