NCMA Opens a Free Nancy Baker Cahill Show That Spills Into the Museum Park

The North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh opened Nancy Baker Cahill: Ecologies of Scale on Saturday, September 26. Admission is free, and the exhibition runs through January 31, 2027.

The show is organized by the museum and spreads beyond walls: it occupies the Photography Galleries (Gallery 3), the Museum Park Ellipse and Gipson Plaza, linking the museum's galleries with the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park. It combines digital and analog media, with site-specific experiences, video installations, sculptures, works on paper and augmented-reality projects that blend natural and imagined worlds.

"Substrate," in the Ellipse

The centerpiece outdoors is an AR work called Substrate, installed in the Ellipse. Visitors use a free app on a phone or tablet to see and interact with it. The piece invites people to add culturally meaningful artifacts, such as artworks, films, books, poems and songs, to a living archive, weaving the digital world into the real one.

An After Hours Projection

On Thursday, November 5, selected immersive videos by Cahill will be projected onto the facade of the museum's West Building in Gipson Plaza as part of the NCMA's free monthly After Hours program.

The exhibition is supported by the Hartfield Foundation and Libby and Lee Buck, with additional support from the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the NCMA Foundation and the William R. Kenan Jr. Endowment for Educational Exhibitions. Interim Director Katherine White said the museum's fall season invites audiences to enjoy two exhibitions that combine immersive and digital experiences with international artworks.

The second is Ancient Nubia: Excavating Treasures of the Nile, from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which opens October 17 and runs through January 10, 2027. Admission to that show is $20 for adults.

Source: North Carolina Museum of Art.