The hole with The Mint in it

29th June 2013

So this time last week (sort of) I was all packed and ready for the off. The Voice UK was on the telly and given the lack of anything interesting on US TV (or at least the channels we can get) I’d settle for The Voice now.
Today we left the confines of Mooresville and ventured south along I77 to Charlotte. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly. Grand colonial style buildings maybe? Well if they exist we didn’t find them. We’d headed for the Uptown area of the city as our guide book seemed to indicate that this was where it was happening. In fact Uptown is a bit like going to the City of London or Canary Wharf on the weekend – pretty dead.

Uptown is the finance district we realised including a very large Wells Fargo office block. To someone raised on a diet of The Virginian, High Chaparral and Western movies (thanks Dad) then Wells Fargo will always be synonymous with stage coaches getting robbed by men in black hats and John Wayne saving the day. Alas no stage coaches (though we did see a tour of the city by horse and carriage.)

However, we did find a very interesting gallery called The Mint. http://www.mintmuseum.org/ The Mint is on two sites with the other site (out of town) being in an older building that once housed a branch of the US Mint hence the name. The Uptown Mint is in a modern building.

This Mint had a good collection of paintings by Americans from 19th to 21st centuries. And there was much to like. But I was particularly taken with a small exhibition by a photographer called Sharon Core. The pictures featured were of people eating. But I liked a series called The Overtoom Squatters. This was a series of photos of people sat at a long tale enjoying a meal together. And I was reminded of depictions of the last supper.

http://www.mintmuseum.org/art/exhibitions/detail/still-lives-early-works-by-sharon-core

And seeing real people enjoying a meal together in this way made the idea of the Last Supper come alive. In one of the pictures a bearded guy is placed in the middle of the table and he just looks fed up with all the partying going on around him. Very thought provoking.

There was also a painting called “Politics”. I can’t remember the artist’s name. It was relatively modern and had almost a photographic quality to it. It depicted two groups of men (and from their style of dress it was supposed to be set around the time of Jesus Christ) shouting at each other and pointing at one another. In between them is a woman looking downcast. In one of the groups of men is a bearded man. He looks angry but somehow detached from the groups and somehow appears to be concerned with the woman. The woman caught in adultery? I’ve attached a blurry photo I sneakily took.


So I have to say Charlotte is the hole with the Mint in it! Actually that’s a bit unfair. I liked what we saw. The streets are tree lined and there were lots of public spaces with chairs and tables to sit and watch the world go by. But Uptown just seemed lacking in …. Something.

(For those of you too young, too forgetful or not British, the Polo mint, long popular in the UK, used to be marketed with the slogan “Polo. The mint with the hole”)