Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art
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The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (or SECCA) is an art museum and non-profit located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was founded in 1956 to provide gallery space for local artists, but has expanded since then to provide a venue for artists from around the United States, with an emphasis on the Southeastern states. In addition to a gallery space, SECCA also has art, yoga and Tai Chi classes, and in collaboration with the Winston-Salem Cinema Society, exhibits international films in the Cinema at SECCA film series. SECCA is also used as the performance space for many of the shows put on by the Winston-Salem Theatre Alliance.
SECCA was briefly the subject of national political and media notoriety in 1989 when 23 U.S. Senators signed a letter challenging its involvement, along with the National Endowment for the Arts, with a $15,000 arts prize awarded to controversial photographer Andres Serrano. Former U.S. Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Alfonse D'Amato (R-NY) denounced SECCA in speeches on the floor of the Senate, taking particular issue with what has become Serrano's most famous work, "Piss Christ," a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artists's urine.
With those issues behind it, SECCA presents some of the best contemporary art between New York and Miami in its 11,000 square feet of gallery space. Functioning as a Kunstalle, the museum features enormous open spaces on several levels that offer artists and audiences almost unlimited possibilities. Some of the recent exhibitions include James Esber: American Delirium, Lynn Book: Re:garding NEXT, Bill Fick: Diasters 24/7 and a 6-month long evolving site specific painting exhibition SITEings featuring Sol LeWitt, Elena Hertzog, Mark Dean Veca, Laura Lashley/Ricky Needham, and others. The last several years have also seen large-scale installations by David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Lesley Dill, Terry Adkins, and Allan Wexler.
Known for its Artist in the Community series which came into being under the auspices of Susan Talbot Labowsky and the staff during the early 1990s, SECCA's most recent evolution of that form is the HOME House Project: the Future of Affordable Housing. This multi-year initiative began in 2003 and continues today. With it, SECCA challenged artists, designers and architects to propose new designs for single family houses for low-and moderate-income families using Habitat for Humanities basic three-and four-bedroom house plans as a point of departure. The design criteria also featured environmentally/sustainable materials, technologies, and methods. From the more than 800 individuals and teams from the U.S. and 16 countries who registered for the project, SECCA received more than 440 designs. The museum is working with community partners in Winston Salem and in other cities across the country to try to build some of those innovations.
