By Priya Giri

Photography by Helen Kranbuhl

A young boy walks through the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh with the prescribed blue jeans, t-shirt and sneakers of many children today. For every one step his mother takes, the youngster takes at least three or four to keep up. When they finally make it down the long second story hallway to Gallery C, what awaits them is a world that is fast disappearing.

After the customary nod of the head by a security guard, they walk into a dimly lit exhibit room that has been temporarily transformed into a picture postcard of rural North Carolina. The walls resemble the woodsy surroundings of the historic North Carolina countryside. Even the emergency exits are covered with faux timber. Under the low, yellow lighting, it seems that they have entered a very private place--a quiet clearing in the woods.

Their first stop is at the information station, where a "family guide" pamphlet tells children how to study the work of the North Carolinian realist Bob Timberlake. In a way, the pamphlet serves as a tour guide for children and leads them through the private world Timberlake captures in his paintings and handicrafts ranging from a line of furniture done for Lexington Furniture Industries to a commemorative bicentennial stamp collection from 1989.

"How to Read a Painting," says the first large caption in the pamphlet under the title, "At Home in North Carolina with Bob Timberlake." "What time of year does the painting show?" it instructs the young readers to ask themselves. "Where did the artist find the scene, in the city or country? What other things can you learn about the painting as you `read' it?"

These are some of the questions that face young visitors to the exhibit, which runs October 24 through December 8. Even older visitors will have questions about the state's past after viewing the exhibit. But how people read the paintings of Timberlake's life in rural Lexington, North Carolina, invariably depends on their own background.

While the manicured lawns of suburbs and concrete playgrounds of the city make up the reality of many young people in North Carolina and the rest of the country today, that's not what Timber-lake portrays. The dangers of riding a bike down the streets of modern cities and even of "safe" neighborhoods pales in front of the secure freedom that he tries to capture in his work.

"As an institution, the Museum of History has as one of its goals, to represent all people of this state," says Mary Cook, director of public affairs for Timberlake. "They have a very, very broad focus."

For many visitors, not just children, images of perfect spring flowers and summer landscapes in the country are too far in the past to be a part of their present reality. A young child, for instance, will no doubt see scenes of lonely farmhouses in the middle of winter differently than some of the older visitors might.

"Many of these houses, I've seen a thousand times," says John Badgett, a visitor to the museum who grew up in rural North Carolina before moving to much more suburban Chapel Hill. He saw the exhibit as a learning tool for those who had no real concept of the state's rural history.

In fact, learning through viewing is one of the tasks of the Timberlake exhibit, say museum officials. From the very beginning, the exhibit was meant to be something to which all people, especially children, could come and learn about what North Carolina once was for those who lived here.

The team assigned to putting the project together included education professionals who seized their opportunity to teach children outside North Carolina classrooms. And so the family guide was born.

It is important that children have an understanding of the past, says Ellen Fitzgibbons, a curatorial specialist and team leader of the Timberlake exhibit. "If we're going to reach out to the kids, we have to find some way to do it," she says.

At a time when the kind of utopian family values Timberlake seemingly illustrates in his work are hard to find in many households, museum officials see the exhibit as a chance to bring families together to try and understand the intricacies of rural North Carolina.

"It's really to engage parents and children," says Pat Phillips, curator of the museum.

But the goal of the museum and the realities of its visitors may not be in the same vein. If the overwhelming majority of North Carolinians and Americans, for that matter, no longer live in the countryside, can museum officials expect their patrons truly to appreciate what Timberlake tries to recreate?

"Unless you're from a highly developed area like New York City... most folks can relate to the rural countryside," Phillips says. The continued existence of agriculture throughout the United States has kept the rural past of this country alive, including that of North Carolina, she adds.

"You can't work in [North Carolina] state government without meeting someone who lived on a farm," says public affairs director Cook.

Those select few who work for the state undoubtedly have a stronger connection to North Carolina and its past than some of the visitors who will come to see Timberlake's work during the next month.

Leslie Holloway of Orlando, Florida, came to see the exhibit with a friend who lives in Chapel Hill. While she says she enjoyed the paintings and handicrafts, she only saw them as interesting "still life," hardly the type of resonance museum officials claimed could occur in all visitors.

Her friend, William Hilliard of Chapel Hill, on the other hand, had his own personal connection to what he saw. He says it captures everything he remembers from his childhood when he would travel through the rural South past the small family farms of the countryside. Although Hilliard's perceptions of Timberlake's representations seem to be first-hand, they actually came through the tinted glass of a car window. It could be that Timberlake's idealized vision of his rural past simply reaffirms an already idealized childhood memory.

John Badgett does not think it is idealized at all, however. He looks at the many paintings of spring and summer flowers and makes the point that none of the plants sitting next to an old house held up at the corners by large rocks are fancy or expensive. They were simply efforts by the people of that community to beautify their homes, he says.

"I can smell those leaves right now, and I hate it," he says as he looks at a painting and reminisces about the front yard of his grandmother's country home. For the most part, he finds the exhibit to be a great reminder of his childhood. Only one thing sticks out as different than what he remembers.

"My memories are not so technicolor," he says.

In fact, the superfluous "technicolor" of many of the paintings exudes a sense of utopian idealism about North Carolina's countryside to which not everyone could relate. The painting, "Ella's Cupboard," for example, depicts a country kitchen with a cupboard full of freshly jarred food. The vibrant reds and greens seem to imply that Ella's cupboard was always plentiful. Timberlake never alludes to the undeniable poverty that existed and continues to exist in the countryside.

Poverty in the modern, urban world might be something to which Timberlake could forge a connection, but instead, such scenes remain nothing more than idealized portraits of a romanticized past packaged impeccably in rustic wooden frames.

Problems are not something Timberlake wanted to address, curator Fitzgibbons says. "I think what he attempts to do is chronicle his backyard," she says.

In fact, the exhibit is as much about rural North Carolina as it is about Timberlake himself. His own family tree is one of the first pieces a visitor sees as he enters Gallery C. Paintings of people from his past, like "Dan Melton," as well as his childhood photos, cub scout hat, and his first paint set, which are featured prominently in the front of the exhibit hall, are all a part of Timberlake's own history, not the history of the collective past the museum officials claim to try and convey.

"We basically approached it from the viewpoint that the rural experience, up until the 1950s, 1960s was a shared experience," Phillips says. Ultimately, even Phillips realized that Timberlake's work has a finite audience. The exhibit has a stronger resonance for older patrons, she says.

The N.C. Rural Profile, a report written by the N.C. Rural Economic Development Center and North Carolina State University in 1988, states that "considerable economic and social differences exist between rural and urban areas--and, in many cases, the discrepancies are growing." Many of the works in the exhibit were created in the 1970s and 1980s. In all likelihood, Timberlake's own hometown has changed dramatically, yet his depictions in the exhibit portray the North Carolina of up to 25 years ago--light years from the development of strip malls, office buildings, upscale housing communities and multiplex cinemas.

While Phillips says, "We're looking at the paintings as a document of how landscape has changed in North Carolina," evidence seems to suggest otherwise--modern or recent changes are brushed aside. The North Carolina Rural Profile reports that the Piedmont area was the fastest growing urban area in the state. Ironically, rural--and, in fact, non-industrial--Piedmont is the subject of most of Timberlake's work.

Ultimately, one redeeming message surfaces from the quaint scenes of Timberlake's exhibit. His collection is as much about the past as it is about experiencing present and visualizing the future. The past that he strives to preserve helps broaden one's understanding that North Carolina has changed and will continue to evolve.