In 1949, Winston-Salem created the first arts council in the United States, a civic decision that launched a national movement before the city had even begun to remake its tobacco-and-textile identity. The institutions that followed built on that founding instinct. The North Carolina General Assembly established America's first state-supported arts conservatory here in 1963 — but Winston-Salem's citizens had already voted with their phones, raising nearly $1 million in two days to win the school. UNCSA opened in 1965, joined the UNC System in 1972, and eventually sent Jada Pinkett Smith, Danny Glover, and Mary-Louise Parker into the world. The Carolina Theatre, a vaudeville and movie house since 1929, was donated to UNCSA in 1980 and now anchors downtown as the Stevens Center — home stage to the Winston-Salem Symphony, Piedmont Opera, and the International Black Theatre Festival. The traveler standing here is inside a city that decided, early and repeatedly, that culture was infrastructure.
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