A lifetime member and past President of the Advisory Board of The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Carol has been instrumental in growing the Museum’s collection, particularly of women artists. Along with her late husband, Carol has supported numerous leading-edge exhibitions at the Weatherspoon, from Hannah Wilke: Intra-Venus in 1996 to the upcoming presentation of Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And. Artist Nancy Grossman has stated that her “voice was central in tipping the scales for what were considered controversial shows at the Weatherspoon.”

Carol Cole Levin has supported exhibitions of artists in her collection at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Jewish Museum in NYC, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Grounds for Sculpture, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, LA, amongst others. She is always willing to loan works from the collection.

Carol and Seymour have donated to Greensboro’s Elsewhere Museum, a living museum that supports artists in a reimagined thrift store space; the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, amongst other organizations. Carol currently serves on the National Advisory Board of the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has served on many nonprofit boards, including the governing boards of ArtTable, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, NC, and the Penland School of Crafts in Penland, NC; the cabinet of Elsewhere Museum; and the National Advisory Board of the Lucy Daniels Foundation in Cary, NC. 

Carol’s artistic career spans over forty years. Her surreal drawings from the 1970s and her later mixed-media breast sculptures are charged with a feminist critique derived from her life experiences.

In the spring of 2018, Carol had a solo show at the Weatherspoon Art Museum titled Carol Cole: Cast a Clear Light, based on the quotation of Tennessee Williams, “Let us not deny all the dark things of the human heart, but let us try to cast a clear light on them in our work.” The exhibition included 24 of her own works and 62 works from her collection of other artists. In the fall of 2018, Carol had her first solo show in New York at Empirical Nonsense, titled Carol Cole’s The Bubble Blower, named after her autobiographical drawings from the 1970s of a breast that inverted its nipple and became a bubble blower. In 2016, Carol showed her work at the Greensboro College art gallery in an exhibition titled Carol Cole: Me and Tennessee, based on her relationship with the plays and writings of Tennessee Williams. 

Carol holds a BA from the University of Mississippi in 1964, triple majoring in Latin, English literature, and mathematics. Later, she turned to art and studied with notable artists including Lynda Benglis, Judy Chicago, Elizabeth Murray, Philip Pearlstein, and Ida Kohlmeyer. She lives surrounded by the works of other artists, sharing their souls and spirits, in her art collection.

She is also curator of the touring exhibition Marking Time, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in September 2020. Her other books are On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015) and Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (2011).  She is also co-editor of Aperture magazine’s “Prison Nation” issue, focusing on photography’s role in documenting mass incarceration, and co-curator of Aperture’s touring exhibition of the same name. Fleetwood has co/curated exhibitions and programs on art and mass incarceration at the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, the Andrew Freedman Home, Aperture Foundation, Cleveland Public Library, Eastern State Penitentiary, MoMA PS1, Mural Arts Philadelphia, the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Worth Rises.  Her work has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, NYPL’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ACLS, Whiting Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, Denniston Hill Residency, Schomburg Center for Scholars-in-Residence, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the NEH.