Curating Carolina

“Serving as the Ackland’s director was the happiest time of my professional life. I had always been a curator everywhere else I’d been, but here I had the chance to really make a difference and to help build something special.”

First and foremost, Charles Millard was an art lover, historian and scholar. During his seven-year career as director of Carolina’s Ackland Art Museum, that love was apparent. He helped to add more than 800 works to the museum’s holdings, expanded the staff, launched an inaugural education program with its first University liaison and presided over a building renovation.

Even after retiring in 1993, Millard continued to help advance the Ackland, creating the Tyche Foundation (tì’ kee, Greek for goddess of chance and fortune) to benefit the museum. The Tyche Foundation gift brought 51 work, ranging across some 2,500 years and a variety of the world’s cultures, to Carolina.

Read the complete Carolina Story from Carolina Connections…

This is story number 72 in the Carolina Stories 225th Anniversary Edition magazine.

Millard died in December 2017 and left the Ackland a landmark $5 million gift that encompasses his entire 375-work collection ranging from South Asian sculpture and 19th-century photographs to North Carolina pottery and 20th-century abstraction. The gift also includes early cartoons and comic strips, Byzantine earthenware of the 12th century, Japanese calligraphy and master prints from the Western tradition.

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