Professor Ivy and His New Experiment: Beaufort Art Colony

"Woman's College Trying New Experiment On Coast," reported the Greensboro Daily News in June of 1938. Beginning in the early 1930s, the North Carolina College for Women (now UNC Greensboro) offered a course in marine science for a select group of students. Each summer, students applied to attend the course in Beaufort, North Carolina. Students were tasked with arranging their own room and board for the duration of the course and were able to get practical experience in the field of marine biology. The program developed into an annual opportunity for students desiring a hands-on approach to their education in a course that would now be described as experiential learning. (To read more about the Marine Biology Summer Session, please click here.)

Woman's College student drawing at Beaufort Art Colony, ca. 1938

The 'new experiment' in the summer of 1938 entailed the creation of a similar summer program available for students wishing to study art. Young women were offered the opportunity to study advanced landscape painting at the coast.

Professor Gregory Ivy, head of the Art Department of Woman's College, had searched for an ideal site to establish this summer 'colony' of art students. Beaufort had been recommended to him as a suitable location and easily won him over upon his first visit to the town. Aside from the scenic landscapes all around, he also found an optimal indoor space to serve as shelter on a rainy day or as a lecture hall. Beaufort was home to one of the largest structures built of logs in the country, its community center. The local Chamber of Commerce allowed Ivy to use a large room in the community center that, with its beautiful light, served as an excellent art studio and lecture hall for the summer program.

Ivy conducting a class critique at Beaufort
Community Center, ca. 1938

The first course in the summer of 1938, attended by around 30 students, provided the chance to earn four hours of college credit and incorporated the concepts and techniques used by the Post-Impressionists, Cubists, and Surrealists, all modern art movements of the late 19th and early 20th century, and no doubt a draw for the young artists of Woman's College. The program was open to students of other southern schools and colleges as well as to teachers interested in the experience.

Ivy and his painting students at Beaufort
Community Center, ca. 1938

In its second year, the summer art program offered the same landscape painting class as well as a general advanced painting class. Participants, some studying to become professional artists and others considered themselves hobbyists, began using an old mansion house in town as their dormitory. Though plans were made to eventually build a dormitory for the summer program, it never came to fruition.

Aside from the additional course offered the second year, the first annual Beaufort art exhibition took place, jointly sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce and Professor Ivy. Local artists as well as out-of-state artists were invited to participate, and it was billed as the first exhibition of its kind in a southern coastal town.

One can only imagine the idyllic setting of Beaufort in the late thirties and early forties for the Woman's College art students. Hilda Brady, a junior at Woman's College during the summer of 1939 described it as "the land of the jasmine because of the great abundance of these fragrant flowers, a spray of which was placed beside the plate of guests each morning." In all likelihood, such treats for the senses were available in abundance for the young women who spent the majority of the year in land-locked Greensboro.

Professor Gregory Ivy sketching a student on the coast, ca. 1940

The effects of World War II unfortunately put a damper on the Beaufort Art Colony, which was shuttered for the last three summers of the war, 1943-1945. The art colony reopened in 1946 and art courses were expanded to include design, figure drawing, and art education in addition to the watercolor class taught by Dr. Ivy. The Colony also began to include music in the course offerings. By the mid-fifties, the "Fine Arts" summer session of Woman's College included dance, theater, and creative writing.

In the late forties and early fifties, the Fine Arts summer program, focused mostly on theater, was held in western North Carolina in the mountains near Burnsville (for more information about the Burnsville School of Fine Arts, please click here). It returned to Beaufort by 1954, sixteen years after it began. Aside from a broad selection of fine arts courses available to college students that year, classes for school-aged children were introduced, and the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce began providing two scholarships, one for adults and one for children to attend the program. The Woman's College Library provided library facilities and a trained librarian during the summer session as well.

Modern dance class at Beaufort, ca. 1940

Professor Gregory Ivy, founder of the Beaufort Art Colony, left the Woman's College in 1961. It is clear the Beaufort Art Colony continued into the mid-fifties, but there is no specific mention of it in University Bulletins after 1954. Since the Colony was the brainchild of Ivy, it is likely that it ended with his tenure at the University. In his resignation letter, he expressed his frustration at the college's lack of funding for the Art Department. His legacy at the Woman's College extends well beyond the Beaufort Art Colony. To read more about Ivy, please visit "Gregory Ivy: The Legacy of a Non-Conformist". Professor Ivy was the driving force behind developing the Woman's College art program. His idea to start the Beaufort Art Colony was just one of many contributions to art education at what is now UNC Greensboro.

Ivy's legacy lives on in the thriving UNC Greensboro School of Art, which boasts both undergraduate and graduate degree programs, a nationally and internationally renowned faculty of practicing artists, and an incredibly motivated, talented student body.

Gregory Ivy: The Legacy of a Non-Conformist

Today's Spartan Stories post was written by Arlen Hansen, a PhD student in History. Arlen worked in Special Collections and University Archives during Summer 2017, assisting with research related to the University's 125th anniversary celebration.

To the extent that UNCG is known as an “arts school” in North Carolina, much of the credit for that reputation can go to Gregory Ivy (1904-1985). “Consider,” wrote his student Lee Hall, “what the world and North Carolina were like in the Great Depression, what the Woman’s College was about…when Gregory Ivy arrived in his super-modern space craft and -- seeming to barely speak the language of the country he had invaded -- urged the female natives to seek and value freedom, to question what they had been taught was unquestionable, and to notice that most authority figures were swaggering about as buck naked as the emperors they imagined themselves to be.”1  According to Lee Hall, “Ivy might as well have been an alien when he arrived in North Carolina” in 1935, to found the art department of the Woman’s College (later UNCG).2

Ivy was a Columbia University-educated artist, a modernist influenced by surrealism and the Cubists. As such, according to Hall, Ivy was always advancing challenges to the status quo, and he made the newly minted art department at the Woman’s College into “a mini-cosmos of the humanistic world he envisioned.”3  With this guiding philosophy, Ivy influenced generations of students, and shaped art education at the Woman’s College. In 1938, Ivy established a summer art colony held at the Beaufort Summer School through the mid-1950s, which focused on landscape painting. In 1941, with the help and support of community members, Ivy established an art gallery, now known as the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Ivy’s connections to the wider art world meant that he could bring nationally known artists to the Woman’s College. This is how the sculptor Maurice Glickman, for instance, anchored the inaugural exhibit at the new Woman’s College Art Gallery in 1941. In subsequent decades, under Ivy leadership, the Weatherspoon Gallery became nationally known in the art world as a leading showcase of modernist art. His legacy is still felt in the Arts at UNCG, and in the Weatherspoon Art Museum.

Ivy's watercolor Dead End, Beaufort (1940)

Lee Hall met Gregory Ivy as an art student at the Woman’s College.4  Hall would later recall that in 1950s “McCarthyism” America, Ivy “did not fit in, he did not conform.”5  Ivy had built the UNC system’s first department to award a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in fine arts, and assembled an art department of very talented colleagues. According to Lee Hall, “these “liberal” or “arty” or “pinko” faculty…kept the gossips and scolds stoked, and caused among the keepers of the status quo near-terminally raised eyebrows and pursed mouths.” Lee Hall recalled that students seemed to either love or hate Ivy, and recalled the gossip of her fellow students about him. From students who liked him: “He’s hip.” “He has Negro friends.” From students who hated him: “He’s an atheist and communist.” “He believes in sex before marriage.” “He’s going to be fired.”6

Gregory Ivy left the Woman’s College in 1961, after twenty-six years, to work as design coordinator for an architectural firm in Greensboro. He resigned with an angry letter to acting-Chancellor W.W. Pierson bemoaning the lack of funding for the art department, and the apparent disinterest of the College to fund it. “The Art Department,” he wrote, “is the only department here which is not housed, and yet, it is the best known nationally of all the departments.”7  His resignation letter detailed all of his grievances with the administration, and continued, “I feel that I can no longer assume the responsibility for maintaining decent standards under these conditions. The quality of the work done under these really outrageous and scandalous conditions suffers.”8

 In 1965, Ivy left Greensboro to head the art department at California State College in Fullerton. Over the course of his long career, Ivy participated in exhibitions with major artists such as Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack, and Marc Chagall, and at institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The Weatherspoon Art Museum houses a major collection of Ivy’s work.


1 Lee Hall. Lecture delivered November 13, 2005 at Weatherspoon Art Museum on the occasion of the public reception for the exhibition, “Gregory D. Ivy: Making North Carolina Modern.” Gregory Ivy Bio Files, Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG Libraries. 
2 Ibid. 
3 Ibid. 
4 Lee Hall was the student artist who drew the male nude which graced the cover of the Fall 1954 issue of the Coraddi. In the ensuing controversy, The Coraddi staff was censured by Chancellor Edward Kidder Graham, resulting in the resignation of the magazine's staff. 
5  Lee Hall. Lecture delivered November 13, 2005 at Weatherspoon Art Museum on the occasion of the public reception for the exhibition, “Gregory D. Ivy: Making North Carolina Modern.” Gregory Ivy Biographical File, Special Collections University Archives, UNCG Libraries.   
6 Lee Hall, e-mail to Will South, 4 March, 2004. Gregory Ivy Bio Files, Special Collections University Archives, UNCG Libraries. 
7 The Carolinian, May 12, 1961. 
8 Ibid.

The Development of the Weatherspoon Art Museum: Bridging Art and Education

Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon

Elizabeth "Lizzie" McIver enrolled at the State Normal and Industrial School at its opening in October 1892. She was the younger sister of the school's founding president Charles Duncan McIver. In fact, one of the drivers that led McIver to advocate for State Normal was the lack of reasonably priced institutions in North Carolina for Lizzie to continue her education after completing studies at Peace Institute in Raleigh (where her brother worked prior to the opening of State Normal). After completing a year at State Normal, Lizzie taught in the Greensboro city schools until 1900, when she marries James R. Weatherspoon of Sanford, NC. When her husband died four years after their marriage, however, she returned to Greensboro and teaching.

She served as a supervisor of the first grade classes at the Curry School, the teaching school on the State Normal campus. Mrs. Weatherspoon's abiding love, however, was art. While at Curry, she taught private classes in art. And, in 1906, she officially joined the State Normal faculty as an art instructor, focusing on art education for elementary school teachers. She was also a charter member and the first president of the art division of the North Carolina Education Association.

Mrs. Weatherspoon was also a strong advocate for the establishment of a Department of Art at State Normal. Finally in 1935, she saw that dream come true, and she was named an associate professor in the new department. Four years later, however, on May 25, 1939, Mrs. Weatherspoon passed away at her home on Tate Street after an extended illness.

The year following Mrs. Weatherspoon's death, the art department moved into its new home in the McIver Memorial Building. A small gallery space was opened in the building, and, in 1941, the gallery was officially named the Elizabeth McIver Weatherspoon Gallery.

One of the early exhibits in the Weatherspoon Art Gallery featured 24 lithograph prints showcasing modern English art. Reflecting Mrs. Weatherspoon's interest in art education for elementary school students as well as the art department's emphasis on the gallery as a teaching space, 10 of the 24 lithographs were specifically chosen because they were to appeal to children.

Weatherspoon Art Gallery space in the McIver Building

For the next 15 years, the Weatherspoon Gallery in the McIver Memorial Building featured a wide array of art from around the world. Exhibits included textiles, furniture, paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, and more. A particular emphasis was placed on contemporary art as well as the space as a source for the practice and teaching of art. A donation in 1950 of the million-dollar Cone Collection from sisters Etta and Claribel Cone of Baltimore, served as one of the gallery's earliest and most important acquisitions. This donation included six bronzes by Henri Matisse and over 100 works by Matisse, Picasso, and other modern French artists.

McIver Memorial was closed due to numerous building hazards and issues in 1956. But, the new McIver Building opened in 1960 and featured a special wing specifically constructed for the Weatherspoon Gallery.

The Weatherspoon Gallery continued to grow in its new location, collecting new pieces and building a large audience. In fact, when actor Vincent Price visited UNCG in 1977, his first request in the way of sightseeing was the Weatherspoon Art Gallery. In particular, he wanted to see one of the gallery's most valuable pieces, Willem de Kooning's "Woman," which Price declared to be "an asset to any gallery." He reportedly studied the painting for a full 10 minutes as part of his 90 minute behind-the-scenes gallery tour.

Director Ruth Beesch with de Kooning's "Woman"

By the late 1980s, however, the Weatherspoon Art Gallery had far outgrown its space in the McIver Building. In 1989, the Weatherspoon found its new (and current) home -- the Cone Building, named in honor of Anne Wortham Cone (Class of 1935) and her husband, Benjamin Cone, Sr. The $7.5 million building opened at the corner of Spring Garden and Tate Street and provided the Weatherspoon Art Gallery with nearly five times as much space as they had previously had in the McIver Building. Gallery director Ruth K. Beesch declared, "we've gone from rags to riches."

In 2001, the name of the Weatherspoon Art Gallery was changed to the Weatherspoon Art Museum to more adequately reflect its function and mission as the gallery had grown and expanded in size and scope. Today, the Museum continues to maintain a schedule of more than fifteen exhibitions each year as well as full roster of educational activities, publications, and outreach efforts.