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Adelaide Austell Craver Memorial Lecture with speaker Valerie Hillings

This year’s “Adelaide Austell Craver Memorial Lecture” will be presented at the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum at 2:00 p.m. Sunday, July 30th. The program will feature Valerie Hillings, Executive Director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

About the Lecture

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Adelaide Craver

Adelaide Austell Craver, a 76 years old native and resident of Shelby, North Carolina, died in January of 2019. In 1948 when she was six years old, her parents, the Austells of Shelby, converted the former "Gun Club" of the Mayview Manor Hotel into their summer residence.

Beginning then and continuing for the next 70 years until her death, Adelaide was an active summer resident of Blowing Rock. As an adult she was a constant volunteer and assumed leadership positions of many local charitable causes in the Blowing Rock community.

In recent correspondence with the museum, Adelaide's husband Dick has said:

“Throughout her life, Adelaide loved most everything about Blowing Rock, but especially her lifelong friendship with many of the year-round and seasonal residents there whom she treasured. In addition, she always had a great sense of pride in the place and in her later years the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum was ranked "top priority" on her "Must See" list when showing our visiting house guests around the village. 

Both my daughter Adelaide and son Newton join me in expressing our pleasure and gratitude to have the opportunity which the Blowing Rock Art & History Museum has provided for us to sponsor this year's ‘Adelaide Austell Craver Memorial Lectures’."

Please note: This lecture is a membership benefit, registration is required, see below.


About the Speaker

Valerie Hillings became director of the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) in November 2018. Prior to joining the NCMA, she received her B.A. in art history from Duke University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Since 2004 she has held senior positions for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and worked on projects for museums in its global constellation—Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, Las Vegas; and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice—and with partner institutions in Australia, Europe, and the Middle East.

During her tenure at the Guggenheim, Hillings rose through the curatorial ranks and curated more than 15 exhibitions on four continents, among them RUSSIA! (2005–6); Hanne Darboven: Hommage à Picasso (2006); Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now (2007); Picturing America: Photorealism in the 1970s (2009); ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s (2014); and The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence (2017). ZERO, inspired by Hillings’s doctoral thesis, was a 2014 AICA nominee for Best Thematic Show in New York, and the exhibition’s website won a Webby Award.

In 2009 she joined the Guggenheim’s dedicated Abu Dhabi Project staff, tasked with planning for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, a museum of modern and contemporary art currently under development in the United Arab Emirates in the Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi. As curator and associate director of curatorial affairs, Hillings led a team that brought together leading experts in a variety of art historical fields to develop a strategy for originating for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi a collection of art since the 1960s made around the world in all mediums.

In addition to her Guggenheim projects, Hillings has published and publicly lectured on curatorial practice and on various topics in post–World War II art history and contemporary art. She served on the jury for the Kandinsky Prize for Russian contemporary art from 2007 to 2009 and the international ZERO Foundation Scientific Board, Düsseldorf, Germany, from 2011 to 2014. From 2014 to 2017, she was a member of the Board of Advisors for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. In 2016 she was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York.




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July 27

Jan Lukens: Artist’s Talk

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August 1

Afternoon Art