Designing Minds

photo courtesy of CAM

Each spring, Cameron Art Museum invites design luminaries and enthusiasts to celebrate the craft of design and to elevate and support awareness for the museum through Design NC. In attendance, design professionals, students, and art enthusiasts can immerse themselves in the design world while learning from industry trailblazers.

Now in its sixth year, the festivities kicked off May 2 evening with a cocktail party hosted by CAM Café. Events on May 3, which included the morning forum and luncheon, sold out with about 180 in attendance.

“This year has proven to be the most successful Design NC fundraiser for Cameron Art Museum so far,” says ELIZABETH OVERTON, CAM’s director of development.

One key component of the event is education. Prior to the start of Design NC, speakers ELIZABETH GRAZIOLO, CHARLOTTE LUCAS, and SUSANNA PAISLEY showcased their presentations to students at Cape Fear Community College with Glow Academy’s Art Club in attendance.

“The Design NC Committee works on these details for a year in advance,” Overton says. “They are connected with world-renowned designers and artists that understand the mission, values, and goals of Cameron Art Museum and support CAM in ways that include connecting with designers who want to come to Wilmington (and) share their gifts and accomplishments of their trade.”

The forum included fascinating presentations from each speaker. Paisley, founder of the textile company Newton Paisley, discussed her time in South America tracking and studying the elusive Andean bear, or spectacled bear. She described how this developed her relationship with pattern and that she, “Wanted to create wild around me.”

With Newton Paisley, hand-illustrated fabrics and wallpapers display a wide variety of endangered and neglected species as well as habitats of conservation concern. Newton Paisley partners with the World Land Trust preserving 100 square meters of wild habitat for every meter of fabric or wallpaper sold.

Career and projects were the focus topic for Graziolo, founder and principal of the award-winning, New York City-based Yellow House Architects. In 2021, Graziolo was inducted into Architectural Digest’s prestigious AD100 list and she has been profiled by both Architectural Digest and The New York Times.

Graziolo led the audience through a wide variety of her firm’s work including The Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse, a 1934 Georgian Revival home in Palm Beach, Florida, and a culinary-focused community outside of Atlanta.

Lucas, the founder of Charlotte Lucas Design, was the final presenter of the morning. She shared sentiments of her childhood and that although her family moved frequently – with time spent in Wilmington – her mother made sure to make each house a home.

She discussed the balancing act of motherhood and career and walked the audience through her design ethos of color, pattern, and mixing antiques. Lucas was introduced by her sister, Liz Carroll, owner of Wilmington-based Liz Carroll Interiors. Together, Lucas and Carroll founded the textile company House of Harris.

Overton says she would love to see Design NC grow year by year and when asked about the relationship between art and design she notes, “Art and design have the perfect symbiosis from the lines that begin an artist’s masterpiece on a canvas or fabric that will inspire us in museums or homes within the world around us to the architectural lines that create a structure we thrive in for centuries to come.”

“These visual assets that increase the value of our environment,” Overton says, “are important and will continue to elevate the human experience.”

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