The best museums in Charlotte to get your culture fix

The Mint's HQ down on Randolph Road added this 145,000-square-foot cousin to house its collection of international and American arts, mostly skewing to crafts and fashion. What was originally simply the Mint’s second act is now one of the city's finest cultural institutions, with displays of everything from 18th-century ceramics to men’s and women’s fashions from the 1700s to today.

The Gannt Center hired some serious guns to give the 1974-born museum new life: Philip Freelon, who also designed the Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture. The result is what looks like a series of shards stitched together, like the weaving of the past with the present. The dramatic building now serves as a space for everything from dance performances to visual art exhibits from the likes of Romare Bearden and Jonathan Green.

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Appropriately headquartered in the former Charlotte Mint building, the Mint became the city's first art museum when it opened in 1936. Permanent collections skew toward the important-for-you-to-know historical art of Europe and America, represented in about 900 works.

The years after the Civil War were rough for many Southern cities. But Charlotte embraced a new approach to modernizing both its economy and its old ways, and that forward-thinking is captured in the Levine Museum. Nowadays, that means displays on the city's neighborhoods and traditions, from Dia de los Muertos to Juneteenth.

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With more than three dozen locations across 25 countries, the Museum of Illusions has perfected a recipe: create exhibits and works of art that serve both as entertainment and a great backdrop for your TikTok vid. The Charlotte location boasts 60 interactive exhibits that’ll appear to decapitate you, seem like you’re walking on walls and, maybe more than you’ll like to admit, make you question what’s real.

Even if you're not a modern art fan, the Bechtler Museum is worth a visit if simply for its stunning building, four stories of sunset-orange bricks that look like a wild Jenga stack, the center revealing a wall of glass. Outside stands The Firebird, a 17-foot statue of disco ball glass that's raising its winged arms toward Tryon Street.

Whatever you think of race car driving, the NASCAR museum is undoubtedly an impressive space, starting with the building’s sweeping metal adornment, like a gleaming hat of silver, that's meant to evoke a racetrack. Inside, more than 86,000 square feet of exhibits detail the days when moonshiners from the outskirts of Charlotte helped create what would become America's No. 1 race car circuit, capped off by a "Glory Road" display of the cars that have captured checkered flags.

Charlotte's trendy Uptown neighborhood has a cultural hub at the McColl Center. A 5,000-square-foot gallery space housed in a former church works to promote, and sell the works of the artists who have benefitted from the center, including those in the artist-in-residence program that's helped kickstart the careers of creatives.

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Yes, Discovery Place is a great spot for that troubled nephew of yours to burn off energy while theoretically learning about science and stuff. But there are also lots of events like winter stargazing, animal encounters, and for the 21-plus crowd, Science on the Rocks, where the museum turns into a bar of sorts at night with live music and, yes, tasty drinks.

The Charlotte Museum of History's wooded eight-acre campus holds several attractions, including a preserved home that dates back to the 1770s and a plantation-inspired modern gallery space. Exhibits tap into the museum's 5,000-piece collection of historical artifacts to tell a story of the people that shaped the city.