Diggs Gallery (Winston-Salem State University)

James T. "T" Diggs Jr. graduated from Winston-Salem State in 1934, then gave the institution the rest of his working life — as a painter, a professor for more than forty years, and the man who designed buildings on campus. He died in 1989. That same year, Gordon Hanes Jr. — whose family name runs through this city's tobacco and textile history — remembered a friendship with Diggs and created a gallery in his name.

That act of remembrance became one of North Carolina's largest exhibition spaces dedicated to African and African Diaspora art. The gallery mounts between ten and fifteen exhibitions a year. More than ninety percent of the permanent African American collection arrived as donated gifts — work people chose to give away, which is its own statement about what this place means. The collection holds the John Biggers murals. Winston-Salem State, founded in 1892, has long been serious about what it puts on its walls; the gallery has been recognized as one of the top African American galleries in its region.

Winston-Salem earned the name "Twin City" from the merger of two distinct towns, and it built its wealth on tobacco and textiles — industries whose profits moved through very specific hands. That a gallery of this scale exists on a historically Black university campus, holding a collection assembled largely through gifts, says something the city's conventional history doesn't always say loudly enough.

The doors are closed at the moment. The gallery is scheduled to reopen in early 2026 in the O'Kelly Library at 601 South Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. That's your window — a room built on a friendship, holding work that was, in large part, freely given. Worth the wait.