Announcing the Winners of Jasper's Degenerate Art Project Artist's Awards

Jasper’s Degenerate Art Project II is a wrap!

Janet Kozachek - Pufferfish

Jasper is excited to officially announce the winners of the Degenerate Art Project Artist’s Awards presented Saturday, February 28th at the exhibition’s Closing Party at Stormwater Studios in Columbia.

In a night that included verboten swing dance demonstrations and lessons by Columbia’s Richard Durlach and Breedlove, the launch of Ed Madden’s new book, I Asked Him What He Needed, with a sweet little surprise chapbook titled, My Students Want to Talk About Ice: Political Poems, the reading of a banned children’s book by our favorite Drag King Marty McGuy, freshly spun tunes from Scotty Tempo, and an amazing menu by MidiMarc, the presentation of the awards was an appropriate addition to the fun.

Ivan Segura with Untitled

Congratulations to Ivan Segura for winning the Jasper Degenerate Art Project II ZEITGEIST AWARD for his painting Untitled, presented to the artist whose work best exemplified the socio-political spirit of the times while also exhibiting proficiency in execution, originality, and strong engagement with the viewer.

The Adjudicators for the Zeitgeist Award included Peter Chametzky, Harriett Greene, and Xavier Blake.

Cam Moore with Heavy

Congratulations to Cam Moore for winning the Jasper Degenerate Art Project II ARTISTS’ CHOICE AWARD for his painting HEAVY. The winner of the Artists’ Choice Award was determined by the participating artists, each of whom cast a single vote for their favorite contribution to the show.

In addition to framed certificates the winning artists also received cash prizes made possible by the generosity of our sponsors Bill Schmidt and Muddy Ford Press.

Nolan Wright - Resilient Standing Strong

Ginny Merrett - 100 Worry Dolls

Stephen White - No More Closets

Kirstin Dow - Artist

Janet Kozachek - Liberty Snakes

Thank you to everyone who came out for the Degenerate Art Project II, and thanks to Maya Smith and the welcoming artists at Stormwater Studios for hosting us. Thanks to Curiosity Coffee for keeping our thirsts at bay and to MidiMarc for feeding us so well and to WeCo Bottle & Biergarten for donating the bubbles we used to celebrate our opening night.

Thank you to our Zeitgeist judges: Xavier Blake, Harriett Greene, and Peter Chametzsky.

Sadly, it is highly likely that we will need to do this again in 2027, so please be thinking about ways to make the third iteration different and unique unto itself while still engaging with artists from all disciplines and their patrons.

WE WANT TO HEAR YOUR IDEAS!

Hit us up at info@jasperproject.org

Ed Madden Launches Newest Book of Poetry at Jasper's Degenerate Art II Closing Party

A new book by Ed Madden, postcard poems against the Trump deportation regime.

The Jasper Project is excited to announce that Ed Madden will launch his latest book of poetry — I Asked What He Needed (Squares and Rebels, 2026) — at our Degenerate Art Project II Closing Party on Saturday, February 28th at Stormwater Studios. Madden will read at 7 pm and sign books immediately after.

In addition to being a book of postcard poems, Madden’s I Asked Him What He Needed is part of the Chaps Poetry Series which is an imprint of the Squares & Rebels publishing house. Madden explains the series on the back cover of the book:

“The morning that I read Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested, I wrote a short meditation on a postcard. I had written postcard poems before, drawn to the brevity and the link between the poem and the image. I asked him what he needed for the journey. I dropped the card in the mail to a friend. But the stories kept coming. My morning meditations, contained by the small message space of the postcard, began to take into their ambit not just the deportation regime but the administration’s broader attacks on history, truth, law, democratic norms—and in the face of such fears, my own mortality. What kind of disaster did I think was coming?”

The title poem follows:

I asked him what he needed

for the journey. He said,

Write down what you saw.

Maybe, someday, the world

will want to know.

Join the Jasper Project Saturday from 3 - 9 for an exciting close to our Degenerate Art Project II at Stormwater Studios, 413 Pendleton, Columbia, SC. In addition to Madden’s book launch and reading we’ll have a banned book reading and performance by Marty McGuy, Swing Dance demonstrations and lessons from The Big Apple’s Richard Durlach and Breedlove, music from DJ Scotty Tempo, beer and wine from Curiosity Coffee, and delicious food prepared by Midi Marc.

We will also be awarding Jasper’s Degenerate Art Project II Zeitgeist Award as well as the Artists’ Choice Award, decided by a vote from the project’s participating artists.

This will be your last chance to check out the art exhibition everyone has been talking about. Don’t miss it!

Call for Sponsors of Jasper's Degenerate Art Project II - Please Spread the Word

 

The Jasper Project is in search of sponsors for our upcoming Jasper Degenerate Art Project II exhibition at Stormwater Studios, February 11 – 28, 2026.

We are asking for sponsors to help us defray the costs of facility rental, promotions, refreshments for attendees, performing artist stipends, and a cash prize for the juried Zeitgeist Award which will be given to the artwork that “most accurately represents the socio-political spirit of the times while also being technically well executed, engaging, and highly original.”  We are in need of a total of $2000 in contributions of any size.

To show our appreciation, sponsors and their guests will be invited to join us for Jasper’s Degenerate Art Project II Preview Event for Sponsors, Jasper Guild members, and Participating Artists. Our Preview Event will take place February 12 from 5 – 6:30 prior to the official opening reception from 6:30 – 8:30 the same evening. This puts you first in line to see and purchase all the art included in the exhibition as well as to toast and chat with the artists themselves.

With your permission, we will also show our appreciation at all events with a public thank you and you, or the name/logo of your business, will be listed in the following locations:

·         The Jasper Project Website

·         The printed Degenerate Art Project II Calendar of Events which will be distributed throughout the city

·         and, in a special Thank You Ad in the spring 2026 issue of Jasper Magazine. You, or your organization, may also remain anonymous if you prefer.

To serve as a sponsor for the Jasper Project’s Degenerate Art II Project please email Cindi Boiter at cindiboiter@gmail.com or by visit the Jasper Website and click on DONATE.

Thank you for your consideration.

We are happy to answer any questions you may have.

 

From the print issue -- DEGENERATE ART PROJECTS I & II

“We proudly reclaim our art—protest art in defiance of the current administration’s attempts to remove, censure, and redefine art and its purpose—"Degenerate Art” in solidarity with both historical and contemporary artists who work or have worked to maintain our first amendment rights of freedom of speech and expression.”

Degenerate Arts—Entartete Kunst—I and II

By Cindi Boiter

 

Sometimes you just have to say what you’re thinking. You have to get it out there, one way or another. You have to express the fire of frustration, anger, and disappointment that can rage within you, as well as those still-hanging-on, deep-rooted beliefs that it can be better. It has been better. Our country has been better and can be better again. These sensations are complex and difficult to manage for all of us.

Luckily, we have artists.

Art is the tool we humans use to attempt to reconcile our profound and complicated responses to a world that doesn’t always give us the peace we crave. The peace we once took for granted. The process of creating art, be it dance, theatre, or music, visual art, or the written word, not only soothes the artist but it helps the recipient of the art, the viewer, the reader, feel seen and heard as they wrestle with the same conflicts an unbalanced world stirs inside them. It helps the recipient to better comprehend where we are right now, as a culture, and it helps us know that they we not alone.

This is why the Jasper Project originated the Degenerate Art Project in the summer of 2025 at Stormwater Studios, and it is why we’re bringing this unique project back in January 2026 at Gemini Arts.

Degenerate Arts II offers an open call for visual artists as well as performing or written word artists who want to propose programs that they would like Jasper to help implement.

Why do we call it “degenerate art?” In his essay printed in the current issue of Jasper Magazine, professor and Jasper Magazine poetry editor Ed Madden identifies the similarities between Hitler’s purge of art that did not represent the cultural ideology he promulgated—an ideology we now recognize as fascist—and the current administration’s attempts to dictate, control, and suppress art via a “politics of culture.” As Madden writes, in July 1937, “Nazi culture warriors had searched 32 of Germany’s public museums, determined to purge them of any work they considered undesirable because they were incompatible with Nazi values.” Hitler and Goebbels called the exhibition of this “undesirable” art “Degenerate Art,” or “Entartete Kunst” and juxtaposed it against an exhibition of predominantly representative art, of which he approved, and titled “Great German Art” or Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung.

We proudly reclaim our art—protest art in defiance of the current administration’s attempts to remove, censure, and redefine art and its purpose—"Degenerate Art” in solidarity with both historical and contemporary artists who work or have worked to maintain our first amendment rights of freedom of speech and expression.

CALL FOR ART FOR DEGENERATE ART PROJECT II EXTENDED UNTIL MIDNIGHT SATURDAY NOVEMBER 22ND!

I’ve always maintained that we don’t fully know the history of an event or a period of time until we know how the artists interpreted it. To that end, we created the first iteration of our Degenerate Arts project to provide a concerted platform for Columbia’s artists to express their responses to our country’s current socio-political situation. We also wanted to bring our local arts community together both physically and in spirit during this challenging time in order to support and encourage one another. And we hoped to preserve for posterity the SC Midlands’ artistic interpretation of this unique and disturbing time in history.

More than twenty visual artists participated in the Degenerate Arts Project in June. It was exciting to see the work, some of it satirical like Robert Airial’s cartoons of the president as a present-day Mussolini and  the same man removing the letters M and E from the word America to simply spell ME. Some was jarring and foreboding, like Eileen Blyth’s found art sculpture of a child’s old doll in a rusty oven. And some of it was incisive and incredibly current like Marius Valdes’ huge painting of a masked ICE agent with a word bubble reading “Just Following Orders.”

Pictured - poet Ed Madden stands before Marius Valdes’s painting “Just Following Orders” during a protest poetry reading in June 2025

Eileen Blyth - Artist

Portrait and assemblage artist Kirkland Smith says, “Being part of the Degenerate Arts project reminded me how powerful art can be in shaping the way we see one another.” She continues, “I appreciated the opportunity to portray a polyamorous group of four beautiful transgender women with quiet dignity, reclaiming a narrative that has been twisted for political reasons. The exhibition created a space for empathy in a world that is forgetting how to listen.”

Kirkland Smith pictured with her painting and her daughter at the Degenerate Art Project I in June 2025

While our first project focused on visual arts, poetry, a little music, and activism opportunities, we plan for our 2026 project to include additional arts disciples and we are excited to hear from dance, theatre, and more literary artists about what you’d like to contribute.

While the 2025 project lasted less than a week, the 2026 project will last three weeks, giving all of us ample time to be seen and heard.

And while the first project was structured as an invitational exhibition, Degenerate Arts II offers an open call for visual artists as well as performing or written word artists who want to propose programs that they would like Jasper to help implement.

For more information on how to submit a proposal for Degenerate Art II please see our CALL FOR ART at the Jasper Project website.

CALL FOR ART FOR DEGENERATE ART PROJECT II EXTENDED UNTIL MIDNIGHT SATURDAY NOVEMBER 22ND!

This article previously appeared in the fall 2025 issue of Jasper Magazine, on newsstands now.

CALL FOR ART - The Jasper Project's Degenerate Art Project PART II

Degenerate Art Project II – Call for Art

The purpose of this exhibition is to answer an overwhelming request by artists and patrons of Jasper’s inaugural Degenerate Art Project (July 2025) for an additional exhibition which will involve an open call for visual artists and an extended calendar for exhibition. This iteration of the project will also include prizes for visual art and representation by additional arts disciplines.

Learn more about the project →

Entry Guidelines

  • Artists must live in one of the following counties to be considered: Calhoun, Fairfield, Kershaw, Lexington, Orangeburg, Richland, Saluda, Sumter, Lee, Clarendon, Newberry, and Aiken.

  • Artists may submit up to three pieces. 

  • 2D Art must be framed, wired, and/or mounted for presentation and delivered to Gemini Arts during a designated time period on January 17 and 18, 2026. 

  • All art must be for sale and artists must agree to allow the Jasper Project a 25% commission on sold art which will go toward project costs, with any potential extra going toward the publication costs for Jasper Magazine.

  • All submissions should be of NEW work. Nothing previously exhibited or repurposed for this exhibition is allowed. 

  • Artists who participated in the Jasper Degenerate Art Project in 2025 are invited to submit new work, but art previously exhibited at the Jasper Degenerate Art Project in 2025 should not be submitted for the second exhibition.

  • No AI-generated imagery or significant alterations of others' work is allowed. 

Deadline for submission – November 16, 2025

The purpose of this exhibition is to answer an overwhelming request by artists and patrons of Jasper’s inaugural Degenerate Art Project (July 2025) for an additional exhibition which will involve an open call for visual artists and an extended calendar for exhibition. This iteration of the project will also include prizes for visual art and representation by additional arts disciplines.

The title, Degenerate Art Project, is a contemporary SC-localized reflection of the Nazi Party’s 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich at which more than 650 pieces of Modernist art were haphazardly displayed alongside graffiti and mocking text labels with the goal of denigrating and ridiculing the art and artists. The exhibition included the work of 112 artists including Picasso, Mondrian, Chagall, Kandinsky, Klee, Dix, and many other groundbreaking artists. The website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum offers an excellent overview of this period of world history. 

The purpose of the Jasper Degenerate Art Project is threefold:

  • To provide a platform for expression and/or protest via art for Midlands area artists

  • To bring our local arts community together both physically and in spirit during this challenging time in order to support and encourage one another

  • To preserve for posterity, via the Jasper Project website, Columbia, SC’s artistic interpretation and response to our country’s current socio-political situation.