The Levine Museum: What Happens Next? – Charlotte Magazine

A new CEO seeks to steer the museum through a murky era in its own history

Stories are a Southern specialty. Mythmaking shapes our past; daydreaming, our future. “Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people,” wrote the Floridian novelist Harry Crews. “It is all—the good and the bad—carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.”

For more than 30 years, the Levine Museum of the New South has carted up the region’s proud and shameful stories and reflected on who does the telling. In 1991, the museum incorporated with a mission to explore the Charlotte region from 1877 to the present: a kaleidoscopic, cacophonous story that the city is still writing. The museum website says that it was founded to “tell everyone’s story—a radical idea at the time and a radical idea still.” 

The forward-thinking ethos put the Levine ahead of many of its peers, which have struggled to engage and reflect the writhe of progress outside their doors. But that hasn’t exempted the Levine from post-COVID challenges that have impaired museum operations nationwide.

In March 2022, the museum sold its Seventh Street building to a developer for $10.75 million. The Levine has framed the sale as a bold leap into the future as it prioritizes digital experiences and unconventional exhibitions. But as attendance dwindles and digitally oriented generations question the relevance of museums, the money also provides a safety net as the museum rethinks its approach.

The Levine has a $8 million endowment and, in 2021, received a three-year, $600,000 grant to support digital programming. But Kathryn Hill, who became the museum’s CEO in 2016, told The Charlotte Ledger in 2021 that its building wasn’t well configured for its purpose and needed millions in repairs. Unlike the Mint or Gantt museums, which operate out of city-owned buildings, the Levine shouldered its own maintenance expenses.

Worse, attendance fell during the pandemic. In the last year in its old building, the museum hosted 47,000 visitors, a steep drop from its record-breaking 79,000 visitors in 2019. Under financial pressure, the museum gambled on a future without the building it had occupied for decades. In 2023, it moved into a temporary space at Three Wells Fargo.

After the sale, Hill retired. Last September, public historian Richard Cooper took her place. He comes from Conner Prairie, a living history museum in Fishers, Indiana, that connects regional history to science, technology, math, and engineering. 

The Levine has ambitious plans to break out of the confines of museum walls, but it’s also developing a new permanent space. In the meantime, the museum has launched temporary and traveling exhibitions, an app-based tour of uptown’s razed Brooklyn neighborhood, and a podcast. The year after its old space closed, the museum engaged more than 70,000 people, though most of them never walked through its doors. 

That reflects Cooper’s ambition: “I like to push the boundaries of what a museum is.” Will that be enough to sustain it in a city changing as fast as Charlotte?

Cooper, 43, has a Midwesterner’s wholesome earnestness. His athletic physique and sympathetic expression could land him a movie role as a coach who leads a ragtag high school team to a poignant victory. In 2016, he told Cincinnati Soapbox that “the thing I’m most proud of is making my mom and dad proud of me.” 

He and his two older sisters grew up outside Cincinnati, where his dad worked six days a week in administration for U-Haul. In the evenings, his father often watched history programs. “I hated it,” Cooper says, “but because I was little, I just wanted to spend time with my dad. And I ended up falling in love with it.”

At the University of Cincinnati, he took courses on slavery and antebellum America, researching the Underground Railroad and Cincinnati’s Union Baptist Church for his undergraduate thesis. At Northern Kentucky University, he received a master’s in public history and a doctorate of education. 

Cooper wanted to teach. But as George W. Bush-era legislation introduced content standards in history, he decided the classroom posed too many constraints. His life changed trajectory on a pool deck: He was coaching a swim team when he got a call that led to a position at the just-opened National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, in Cincinnati. He stayed for nearly 13 years and eventually became director of museum experiences. In 2017, he left to take a position as vice president and chief programs officer at Conner Prairie. 

A lot of his peers, Cooper says, trace their passion back to museum trips with their families. “We did not have enough money to go to museums,” Cooper says. “I didn’t necessarily have a connection to museums but have absolutely fallen in love with what museums can do.”

Which, as it turns out, is a lot. The United States is in the throes of a “trust deficit,” as confidence in public institutions wavers dangerously. But as Americans look askance at the media, schools, and the CDC, trust in museums has deepened. The American Alliance of Museums and Wilkening Consulting conducted a survey in 2021 and found that museums ranked second only to friends and family in trustworthiness. That put museums ahead of scientists, NGOs, news organizations, the government, businesses, and social media. One researcher called museums’ rare levels of trust a “superpower.”

The Levine, by dint of its focus on the present and recent past, may be uniquely poised to exercise that power. “My goal,” Cooper says, “is that when there are challenges facing our community—good, bad, and in between—people are thinking, Hey, let’s go to the Levine.”

In November, the museum collaborated with the Latin American Coalition to hold its annual Day of the Dead celebration at Camp North End. More than 10,000 people showed up. Women in traditional marigold crowns swayed to a mariachi band’s ranchera music; families honored loved ones with candle-lit altars and offerings.

Cooper loved it. The holiday joins the living with the dead—as the Levine aspires to do—and the festival was exactly the kind of innovative, community-focused programming that had lured him to the museum a month earlier. “Those are moments where you’re just like, How do we capture that, to bring that to an institution on a daily basis?”

He’s addressed that challenge before. Among Conner Prairie’s primary missions are to preserve William Conner’s 19th-century home and teach visitors about life along Indiana’s White River during that era. But in 2018, Cooper helped develop a master plan to engage a more diverse audience. The plan included a land, water, and energy innovation center; an ecology center; and an immersive play area. They’ll join the museum’s award-winning programming for dementia awareness and inclusion, and for those with autism and sensory challenges. 

Some of these initiatives may seem to have little to do with 1800s Indiana, but the museum has seized on the manifold ways the past links to the present. The museum complements its collection of historic inventions, for example, with activities for children in the Spark!Lab.

 “We had an ambitious goal to change the way the world used and engaged with museums,” Cooper says. “Museum people have been incredible storytellers but have been afraid to be more creative with our storytelling.”

For Cooper, that means digital exhibitions that anyone can access. It means leaving the museum to bring history home. Grier Heights: Community Is Family is an exhibition the Levine designed with the Grier Heights Community Center to showcase the neighborhood’s history—in the neighborhood. It means hosting difficult conversations around exhibitions like States of Incarceration, about the roots of mass incarceration. It means reaching families like his, captivated by stories of the past but unable to afford museum visits.  

Cooper is cagey about the Levine’s new permanent location. But he grants that “this building is going to allow us to really look at the hopes of what a New South could look like.” 

He isn’t worried about leading the Levine as a non-Southerner. Charlotte has attracted strivers and transplants for more than a century, and each, like Cooper himself, brings a perspective through which to explore the South they’ve collectively made. Plus, Cooper doesn’t truck with strict parameters. 

“We’re a history museum,” he says, “but we’re not going to get defined by what that means.”

ALLISON BRADEN is a contributing editor.