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Arts: Cover story
Women Who Rock
Presenting six ladies who make Charlotte a cooler place to live
Published 06.18.08
By Cheris Hodges

I am woman. Watch me rock. (Roaring is so 1970s.)

It's easy to be a woman who talks loud, but what about the chicks who are doing something? You know, like, making a mark on the community with culture, art and sheer intelligence?

These are the women who rock. The women who put talk into action and give Charlotte a kick of flavor.

From medical school to art cool

Owning an art gallery wasn't in Allison Wolf Hertzler's plans while she was a student at North Carolina State University. "I was too much of a practical mind to think that I could make a living at art," she says. "At that time I didn't know anything about graphic design and computer design. It wasn't part of the daily language when it came to art."

But Hertzler, the owner of Green Rice Art Gallery in NoDa, had a change

of mind after a trip the Sri Lanka.

"Everything I did always had a creative twist," she says. Three days after graduating from NCSU, Hertzler went into the Peace Corps for two years and worked in public health. "In any project that we did, I always added an art element and that sort of thing. I came back from that experience very different. I was not going to go to medical school, was not going to go into public health."

Instead, she went into the nonprofit realm. She worked with the mentoring

organization Big Brothers Big Sisters of America in marketing. There, she put her design skills to use.

"That's when I got in the art world again and, to me, in a more practical sense," she says. "I moved out of there and worked at [the University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. I was the first woman art director at UNC-G." After a year, Hertzler decided that she wanted to strike out on her own and do design work.

"Before that, all of my jobs had to do with kids and for me to go into something that was not kid oriented was sort of a different thing for me."

She moved to Charlotte and fell in love with NoDa. "I decided it was time for me to get back into the real world," she says. "I wanted to open my own design center and I knew I couldn't do it from home."

But an art gallery?

She says it's something she just fell into. In her design office, which was located near the Center of the Earth gallery, Hertzler realized that local artists needed some place to show their work. She had one wall that allowed her to let the artists display their stuff.

By the end of her first year at her office, she'd moved to the current Green Rice location.

In the five years that Green Rice Gallery has been open, Hertzler has been the launching pad for many in the city. The up-and-coming, urban-flavored art collective God City had one of their first big shows at Green Rice. It was a hip-hop exhibition that no one else wanted.

"We're approachable," she says. "I think people feel comfortable coming in here. We're really trying to get fun, unique and eclectic things out to people."