Maya Freelon Brings Grounded and a Family Legacy to the Gregg Museum

Maya Freelon’s Grounded exhibit brings generations of art, architecture and music together at the Gregg Museum—inside a building her father helped shape.

The Gregg Museum of Art & Design is going full Freelon—showcasing a family that runs deep with artistic, architectural and musical talent. 

At the center is Grounded, artist-in-residence Maya Freelon’s newly opened retrospective, featuring immersive installations and works spanning more than two decades of her career, while pieces by her father and great-grandfather stretch the story across generations—with some elements even spilling beyond the galleries.

Come Dec. 5, her mother, Grammy-nominated vocalist Nnenna Freelon, and brother, musician Pierce Freelon, will perform inside the museum as part of NC State LIVE’s Well-Being Concerts.

The setting could hardly be more fitting. Maya’s father, the late architect Phil Freelon—who also served as principal architect for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture—led the team behind the Gregg’s 2017 renovation and expansion. In other words, Grounded is unfolding inside a space her father literally helped create.

“I just feel really great about being in a space and transforming the space,” says Maya, who grew up in Durham and later taught at NC State’s College of Design. The transformation starts with the material most associated with her work: tissue paper.

While in graduate school, Maya found a stack of tissue paper in her grandmother’s basement that had been stained by a water leak. Her grandmother had saved it for her. “When I found it, she said she was saving it for me,” recalls Maya. “How did she know to do that?” 

Since then, that delicate material has become the foundation for vibrant, layered works that have carried Maya through exhibitions across the country. Grounded brings those pieces together with photography, paintings and new installations, tracing a practice shaped by family, memory, loss, healing and transformation.

One of the earliest works is a small painting Maya made for her grandmother when she was around 8 or 9, which will be displayed alongside photography, paintings, and vibrant larger-than-life layered tissue paper sculptures. Other pieces in the exhibit by her father Phil and great-grandfather Allan Freelon Sr. widen that personal history, while Maya’s newest installations bring it squarely into the present.

At the Gregg, the family timeline has an unusually resonant backdrop. While designing the building, Phil looked to the museum’s textile and weaving collection for inspiration, architect Kenneth Luker later told Museum Director Sara Segerlin—including for the banding that wraps its exterior.

For an exhibition built around Maya’s billowing layers of tissue paper, the connection feels almost uncanny.

For her part, Segerlin first began envisioning what would become Grounded at the Gregg—a season of four exhibitions anchored by Maya’s retrospective—nearly two years ago while talking with students, faculty and Raleigh community members about what they wanted from the museum. Meeting Maya—and learning more about a practice rooted in family, grief, healing and connection—gave that idea its center.

“That’s really where I recognized the Gregg Museum can be a place that grounds people,” maintains Segerlin.

What emerged is a familial showcase exploring place, heritage and connection—from Black life in North Carolina and sanctuary in the Depression-era South to contemporary ideas of home and identity.

For Curatorial Assistant Meredith Osborne, the hope is that Raleigh visitors see something familiar in those stories. “I wanted the community to see themselves or someone they knew, or just learn something about the area they’re immersed in,” she says.

The museum extends the opportunity to participate too. Visitors can add to a tissue-paper quilt that will grow in the gallery over time. Maya leads a guided tour and meditation Oct. 29, while NC State’s Panoramic Dance Project brings new choreography into the museum for the Nov. 7 opening celebration. 

For one season, the Gregg becomes something of a Freelon family portrait in motion: Phil’s architecture surrounding Maya’s work, Allan Sr.’s paintings hanging in the galleries, and Nnenna and Pierce filling the space with music.

“The whole family, coming together and sharing their talents—it’s really a dream come true,” Maya says. And for Raleigh, it gives one of Hillsborough Street’s most distinctive spaces good reason for another look.