Joe Liles has been thinking lately about rehoming a number of things he has collected through the years. There’s the ’80s-era three-piece suit, for instance – the only three-piece suit the former art instructor and NCSSM-Durham faculty emeritus has ever owned – that he used to wear to faculty council meetings in NCSSM’s early days when he was the group’s president. There’s a bunch of lumber in his wood-working shop that, despite his best intentions, never got turned into anything other than just pieces of lumber.

And then there’s the really, really good stuff: around 1,000 original works of art that Liles has kept stored in boxes and closets and wherever else he could manage for nearly 50 years.

“I am not preparing to leave this world anytime soon,” Liles, who will soon turn 75, says of his recent need to move a few things. “I am however, at the age where I’m looking around and thinking about how I can maximize the benefit of my life’s work.”

It was a stroke of good timing, then, when Barbara Coury, President of the NCSSM Foundation, and Carrie Alter, an instructor of studio art at NCSSM-Durham and NCSSM’s Fine Arts Series Exhibit Curator, visited Joe this past February at his home just a few blocks from the Durham campus to see if he might help them brainstorm fundraising ideas for the the school’s Fine Arts department. Though he retired from NCSSM 16 years ago, Liles remains a revered part of NCSSM’s history. Legend has it that he was the very first faculty member hired for the school, which opened in 1980, and his wisdom is regularly sought even now.

“He just opened up this closet door,” Coury says, “and there were all these wonderful prints. He said, ‘I think I may have an idea how we might raise at least a little bit of money.’ We thought we were just going to brainstorm ideas, but Joe had the core of an idea waiting for us.”

After months of careful planning, the group decided to put the art up for sale during Alumni Weekend 2024, with all proceeds benefiting NCSSM’s Art Department. Twenty-two pieces will be framed and hanging in the Educational Technology Complex Lobby Saturday, Oct. 26, during Alumni Weekend. An additional 19 pieces will be available through an online version of the event. Buying a print is as simple as scanning a QR code, which will direct customers to a webpage to complete the purchase. All purchased prints will be unframed and shipped to customers in sturdy cardboard tubes. The exhibit and online sale will run to Dec. 16.

Most of the work on sale will be screenprints on paper made between 1974 and 1998. Each individual screenprint, made by hand by Liles himself, is considered an original work of art. The number of available prints of each work varies from just a handful to more than 40. Also for sale will be a small number of circuitboard prints and offset lithography prints. 

Regardless of the medium, each piece has a truly unique story behind its creation. There’s “Lucille,” a screenprint of a relatively wild pony among 13 others on the farm between Durham and Chapel Hill where Liles lived in the mid-to-late ’70s. The pony’s lips, Liles said, reminded him of Lucille Ball, so he named her, then immortalized her in art. There’s “Astronomical Gastronomical” – one of the first prints Liles made after coming to NCSSM in 1980 – which sprang from a microscope photo of the villi and microvilli of a mouse’s intestines (“sounds a little gross, but it is really quite beautiful,” Liles says). And then there’s “In the Distance,” a multi-colored scene of the landscape between the Liles family farm in Anson County and the town of Wadesboro, three miles in the distance. If you look closely – and Liles will be happy to point these out to viewers on Alumni Weekend – you will see the subtle silhouettes of the town’s water tower and the steeples of the Methodist and Baptist churches.

Helping organize the art sale has been a labor of love for art instructor Alter, who formed a close professional and personal friendship with Liles soon after she was hired at NCSSM upon his retirement.

“Joe was kind enough to come and meet me when I got hired, and he gave me some really good advice early on,” Alter says. “Every time I walk in the art studio, I think about Joe, and I think about what he did for his students. He’s always on my mind, so putting together this show has just been extra special. I know his former students will love the opportunity to see him again and to purchase some of his work for themselves.”

The collection that Liles is offering covers a quarter century of the artist’s life. With the online sale, he is hoping to give something back to a school that has given so much to him. “NCSSM gave me a purpose in my creative life, and it allowed me to work with what I consider the best students in the world while also pursuing my own artistic ideas. That was a blessing to me.”

The creation of each piece marked a moment of personal joy for Liles. “The important thing to me in being an artist is to explore different ideas that come to me,” he says. “That creative process has made me a happy, optimistic person. It’s been good for me. It will be exhilarating if it turns out to help the art program at NCSSM.”

To purchase prints online, please click here, or visit https://joelilesncssm.squarespace.com/.

To read a profile of Joe written for NCSSM in 2004, click here.