G & M is not just our favorite place to grab a croque monsieur and a nice Chablis in Charleston, it’s also the initials of the artists who have an exciting installation and program of art at 701 CCA opening next week.
According to our friends at 701 CCA –
The artist-activist duo Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet are back at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, SC, with Displacement, Memory, Erasure: Collaborative Challenges in Three Parts. A dozen years after the duo’s memorable, gallery-wide Olympia installation at 701 CAA, the French couple and Charleston, SC, residents present a three-part project at the center, where they are currently in residence.
The exhibition opens Thursday, March 24, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m., with a meet-and-greet-the-artists opening event. On Saturday, April 9, the Charleston collective TINYisPOWERFUL, of which Gallimard and Mauclet are members, will present an all-day communication and learning workshop. On Sunday, April 24, 3:00 – 5:00 p.m., the exhibition closing reception will take place.
Gallimard’s part of the exhibition, called In Progress…, presents large canvases with drawings, collage and artifacts that relay decades of the duo’s unique art-and-activism collaborations with artists and non-artists alike. “The canvases are dedicated to our many collaborations and our explorations of art in and with communities,” Gallimard says. “It also perpetuates and honors those collaborations.”
Mauclet’s 3-D constructions in the exhibition are excerpts from A Tale of Charleston, an installation-in-the-making that critiques issues of wealth, class, culture, and race in Charleston. The tale central to the installation, Mauclet says, “actualizes a dream in which the city of Charleston has turned into a living garden. Wealth, class, cultures, race have become assets, a place for all to belong.” Several of Mauclet’s constructions refer to tiny downtown Charleston businesses that are either for sale or no longer exist.
The project’s third component is the April 9 workshop of TINYisPOWERFUL. The day-long workshop explores art tools and other techniques for collective social engagement, communication, and learning. The workshop, open to the public, will consist of five sessions exploring ways of engaging with and in the community and exploring art as tools for social engagement, activism, and growing communities. The workshop is from 9;30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. and will be a hybrid event with an online and in-person component. For more information, go to www.701cca.org.
About the Artists -
Gallimard (b. 1948, Paris, France) and Mauclet (b. 1942, Meru, France), Charleston residents since 1984, have worked independently and collaboratively for some four decades. Their collaborative works include Charleston’s popular community-oriented French café Fast & French, which they owned for decades, and which was conceived to offer “all the features of an art, social justice and economic sustainability project.” The duo has created installations and exhibitions tackling the health insurance industry, fast food, religious beliefs, refugees and how the past is memorialized. A 2006–08 collaboration, You Comin, brought eight artists and educators to the World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya. Their long-running project The Future Is On The Table between 2001 and 2013 was at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg and in Lexington, KY, Charleston, SC, and Jackson, MS. The project led Gallimard and Mauclet to residencies in India and France and an experimental conference on the Trans-Siberian train. Why do they want to be rich without us? in 2007 was part of the project The Changing Face of Charleston. Gallimard & Mauclet 2009 residency and 2010 exhibition Olympia at 701 CCA explored the history and culture of the historic mill district in Columbia where the center is located. Conversations With Time was a 2011 intergenerational art project in West Baltimore, MD.
Gallimard & Mauclet’s work has received support from France’s Ministère de la Culture; the South Carolina Arts Commission; Charleston’s Spoleto Festival; Alternate ROOTS; Alternate Visions; the Humanities Foundations; and the National Endowment for the Arts. Mauclet studied at the University of Paris, France; the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received an MFA; and New York City’s Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. Gallimard studied at Paris’ Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs and received an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.
The TINYisPOWERFUL collective believes that art and tiny businesses are nimble, adaptable, and profitable for the people. The collective argues that belonging means celebrating many histories and cultures and together becoming all we can be.
701 CCA is located at 701 Whaley Street, 2nd Floor, Columbia, SC 29201.
Dates to Remember:
Thu, March 24, 6:00 – 8:00 pm, Meet The Artist Exhibition Opening
Sat, April 9, 9:30 – 5:00, TINYisPOWERFUL Workshop
Sun, April 24, 3:00 – 5:00 pm, Exhibition Closing Reception
For further inquiries contact Michaela Pilar Brown at director@701cca.org or (803) 319-9949.