Caroline Orr ’12: Working with a Diverse Palette of Art, History, and Business

“Moving up the canvas, we have flashes of icy blue, a flash of lightning, and I love the demarcation lines that are then protruding out of these pools and puddles of color. As our eye moves across the surface of the canvas, we notice a myriad of textures. But most of all, there’s a shimmer. There is really a glowing, illuminating part of the paint that just jumps off the canvas. As far as technique, here Helen is using acrylic paint. You see a lot of active brushwork and a lot of paint that is really sitting on top of the surface, almost creating an impasto and thickly painted area. We love to see evidence of Helen working in her studio, laying the paint down onto the canvas. And this really does bear resonance to her as a person who is dedicated to studio practice, to technique, to play, to exploration, and everything that a true artist represents.”

“I was always painting, and my parents knew that it was something I was interested in,” Orr said. “I took art classes from a young age, like five or six. I was always doing something artistic.” 

Still, when she started at UNC, Orr originally planned to major in business. “That did not last long. I took one economics class and realized it was not for me. I quickly changed my major and decided that I would pursue art.

“I’m motivated by things that are passion-driven and less black and white,” she said, explaining her decision to pursue art. “The idea of interpretation of art, creating art, and the openness of creativity were what drew me to study art.”

Orr was the first of four Hutchison graduates to be awarded a Morehead-Cain scholarship at UNC. (The three who followed her were Gaby Nair ’14, Gabi Stein ’15, and Francie Sentilles ’17). Modeled after the Rhodes Scholarship, the Morehead-Cain at UNC is the first merit-based scholarship program in the United States. Scholars are challenged to pursue meaningful summer enrichment experiences that align with their passions. 

During her time at UNC as a Morehead-Cain scholar, Orr was intentional about seeking opportunities to explore her passions. One summer, Orr taught art, Shakespeare, and poetry to seventh and eighth graders at the Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project, a school in Bangalore, India. She said the opportunity to work with students interested in art was special because the usual emphasis in India is on science and math. Another summer she interned at Christie’s auction house in New York, which foreshadowed her future job at Sotheby’s. The next summer she worked at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., doing independent research for a curator, which allowed her to return to India to study a contemporary female Indian artist whose work focused on social change. During her junior year, Orr studied at the University of Oxford in England, focusing on two disparate fields of art history—contemporary Chinese art post-Mao and Italian Renaissance art. 

“The Morehead-Cain program was an extraordinary honor and opportunity which provided the framework to think more critically about how my studies and interests could be the defining part of my career,” Orr said. In addition to being passionate about making and studying art, Orr believes in the intrinsic value of art in the world. 


“I stand by the belief that I’ve always had, that we cannot live in a world without art,” she said. “I’m in this career because I believe in what art can do for us, the way it can uplift us, challenge us, encourage us, provide new viewpoints, connect us across different barriers—whether that’s a language barrier, geographical barrier, racial barrier, cultural—all of our differences. I think art is a common visual language through which we speak, we connect, we share ideas, we communicate, and without it, it would be a very different world. That extends through all of the arts, not just visual arts.”

The Business of Art

As an art services specialist, Orr helps art collectors navigate their collecting journey from an advisory and financial standpoint. For instance, she might guide a client through selling her art at auction; she might advise a client about taking a line of credit out against his collection; or she might strategize with a collector about what she will do with her collection in the future, whether it’s donating it to a museum or bequeathing it to family members. Her team also brings collectors together at major world art events. “It is about supporting our clients who are art collectors and providing tailored advice and strategy around their collection and art collecting journey,” she explained. 

“Working at a bank is an analytical job in many ways, and what I’m doing is a lot of business strategy. That’s sort of been new territory for me. There are many different kinds of hats that I wear or potential things that could fall under my job description. So there’s a lot of shifting. It’s not so clear-cut. Being able to adapt and move in different directions all at once has been a great learning experience.”

She’s found that there are some similarities between working in business and creating art. “When you’re developing a business strategy … you have to have a sense of where you want to go. I think the same is true for any sort of creative process. The first mark that you make may just be a mark, but you have to then be thinking several steps ahead about a larger plan or direction that you want to go in and be proactive and reactive at the same time, but also very adaptable.”

In addition, she said, being an artist teaches you to work through discomfort. “There’s no formula that says, ‘Now your painting is done.’ In art, it doesn’t always go well. You might not like what you’re making, or you might feel that it’s not right yet, or it’s not ready. It can be very frustrating to make art. Artists are occasionally thought of as moody and temperamental because they wrestle so hard with pieces. Sometimes that uneasy wrestling—sitting in the uneasiness and the wrestling—but working through that with some resilience and adaptability is a huge thing.” 

She believes studying art has been valuable to her in the business world. “There’s no doubt in my mind that, on a daily basis, we exercise both sides of our brain—the creative and the analytical. Even if someone goes into a different field, I think that having studied the arts and practiced them continues to pay dividends.”

“I used to draw in a hyperrealistic style, where it almost looked like a photograph,” Orr recalled. “One time at Hutchison, I was playing around with some paint, and my teachers, Anne Davey and Gwen English, stopped by. I didn’t want to show what I was working on to anyone because it didn’t look like the portrait I was painting. It was loose brushwork and was a bit abstract. But they said, ‘Keep doing that, it’s so expressive and gestural.’ I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this can be good?’ ”

What Orr realized later is that Davey and English had recognized a personal style emerging in her work. “That continued to set the tone for the painting style that I still have today,” Orr said, “which is loose and gestural, with lots of active brushwork, color, and the vigor of mark making and laying paint onto the surface.”

During high school and college, Orr mounted several shows of her work, always with the purpose of raising funds for worthy causes. While at Hutchison, the proceeds of her shows helped to endow a lunch program at a school in Tanzania that she had visited and taught at. While at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sales of her work helped raise funds to build a pipeline in Peru for a village that didn’t have access to running water. Her work also has benefited Habitat for Humanity.

“That was always the undercurrent of the art shows,” Orr explained. “I wasn’t selling the work for myself or to keep the funds. It was always a way to bring people together and use the art as an agent to help make a difference.” Even while she was at Sotheby’s, she collaborated with her boss to help launch a series of limited-edition prints that were sold to benefit an eye clinic in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Orr said that she’s been creating art again recently, and she’s enjoying it. Because space is limited in New York City, she’s rented a studio in the financial district. In addition to painting, she’s also been working in collage.

“My art straddles abstraction and figurative work. So it may have the essence of being in a gorgeous field of poppies, but it’s still abstracted. It’s more about memory and feeling. I look to Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell and some of those post-war American abstract artists who referenced specific feelings and emotions in their work, but it wasn’t so explicit.”

For her collage work, Orr said she is fascinated by a concept called “kintsugi,” which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken areas with urushi lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

“The whole concept is that the piece itself is more valuable because it is broken and because the shattered elements gain prominence,” she explained.

“It’s more whole in its brokenness because it’s been repaired with something that’s gold, not just glue. I’ve always loved that metaphor, and it has lent itself to my collages. The torn pieces and bits and fragments are pieced together and create something where the sum of the parts is greater. It’s a wonderful tenet to live by. Let your broken parts shine and give them prominence and own them.”

While Orr is content in her current job, she has dreams for the future, both for herself and other artists. One idea is to establish a place for artists to have a residency where they could come and recalibrate and make work for a set period of time, whether it be six months or a year. She might design it to have a specific focus, like all women artists, or perhaps artists who have been incarcerated and look to art as a way to get back on their feet.

“I think my goal, ultimately, is to get back to a place where I’m even more directly connecting my passion for service and being socially minded and working in an entrepreneurial way with my love for art,” she explained. “There’s always been an undercurrent and a theme of how I’ve seen the way that art can transform lives and be a vehicle for opportunity and an avenue for change. So, long term, I’m looking for something that will weave those passions together.

“Hutchison laid the groundwork. I continue to think fondly back on my years there and all that I learned. The nurturing and the support, the empathy, the compassion, the constant cheerleading of the faculty and staff were unparalleled. Our teachers helped us believe that we could hang the moon, that we could reach the stars, and that is so empowering when you’re a young woman, to be able to just have that everyday guidance and encouragement. Out of all of the mentors I’ve met and people who have supported me, I still think back to my Hutchison teachers. I’m eternally appreciative and grateful for them.”