In the fall of 1921, John Sprunt Hill, class of 1889, was on the Carolina’s campus for a meeting of the Board of Trustees. Staying at an old ramshackle hotel on Franklin Street, he was unable to sleep because of the heat and the uninvited four-legged guests scurrying about the room. He got up and dressed, and decided to take a walk in the night air.
Coming upon the west end of campus, he saw a beautiful piece of property in the moonlight that gave him a vision: a cheerful inn for visitors, a town hall for the state and a returning home for alumni.
Hill purchased the property, a plot of land just outside the campus boundary, and engaged architect Arthur Nash, who had studied at Harvard and the Ecole des beaux Arts in Paris, to design the new Carolina Inn for the site.
With construction completed in 1924, the Carolina Inn quickly became a comfortable and iconic home away from home for visitors and alumni. In 1935, Hill donated the hotel to the University on one condition: that the profits from the Inn would support what would later become the North Carolina Collection in Carolina’s Wilson Special Collections Library.
The Carolina Inn continues to support the North Carolina Collection to this day.
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“It’s a special place,” said member Kari Hamel about the Ackland Art Museum. “It’s a space where the staff keeps the art fresh and makes everyone feel comfortable.”
Located on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Ackland has been a cultural resource for the Carolina community since 1958, providing an environment for children, students, and adults to experience incredible art collections and performances.
An avid fan of the Museum, Hamel has been visiting the Ackland for 20 years.
“The Ackland is so warm and welcoming to families, students and community members,” she said. “It’s one of those places where you’ll never see it all because it’s always changing and moving. There is always a reason to come. There is always something happening.”
The Ackland is constantly acquiring and showing art from across cultures and time periods for community members and students to enjoy. Set within a “university of the public, for the public,” the essence of community art is emphasized through the programs the Museum offers.
Hamel and her husband also routinely bring their three children to the Ackland.
“The Ackland has been ahead of other museums in family activities. They put families in front of the art,” Hamel said. “Because my family has such a good time there, we keep going back.”
Picture Above: A member of the Hamel family stands inside one of the sculptures that comprised the installation Step Right Up, commissioned for the Ackland’s terrace from artist Patrick Dougherty."
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Joanne Mills Garrett, ’69, ’78, ’90 (M.P.H., Ph.D.) planned to write a Broadway play one day.
During her 30-year career with the UNC School of Medicine, Garrett never got around to writing that play, but she has found another way to make her mark in dramatic art.
Garrett and her husband, Peter ’92 (Ph.D.), have created an endowment to fund the producing artistic director position for PlayMakers Repertory Company. The fund will also provide support for PlayMakers through the production of new works and educational programming for K-12 students.
“Perhaps I could help launch a budding playwright, help a troubled young person learn how to express feelings though drama or establish opportunities for creativity in a world that seems of late to have forgotten the indispensable values of humanities and the arts,” said Garrett.
Read the complete Carolina Story…"
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Born and raised in a musical family in Brooklyn, Seth Shelden '98 self-admittedly knew little about the world beyond the northeast; it seemed unlikely he would head elsewhere for college. The Morehead-Cain Scholarship program both introduced him to Carolina and made it possible for him to attend.
"I credit Chapel Hill itself, however, for being irresistible," said Shelden.
Once on campus, he jumped head first into drama and music, becoming one of the first producers at Company Carolina, and he also enrolled in an introductory political science course with professor Eric Mlyn, captivating Shelden from the start. He followed Dr. Mlyn through several more courses, including one related to nuclear weapons policy. Shelden pursued a degree in international studies and completed a senior thesis on the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
As Shelden considers it, Carolina served as a launching pad for all that would come after. He went to law school, studying intellectual property law; today he practices law in New York City and is an adjunct professor at the City University of New York School of Law. He continues to perform, sharing screens and stages with fellow Tar Heels, including Fred Weller, Anthony King and Tessa Blake; he's also spent the past five years helping bring to life the first-ever revival of the Marx Brothers' first-ever Broadway show.
But it was in 2016 when he was returning from a Fulbright-sponsored program teaching law in Japan that he heard the United Nations General Assembly had adopted a resolution to begin negotiating a legally-binding treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. He knew little about the players or who to speak to about it, but he knew he wanted to help. A series of conversations later, and Shelden was working with ICAN — the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in more than 100 countries promoting the ban of nuclear weapons.
Flash forward to July 7, 2017 — a day Shelden calls "one of the most thrilling days of [his] life" — when 122 U.N. member states voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Later that year, Shelden and his ICAN teammates headed to Norway for ICAN to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, which they won for their work in making that treaty a reality.
Today he serves as the United Nations Liaison for ICAN in New York, but continues to teach and practice law, and to perform in music and arts. With such varied interests and achieving at such high levels of each, how does Shelden find connection between them all?
"I think that the common denominator among these seemingly-disparate interests might be the pursuit of truth. Each of these — law, activism, teaching, acting, music — requires a similar undertaking: to explore what's true — whether about a person, a country or even a fictional character — and to fight for what's right — whether through law, advocacy or storytelling.
"An even more common denominator, perhaps, is humanity itself, and thinking about why we survive. Sometimes I think about this quote from Muriel Rukeyser, in The Speed of Darkness: 'The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.' I think that when it comes to the world's great existential threats, preserving humanity's survival through stronger laws and norms is what we strive for, but as to the why ... for me, art, love, and humanity is why we do it.""
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