Hickory Museum of Art (HMA)was the fulfillment of the vision and ambition of Hickory resident Paul Whitener, a Duke University journalism student and football player who grew into an accomplished painter of portraits and the North Carolina mountains. In the 1940’s, Hickory was a leading cultural center for a city of its size (about 15,000 inhabitants), and Paul felt that the city needed a visual arts center. A group of “conscientious citizens” (as Paul referred to them) assembled in September of 1943 to discuss the possibility of organizing an art association in Hickory. By November of that year, though it did not yet have either a collection or a physical location, the Hickory Museum of Art Association borrowed some local art and held its first exhibition in the vacant Bradshaw office building in downtown Hickory, drawing about 600 viewers during the relatively brief run. In February of 1944, still without either a building or a collection of its own, HMA held a celebratory ceremony in the ballroom of the Old Hickory Hotel where the Museum was publicly recognized and chartered by North Carolina Governor Clyde Hoey. And that was the official beginning of the second oldest art museum in North Carolina.
