[gentle music] I am here with Charlene Newsom, the owner of Gallery C here in Raleigh.

This space is just fantastic, Charlene.

Tell me about the house.

- Thank you.

Well, after successfully operating in the shopping center for several decades, I decided that I wanted to find a landmark destination identity, and I found this gorgeous old property.

And it's two blocks north of the Governor's Mansion, and it's just four blocks from the State Capitol, and it was perfect.

It was built in 1901 by the mayor of Raleigh, Mayor Russ, and it's known as the Russ-Edwards House.

And we're sitting upstairs in what at the time would've been one of the bedrooms.

- [Deborah] Charlene, it seems like you have two missions here.

One is to collect these important works by North Carolina artists, but also to preserve them, but you're not a museum.

Tell me about the two missions.

- Well, it is almost like two different galleries operating under the same roof.

Because of my art history background, we have a strong passion for the older art of our state.

We represent 12 estates of artists that were very important in the 20th century.

So our job is to steward the art, preserve it, protect it, present it, and find collections for it, and institutional collections for it.

But we also are very interested in the contemporary art world, and we handle, hmm, two dozen, three dozen living artists who are making important artwork today.

So we try to balance our show schedule, which is very rigorous, about 50/50.

- [Deborah] And you also offer framing.

- We, if I do say so myself, do some of the finest framing that's available.

We employ several artisans who carve frames.

We offer silk mats and fillets, French lines, a lot of old fashioned techniques that are not available in a lot of places.

[folk music] - [Deborah] How would you say the folk art captures some of the old and new of the art that's here?

- Well, the folk art, which is also called outsider art or naive art or self-taught art, is by artists who are untrained and naive.

And we have a strong tradition of that in the southeastern United States.

And also the artist in Haiti are self-taught.

It does fit sort of in both of my worlds because it goes back to the 20th century, but there's also contemporary folk artists working today.

- [Deborah] Tell me about your current exhibit.

It's very exciting.

- Well, I'm very proud that we are able to bring internationally known artists to Raleigh, North Carolina that you normally wouldn't see outside of Korea or Paris or New York.

And we are gonna have Fabienne Delacroix, the naive artist from Paris who will be coming here.

It's a very timely visit because the Eiffel family of the Eiffel Tower commissioned her to do a book honoring the structure, and the book was just published this year.

And, in fact, I believe we're gonna have a couple of the paintings from the book in our show.

- Charlene, tell me about this painting behind us.

Very interesting.

- Don't you love this painting?

- I do.

- This is Robert Broderson, who was one of the most important artists in North Carolina in the 20th century.

He taught at Duke University.

He was represented in Manhattan.

He's in every major American museum collection: MoMA, the Met, the Corcoran, the Smithsonian, of course, our museum.

This is one of his more powerful paintings.

It's called "Apocalypse."

It has his normal iconography where he uses innocent children.

He mixes in creatures where we have a minotaur man and holding the skull, which represents wisdom.

- Charlene, I can't wait to see more of your gallery.

You've created quite a space for those who love art.

- Thank you.

- Gallery C is at 540 North Blunt Street in Raleigh, and it's open Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 AM to 4:30 PM.

For more information, give the gallery a call at [919] 828-3165, or go online to galleryc.net.