Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opens

The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art opened to the public in Charlotte, North Carolina, as a purpose-built museum for the Bechtler family's collection of mid-twentieth-century modern art. Designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta, the 36,500-square-foot museum became part of the Levine Center for the Arts and gave public institutional form to Andreas Bechtler's holdings of more than 1,400 works. Its opening mattered because it placed a concentrated European and American modernist collection, including artists associated with major postwar movements, in a new civic arts district outside the traditional museum capitals.

Charlotte gained a dedicated modern art museum and a new anchor for its uptown cultural district.