Colombian-American artist Edwin Gil is bringing a new body of work called The Heart Series to the McColl Center in Charlotte this Saturday, where anatomical heart imagery, layered textures, and gold kintsugi-style lines will fill the historic building as it celebrates 100 years. The exhibit debuts November 14 from 2 to 6 p.m., timed to the center's centennial celebration.
A Milestone Birthday for a Charlotte Arts Landmark
According to Queen City News, Gil and Makeia Carriere Thompson, who is affiliated with the McColl Center, visited the station's Positively Charlotte segment to talk about the exhibit ahead of its launch. Gil's presentation is billed on his own site as part of the Centennial Celebration + Fall Patron Party, a milestone event for the historic building, according to edwingil.com. The center itself frames the occasion in sweeping terms: “For 100 years, this building has held space for connection and change. This November, we're opening the doors to celebrate the history and what comes next,” according to McColl Center.
The celebration is described as the start of something bigger than a single afternoon. The event listing notes organizers are “kicking off a year-long celebration of this building's past, present, and future,” per the center's own account. Visitors are invited to wander the building's floors, with the listing promising open artist studios, art in progress, hands-on experiences, music, and food throughout the 2 to 6 p.m. window.
Five Territories, One Human Journey
Gil's own description of the project leans heavily on metaphor and structure. The artist organizes The Heart Series around what he calls five interconnected territories: Roots, Voice, Identity, Healing, and Belonging, according to his artist bio. The work's visual language draws on anatomical hearts, layered textures, and golden lines inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, a traditional technique of repairing broken pottery with gold, as described on his site.
That repair motif isn't incidental to the series' themes. Organizers describe the goal as encouraging viewers to consider the heart “not only as something we carry, but as a vessel for memory, resilience, emotion, and renewal,” per the Meetup listing for McColl Center's programs. Gil has said questions of roots, displacement, identity, and belonging have appeared throughout his body of work, according to his bio, and he arrived in the United States from Colombia in 1998, per the same source.
Part of a Longer Tradition of Anniversary Shows
The Heart Series isn't the center's first exhibition built around a major anniversary. McColl Center's The Long Exposure was planned to mark both the center's 25th anniversary and the building's 100th birthday, according to the center. An earlier show, Ties That Bind, ran from November 2024 into January, per the same McColl Center account, though the evidence doesn't specify which year that run concluded.
A separate online listing describes the Centennial Celebration + Patron Party as open to the public and free to attend, with a suggested $10 donation, though that detail comes from a lower-confidence secondary listing rather than the center's own primary materials. What's clear from the center's own programming page and Gil's site is the shared framing: a building marking a century of use, and an artist using gold-mended hearts to talk about what gets carried, broken, and repaired along the way.
