If you live in the Charlotte area or are visiting anytime soon, there is a new interactive art gallery that you must check out! Portal Charlotte (https://www.portalclt.com/) is located at 114 South Tryon Street in Uptown. If you go past the corner of Trade & Tryon it’s right beside this iconic bank door, you will see a sign! Go downstairs & you are there! It’s open Thursday to Sunday from 10am to 10pm.
What is Portal Charlotte?
So what is an interactive art gallery, you may ask? It’s a collection of art pieces that you can touch, move, and take photos with. Which is a bit different than a regular art gallery! It’s literally the perfect place if you love taking photographs like we do. A limited amount of tickets are sold per hour slot so it isn’t too crowded. We went at 3pm on a Thursday and there were about 10 other people there. There are multiple rooms so we had plenty of space to spread out! Plus everyone is there to take photos, so no weird looks or anything, so you can have lots of fun and be as silly as you want. The staff has lots of great suggestions and will take photos for you if you need some inspiration as well.
Portal Charlotte is a permanent exhibit, not just a pop up, but the galleries will change every 3 months. So if you like an exhibit you need to visit ASAP because once it’s gone it will be replaced with something new. When we visited it was showing casing artists Michele Hoffman, HNin Nie, Jill Seale, Jason Woodbury, and Macus Kiser.
The artist design the rooms to be awesome for unique photographs & the only rule is there are no rules. So there is full creative reign to create some very unique rooms. They all have a different feel and vibe to them.
The Rooms
There are 9 rooms total when we visited: Vintage TV Room, Spiral Hole Room, Baseball Room, FEELS box, Post-It Room, Pink Chair, I’m Rich Room, Play Room, Hieroglyphics Room – Intergalactic Soul, plus lots of mini-exhibits in between the rooms!
It’s $17/person for tickets to get into Portal Charlotte but we spent over an hour and a half taking pictures so it’s well worth your time. Especially if you want some fun Instagram photos to post and are a major art lover like we are.
Some of the most fun rooms play with angles like the Playroom. You walk in on the “right wall” so you can then hang off tables, be on the ceiling, float in mid-air, fall from the painting, anything your imagination thinks of! We spent too much time in this room playing around with angles and couldn’t even think of them all.
Another really neat one is the Spiral Room, that is an optical illusion to look like you are falling into a 70’s psychedelic hole. Just make sure not to actually fall in haha!
The I’m Rich room was by far the most popular while we were there. There is a tub filled with gold balls and there is money EVERYWHERE! Who doesn’t want to feel fancy for the day? I’m pretty sure it’s straight out of the Kardashian house! It was so fun to play around with!
The Intergalactic Soul exibit look simple at first, but with the color changes it’s extra neat to do a panoramic and get the whole spectrum. It’s also got an added layer with an app to show you a special message.
The Vintage TV Room looks straight out of the Stranger Things set I feel like. Who doesn’t want to get on an old phone and call around about the Upside Down? It really felt like you were transported back in time.
Should you go? YES!
There are so many spots to take photos we ended up taking over 500 photos! We spent forever taking photos in there and there are probably spots we even missed still!
No matter your age, Portal Charlotte is a great thing to check out in Uptown Charlotte. Definitely a great addition to the city and a great way to support local artists! Plus there aren’t many time you can touch and play with the art exhibits. It’s a must check out!
We were gifted the tickets to Portal Charlotte, but all opinions are our own!
Looking for more things to do in Charlotte? Check out these blog posts:
Top Charlotte Area Breweries
Top 10 Murals in Charlotte
1 COMMENT
Nadine
4 years agoWhat a very creative idea❤️