Landscape Information
This outdoor art park effectively extends the holdings of the North Carolina Museum of Art into the surrounding landscape. The site was formerly a Civil War training facility and, more recently, a prison. The first museum building, a scaled-down version of a design by Edward Durell Stone, opened on 50 acres in 1983. In 1988 architects Laurie Hawkinson and Henry Smith-Miller, landscape architect Nicholas Quennell, and artist Barbara Kruger won a national competition to develop a master plan for the site. In 1990 Daniel Gottlieb became the Director of Planning, Design & Museum Park, and in 1997 the first phase of the master plan was realized with the construction of an outdoor theater (now the Joseph M. Bryan, Jr., Theater) and the words “PICTURE THIS” formed by living and non-living materials inscribed in 80-foot-long letters across 2.5 acres. In 1999-2000 the museum campus was expanded by the State Legislature to 164 acres and the first of the park’s trails opened to the public. The park has since grown to include over three miles of paved, graveled, or mulched trails that meander through woodlands and fields and over House Creek, past more than a dozen site-specific works of art that actively engage with the landscape. Greenway Trail crosses the Raleigh Beltline to the east of the park and reaches Meredith College, extending west to connect with Umstead State Park via the Reedy Creek Greenway. In 2010 the West Building opened, with gardens designed by Walter Havener of Surface 678 and three reflecting pools derived from a schematic design by Peter Walker. In 2014 Mark Johnson of Civitas was selected to design an expansion of the Museum Park.
