CHAPEL HILL - On the right as you enter the main gallery at 523 E. Franklin St. is a loose juxtaposition of three artworks that, taken together, could serve as a portrait of North Carolina's history and heritage.

Spilling out of a stone fireplace onto the floor is a large pile of raw red Piedmont clay, beside which are stacked several dozen dusky old jars unearthed in Orange County, each holding a cupful or so of creek water. The installation, by Durham's Cici Stevens, is called "Grounded."

Beside that stands "Smolder," by Travis Donovan of Chapel Hill. A mound of dried tobacco leaves sits atop a low platform; periodically a bloom of pale mist seeps through and up from the leaves, carrying the sweet scent of raw leaf through the room.

Susan Alta Martin's "Main Streets" is a model of a small town Main Street, which she constructed by photographing storefronts and architectural details in four real North Carolina towns, cutting the photos into pieces and mixing them together on cardboard supports.

Red clay. Tobacco. Small towns. That's about as succinct a depiction of our state as you can conjure up.

"One of the great things about a show like this is that these uncanny connections start to happen," said elin o'Hara slavick, professor of art at UNC and the co-curator of the exhibit, "Local Histories: The Ground We Walk On." "That has happened over and over again with this."

The show features works by more than 50 artists all exploring facets of the themes suggested by the exhibition's title - ideas of place, the past, progress, memory and loss.

It's the first public exhibit in the building that until last year housed the Chapel Hill Musem. The museum closed summer after failing to reach a funding agreement with the town.

"I was just driving by and noticed the building was empty, and I thought, 'That's a great space; somebody should put a show in there,'" slavick said.

So she did. She won approval from the Town Council and sponsorship from the Parks and Rec Department, drew up guidelines and sent out a call for submissions.

"We were working with just a three-week window, but we got about 150 submissions," she said. "Considering we had no budget and told artists they'd have to ship their own work, that's pretty remarkable."

So is much of the work she and co-curator Carol Magee wound up with. As might be expected in a show with the thematic breadth of this one, the range of imagery, medium, style and message is vast, and yet the exhibition has touches of those unplanned connections slavick spoke of.

The cardboard houses in Martin's "Main Street" have an echo across the room in another cardboard dwelling, "Drift," by Lee Delegard and Ashley Florence of Chapel Hill, a large installation made of flattened boxes that form a sort cardboard snow-cave, into which visitors are invited to crawl and linger.

A video and multi-media piece called "Coast to Coast," by Joshua Bienko and John Powers, projects onto a wall a constant flow of repeated video images of Michael Jordan playing basketball - sometimes just a few, sometimes a crowd of hundreds of little Michaels - that illuminate a small model of the Wilmington house he grew up in. Complementing the piece is one of Jordan's Chicago Bulls jerseys - which slavick happened to find in downstairs in the the Chapel Hill Historical Society's storage.

"Can you believe that?" she said. "That gave me goosebumps."

The exhibition has drawn attention; the opening reception in February drew some 500 people, slavick said. A number of events are planned in conjunction with the show, including performances Friday night by three artists. The exhibit will be up until April 29.

One of slavick's favorite pieces is a set of four photographs of geologic materials - flakes of mica, a sliced geode and so on - by Chapel Hill's Michael Gurganus, a student in slavick's conceptual photography class. He didn't take pictures of the rocks - he took pictures with the rocks, placing them directly into a photo enlarger like film negatives. The result are images that are almost surreal in their brilliance.

"This is his first public showing," slavick said. "I saw these and said, 'We have to get these shown before somebody else does it.' I love these images. They literally are the ground we walk on."