Press Releases

Somerset Place State Historic Site will commemorate Black History Month with a virtual program, “The Anthropology of Adornment and Identity at Somerset Place.” 

Reconstruction remains one of the most misunderstood periods in our nation’s history. Broadly, it was about the meaning of citizenship as African American enslaved people seized their freedom and the restoration of the former Confederate states to the Union. At the local or regional level within the American South, however, these broad issues played out very differently.   

The State Archives of North Carolina will host a virtual presentation, “Discovering and Telling Lost and Unknown Stories: A Family Odyssey,” Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2-3 p.m.  Deputy Secretary for Archives and History, Dr. Darin Waters, will discuss his research into the Rice and Waters families of western N.C., the importance of the State Archives and other public collections, and his donations of family materials. Join this free webinar to celebrate Black History Month and consider the significance of family and regional history for North Carolina.

The Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum is open for Black History Month tours during February. Join the museum staff for tours daily at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., departing from the Visitor’s Center. Tours will include the grounds of the former Palmer Memorial Institute and Canary Cottage, the former home of Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown. Come learn about Dr. Brown’s social justice activism, civic work, and the impact that she had on her students. Tours are $2 per adult and $1 per child.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced its first round of recommended awards for the fiscal year 2022, totaling nearly $33.2 million, on Jan. 11. Of that amount, $540,000 was awarded to 28 North Carolina grant recipients from arts organizations, universities, theater companies, discipline-specific festivals, and museums.

The opening of "Freedom! A Promise Disrupted: North Carolina, 1862-1901," at the Western Office of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources been postponed. The exhibition has been rescheduled to run Wednesday-Saturday 10 a.m-2 p.m., from Feb. 16-March 31. Admission is free. Water from a broken pipe damaged areas on all five floors of the building but the exhibition space and collection were not harmed. Cleanup and repairs have begun and should be completed by the opening.

The North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and the State Archives of North Carolina are partnering with the WeGOJA Foundation on a new initiative, Black Carolinians Speak: Portraits of a Pandemic, to capture the experiences of African Americans in the Carolinas during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will gather first-person testimonies, letters, music, images, art and other documents that will be part of a physical and virtual exhibit.

From Feb. 3 to March 31, the Western Office of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources will host the exhibit, Freedom! A Promise Disrupted: North Carolina, 1862-1901. The exhibit will be open to the public weekly from 10 a.m-2 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday. Admission is free.

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina state parks and recreation areas experienced a record number of visitors in 2021. The 41 sites welcomed 22.8 million visitors last year — three million more than any other year on record. The previous record for visitation was set in 2020 when, despite the early pandemic and several weeks of closures at many parks, the parks welcomed 19.8 million visitors. Ten state parks reached one million visitors in 2021, up from 7 parks in 2020. 

In its continued effort to support the arts sector through the pandemic, the North Carolina Arts Council distributed $7.9 million in grant funds to arts organizations and artists across the state in FY21-22. The source of these funds was a combination of state, federal, and private dollars. The Arts Council awarded 378 grants in 12 categories.