from the News & Observer: Tar Heel of the Week: 
Published: Jan 28, 2007
Ellen Sung, Staff Writer

Gadfly champions N.C. art history
Outspoken gallery owner dreams of contemporary museum for artists

RALEIGH - The N.C. Museum of Art focuses on international art history, such as the recent "Monet in Normandy."

But for those interested in the art history of the Tar Heel state, the best destination is often not a museum at all, but a private gallery in a century-old house in the Glenwood South neighborhood.

Lee Hansley, owner of Lee Hansley Gallery, is an art dealer, but he's a promoter as much as a proprietor. His life's work is to showcase the living history of North Carolina art, from big names like George Bireline to new talent like Ashlynn Browning.

Hansley's current show is a perfect example of his museum-like ambitions: It's a memorial tribute to the recently deceased painter Ted Potter, former director of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem. The exhibit includes painting and sculpture from 20 of Potter's friends.

"Do you think I'll sell a thing from this show?" Hansley said on a recent afternoon. "No, this is an exhibit for my friend."

Hansley, 59, is short and portly, with silver hair and beard and a patrician Eastern North Carolina accent. Often, his black square-rimmed glasses are perched on top of his head; always, he wears nothing but black, to avoid clashing with the artwork.

Unabashedly liberal, brazenly outspoken and often imperious, Hansley has always been a crusader. He studied journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill, leaving after two years to write and edit at the Daily Herald in his hometown of Roanoke Rapids. He spent the next decade at small newspapers in Eastern North Carolina and was founding editor of Halifax County This Week.

He and two other staffers quit that newspaper in 1978 in protest, after the publisher pulled an editorial cartoon that showed the town board of Hobgood trying to hide its budget from a reporter. Hansley thought the publisher was pressured to reject the cartoon by advertising employees.

Today, Hansley still reads voraciously and comments vociferously, reminding friends, "I'm a newspaper man, you know."

Noticing N.C. artists

Hansley's newspapers, though small, had more than their share of cultural news, reflecting his interests in jazz, classical music and visual art. In 1980, he joined the art world as an associate curator at SECCA.

"He was always a champion of North Carolina artists, as he has continued to be to this day," said Vicki Kopf, executive director of SECCA and a former curator who worked with Hansley in the early 1980s. "He really kept reminding us of North Carolina artists, and he was great at discovering new artists that had moved into the state."

Hansley moved to the Triangle in 1986, becoming promotions director at WUNC-FM, an NPR station, and independently curating major shows for artists with local ties, such as Edith London, Marvin Saltzman and Silvia Heyden.

In 1993, he opened his own art gallery in the Capital Club Building in downtown Raleigh. In the early days, the gallery was as experimental as SECCA. There was a show of 15 working telephones, including a 4-foot, hand-carved wooden phone and one that visitors dialed like a harpsichord. For a pottery show, Hansley hauled 25-pound bags of white sand upstairs and strewed it around shelves and the floor.

"It was forever getting that sand out of the carpet," Hansley said.

He moved the gallery to Glenwood South in 1999. The floors are hardwood.

He also grew into his role as a Raleigh gadfly, legendary for his tart comments. He wrote an opinion column arguing that if Raleigh could outlaw dogs on leashes, it could outlaw begging downtown. He outraged firefighters across the state by fighting the installation of the N.C. Firefighters Memorial in Raleigh's Nash Square. And he still describes Carl Regutti's bronze sculpture as "just awful, the worst thing I've ever seen."

Hansley slammed his former employer, WUNC-FM, for promoting "twangy, barnyard music, a few notes shy of hillbilly."

"That probably doesn't serve me very well, to be so outspoken," Hansley said, just before recounting a recent police chase in his neighborhood and adding matter-of-factly: "I'm from the '60s. I don't like the police."

Sculpture squabble

Among the many with whom Hansley has clashed is Tom Fetzer, who became Raleigh's first Republican mayor partly by opposing public art as wasteful spending. When Fetzer was mayor, Hansley served on the city's Arts Commission.

"He took my hide off more than once when I was mayor, but we always had fun together," Fetzer said. "He and I are going to disagree on more things than not. ... [But] in a world where most people are fearful of offending someone or saying the wrong thing, Lee is willing to venture in where angels fear to tread."

Hansley still considers it one of his great achievements that over Fetzer's opposition, the city installed the Light + Time Tower sculpture on Capital Boulevard. Fetzer had blasted the art purchase as wasteful spending. The sculpture was recently appraised at five times its purchase price.

Next, Hansley wants to start a museum to collect the work of North Carolina artists and craftsmen. He launched the idea for the Museum of Contemporary Art-North Carolina, or MoCA-NC, with some fanfare in 2003. But he raised only about $10,000 of the $250,000 that the museum needs to operate for its first year.

Hansley's plans suffered a major setback with his surgery for a heart condition, discovered in 2005 on the same day he found out he was receiving Raleigh's Medal of Arts.

Now fully recovered, Hansley hopes to find a developer who will donate space for MoCa-NC so that it can open by 2010. He thinks a new museum is the way to go after years of unsuccessfully pushing the state-run N.C. Museum of Art to include more North Carolina art history.

"It's a dead horse," Hansley said. "So, I'll do something about it in a different way."

(News researchers Lamara Williams-Hackett and Susan Ebbs contributed to this report.)