Chapel Hill Exhibitions

Burk Uzzle and Roland L. Freeman: Films and Photographs

Saturday, Oct. 11, 2025
3:00-7:30 PM
Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

Uzzle is known for his work for Life Magazine and Magnum Photos; Freeman is remembered for his documentation of life in Black communities and traditional folklife. The exhibition features approximately 80 photos from both photographers’ careers as photojournalists and roughly 50 publications that feature their work. “Parallel Visions” also highlights the way the photographers’ decades-long friendship is intertwined in their work.

“Parallel Visions” includes installations in all three of Wilson Library’s gallery spaces. Prints are arranged chronologically so viewers can experience the work as a photographic biography.

3 – 5 p.m. Galleries open for exhibition viewing. Experience the powerful legacy of two photographers whose work documents more than six decades of American life. Exhibition curators will discuss the lives and photographs of Burk Uzzle and Roland L. Freeman and provide commentary about the selections on view.

5 – 7:45 p.m. Film screening of videos from the Roland Freeman collection plus the documentary F11 and Be There, about the career of Burk Uzzle. A conversation between Photographic Archivist Stephen Fletcher and the filmmaker, Jethro Waters, will follow, along with an audience Q&A.

Opening Sunday, October 12, 2025
Horace Williams House

Warren Hicks - Untethered

Warren Hicks is a visual and conceptual artist working in a variety of media including photography, video, sculpture, painting, drawing, and installation. Hicks lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and works in his studio at Golden Belt in Durham.

Completely self-taught, Hicks' artistic evolution has been as unique as his personal revolution. Hicks has morphed through a progression of styles, mediums, and influences—embracing, digesting, and discarding. A restless experimenter with a keen sense of humor, he is constantly pushing himself into new ideas in visual art, writing, and more.

Born and raised in Chickasha, Oklahoma, Hicks studied architectural design at Oklahoma State University. Prior to graduation, he fled Oklahoma under cover of darkness to Miami, Florida to explore opportunities within the music industry. After twelve years of toil and slight hearing loss, Hicks returned to architectural drafting and relocated to Chapel Hill. In 2002, at the ripe age of 36, he began painting.

Although Hicks established himself as an abstract painter, his recent forays into photography, sculpture, and conceptual art have been well received. Hicks' work has been shown throughout the U.S. as well as in Beijing, China and Skopje, Macedonia.

When he isn't making his own art, Hicks is a freelance art preparator for museums and corporate art collections. Museum clients include: NC Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; CAM Raleigh, Raleigh, NC; Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC. Some of the artists whose work has passed, but not slipped, through his hands include Picasso, Miro, Calder, El Greco, Rauschenberg, Van Gogh, Wangechi Mutu, Nick Cave, and El Anatsui.

September 12 - October 5, 2025
Peel Gallery

Cornell Watson - God's Country

Many grow up learning it’s impolite to talk about politics and religion, but Cornell Watson, a Durham based photographer, has brought the conversation front and center in his new exhibition “God’s Country” at Carrboro’s Peel Gallery.

Walt Whitman’s famous line, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)," perfectly fits what Watson’s artwork documents of contemporary America almost two hundred years later. The line between church and state has never been pulled taut, and the increasingly central political and religious tensions reflect the two’s growing entanglement, but then again - have they ever been truly separate?

This September exhibition distills cultural and political clashes within intimate moments of the everyday. Whether in a crowded rally or a bedroom, Cornell’s lens finds humor in coincidence, holds empathy for its subjects, and exposes the devolved Americana around us - a visual melting pot of iconography and capitalism.

"God's Country" is a photographic exploration of the intersection of patriotism and religion in America and how these forces are lived, politicized, commodified, weaponized, and contradicted in America.

- Statement from Cornell Watson

Cornell Watson is known for his captivating documentations of life in action and reaction. He frequently contributes photography to national publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Bloomberg. He has also photographed national ad campaigns for companies such as T-Mobile, MeUndies, Bombas, and Adidas. His photography centers Black stories and has been featured in museums such as The Mint Museum, Nasher Museum of Art, and the National Civil Rights Museum.

Please join us Friday, September 12th from 6-9 pm for the opening reception of this exhibition! The event will be held as a part of Chapel Hill/Carrboro’s 2nd Friday Artwalk and include an evening of art, music, and refreshments.

We will also be hosting a Closing Reception with an Artist Q&A on Sunday, October 5th from 3:00pm - 5:00pm.

TBA
Northside District, sponsored by PEEL

Opening reception: carousel slideshoW

Peel Gallery’s Carousel Slideshow is a curated exhibition of carnival photography. The reception features a slideshow screening of the works accompanied by live electronic music with framed works hung throughout the gallery. Works will range from traditional and digital to alternative and mixed media methods of photography to be displayed for the duration of October. The event and exhibition is part of the 2025 Click! Photo Festival 

Opens Friday, October 10, 2025
Exhibit Oct 10-31
Artists Reception Oct 10 6-9pm

Christiaan Lopez-Miro - Fractured

Christiaan Lopez-Miro is a photographic artist originally from Miami, Florida and has previously self published one body of work, Smoke and Mirrors (2008). Lopez-Miro's new book, Fractured, marks a new direction for Lopez-Miro as he responds to the environment of his new home in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.

"A bullet riddled, weather battered sign. Footsteps immortalized in a concrete sidewalk. A young girl curling her eyelashes while staring directly at the camera. A roadside motel illuminated only by its red sign at night. These are images that help make up “Fractured."

"As I allowed myself to instinctually make images of my new surroundings, something started to materialize; a conflicting point of view. As the images began to speak to each other, a mysterious uneasiness began to develop. The images were simultaneously descriptive and opaque. I started to feel as if I was trying to work out this tension of seeing my new home through a surreal lens."

"A tall young man, standing proud next to his shiny, black Cadillac. A carnival worker, delicately tending to the game he’s tasked with working. A rough, tattooed man experiencing a warmhearted moment in a stable with his horses. Heart anchored moments that seem to break through an otherwise cryptic photographic landscape.

"While the drama is palpable throughout the sequence, these moments of calm help ground the narrative, juxtaposing the quietly chaotic, mysterious moments with some sense of buoyancy that allows the visual world of Fractured to move forward and resolve."

Second Friday Opening Reception October 10, 6-9pm

Barbara Tyroler October Featured Photographer: "Seeing Trees”

Barbara Tyroler is a photographic image-maker producing collaborative multi-media art projects that address social and cultural issues. As an educator she blends fine art and humanitarian work, which is central to her art practice. As a seasoned professional, Barbara’s art and teachings explore how the lens inspires the journey, how the photographic image evokes feeling and conveys meaning, creating and recreating stories and memories beyond the frame. Her photography is conceived through the synthesis of light, imagination, and technology.

Artist Statement

As a fine art portrait artist and educator who utilizes pools and water for her backdrops, she is specifically interested in community outreach. The photographic series of portraiture created in pools and lakes throughout the east coast, explores how and why we immerse our bodies in water. The work is collaboratively produced with family and friends, students and colleagues, business clients, and strangers, to record gesture and the human figure, light, pattern, and reflective design. Beneath the surface are the intimate stories she encounters.

FRANK: in Focus will feature FRANK guest photographers; Dan Gotlieb, Tama Hochbaum, Tim Walter, and Gadisse Lee.

September 30 – November 8

The month of October is an exciting celebration of photography with FRANK:inFocus “The Click! Photography Festival celebrates the medium of photography and its cultural influence by engaging the photography community with exceptional photo-based works, artists, and programming.”

Please join us for this exciting month filled with engaging photography related events!

Dan Gottlieb studied art and biology (SUNY Buffalo, a Regents Scholar) before relocating to California where he lived for ten years as a student (SDSU, art and environmental design), cabinetmaker, and artist. It was there that Dan began experiments with alternative photographic processes and a 40-year career in museum design (at the San Diego Museum of Natural History). He has developed a unique method of printing with a process of his own design, combining archivally printed photographs with multiple layers of paint and laborious finishing.

Tama Hochbaum is a New York City-born artist and photographer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with a background in fine arts and printmaking from Brandeis University and an MFA in painting from Queens College. She worked as a painter for 20 years before focusing on photography, with a central artistic theme of exploring the passage of time and memory through various projects, including her recent work, Over/Time: Imaging Landscape.  

Timothy Walter, is an arts entrepreneur and art photographer based in Durham, NC. His art projects are the creation of striking portraits of friends and performers that give visual voice to experiences of past trauma. The subjects make visible emotions of anger, dismay, grief -- and sometimes resilience and resolve.

Gadisse Lee is a 25-year-old fine art photographer based in North Carolina. She was born and raised in Ethiopia for seven years before coming to the United States. Lee received her BFA in 2022 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has had numerous group exhibitions throughout North Carolina including the For Freedoms Project – Lawn Signs, and has had her work published in Stubborn Magazine, The Danger Issue.