Jasper is Back On Main Street for First Thursday Fun! Join us from 6 - 8:30 pm in our old stomping ground at Tapp's! This month we're full or pride for our LGBTQ+ Artist Spotlight featuringJackie Bobo & Barry J. White, Josef Berliner, Tayler Simon, and Alejandro García-Lemos.

Come shop, have a drink, and hang out with us in the alley! The artists and Jasper Board members will be on site to chat about their work.

Our DJ for the evening is Ubaeby!

Ubaeby is a queer, Columbia based DJ with Filipino and Guatemalan roots. She mixes house, UKG, global club, and familiar songs with playful twists, bringing good energy wherever she plays.

Our Visual Artists

Jackie Bobo

Jackie Bobo is the vibrant force behind Bobo to the Max, an art practice and brand that creates emotionally immersive art and experiences inviting people to feel deeply, express fully, and belong as their most vivid selves.

Informed by nearly a decade as a Speech-Language Pathologist—and more than three decades of living at the intersection of queerness, Blackness, and neurodivergence—Jackie approaches painting as its own language, one capable of holding nuance from the playful to the profound.

Through her signature Happy Spooky aesthetic—bright, bold colors paired with ghosts, spiders, and other whimsically macabre motifs—her work explores what it means to unmask, authentically connect, and belong. Each piece acts as a symbol of self-acceptance, affirming that belonging doesn’t mean blending in—it means revealing who you already are.

Bobo to the Max is built on invitation, not instruction—an open door to feel.

Josef Berliner

Josef Berliner's artistic identity emerged early. As a child he gravitated toward sketchpads and drawing pencils, and a supportive family nurtured that spark until his work was selected for the Scholastic Art Awards' national touring exhibition at sixteen, earning his first public showing at the Columbia Museum of Art. He studied at the University of South Carolina among instructors and classmates who remain close friends today, but an unexpected detour into DJing took hold, and he spent years as one of the Southeast's premier nightclub DJs, playing top venues and racking up awards. That chapter also brought him his husband Josh, his biggest supporter and most honest critic. As commission work picked up alongside the DJ career, Josh's encouragement helped Josef make the leap into art full time, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Since then, Josef has exhibited widely in solo and group shows and founded Eye-Conic Art Studio. His work has appeared in community theatre lobbies, touring exhibitions, and private collections across regional, national, and international audiences, and he's contributed to organizations like Bullets and Bandaids, the Betsy Blackmon Dance Company, the Atlantic Institute, the Jasper Project, the Greater Irmo Art Guild, South Carolina Artists, and Artists for Africa, where he was a featured artist at the 2024 and 2026 Postcard Art galas. Working primarily in oil on canvas with portraiture at his core, Josef pairs technical precision with a deeper aim: revealing who his subjects truly are beneath the surface.

Alejandro García-Lemos

Bio: Alejandro García-Lemos is a visual artist based in New Orleans, Louisiana and Columbia, SC. He holds a MA in Latin American Studies from Florida International University in Miami, and a BA in Graphic Design from the School of Arts at the National University in Bogotá, Colombia. His work focuses on social issues, mostly on aspects of immigration, sexuality, biculturalism, religion and community. His works has been shown mostly in the South East. Alejandro is a member of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), as well as the founder of Palmetto & LUNA a non-profit organization promoting Latino Arts and Cultures in South Carolina since 2007. From 2022 to 2024 he was part of the artist collective “CAVILANTES” in Colombia, showing in Panama, México and Colombia. In July 2025 Alejandro was selected for a residency of Buihno, ArtLab in Messejana, Alentejo Portugal.

Artist Statement: I create art based on the curatorial statement or the intent of the show, which means that I use different materials and technics to convey the meaning of the exhibition. For the LGBTQ+ Pride Jasper show I decided to use some recent homo-erotic collages that I have been developing which depict images of the male nude body, highlighting the issue that men's bodies have been historically minimized, excluded or avoided in most art forms. It still persist an aspect of censorship if the male body is openly presented.

Tayler Simon

Tayler Simon (she, her) is a writer, artist, social worker, and seeker of collective liberation. She owns Liberation is Lit, a bookstore and press that sparks collective action for liberation among readers by promoting stories from intersectional experiences. Her main artistic mediums are digital collage and poetry. She has self-published four books, including her latest, Black Madonna. Through her art, she has made a commitment to radical vulnerability, curiosity, connection, and liberation.

Barry J. White

Barry J. White is a Blythewood, SC-based self-taught multi-disciplinary artist whose works center the beauty, strength, and vulnerability of Black men. Guided by intuition, personal experience, and emotion, Barry’s paintings explore themes of identity and self-acceptance through expressive realism and atmospheric color.

Barry’s work has been featured in exhibitions For the People, Crowned by the Roots, Degenerate II, and Gemini Arts, Stormwater, Roc Bottom, and Drummond studios, where it’s been recognized for its depth, honesty, and visual storytelling.

Jasper has an exciting show coming up on for our next First Thursday gallery opening on September 3rd as we welcome three singular artists into the Jasper Alley at Tapp's: Emily Moffitt, Cam Moore, and Kate Timbes, each bringing a distinct voice to the space, from illustration to upcycled collage to ecological sculpture. Joining them will be Andrew Phillips, a special guest artist who is showing his work for the very first time.

Color Has Other Plans by Andrw Phillips - 24x24 $400

Guest Artist - Andrew Phillips

Phillips paints the way he lives—boldly, on his own terms, and without waiting for anyone's permission to take up space. He communicates using an AAC device and gets around by wheelchair, but neither has ever slowed down his imagination; if anything, painting gives him a language all his own, one that doesn't require words to say exactly what he means. Working in acrylic paint with an adapted paintbrush created for him by fellow featured artist and camp art director, Cam Moore, Phillips is drawn to bold color and rich texture, which is no surprise from an artist who's also an active member of the Inclusive Theatre Company of South Carolina and brings a bit of flair to everything he touches.

The piece in this show is his first painting. Moore recalls the moment Phillips first took hold of the brush himself: "It was his first time painting, and his reaction was pure joy. He had this huge smile, and you could see the curiosity and pride on his face." Andrew started with simple strokes and was soon experimenting on his own, moving between dotting and longer brushstrokes to see what he could do.

"I paint because I have something to say," Phillips writes in his artist statement, "that life is full of color and excitement, that it takes unexpected turns, and that dreams get fulfilled. This piece is my proof."

Featured Artist – Cam Moore

Cam Moore is a multidisciplinary artist and art educator whose work turns what most people throw away, thin cardboard and packing paper, into mosaic-styled collage pieces detailed with charcoal. "There's usually a moment where the viewer realizes that what they're actually looking at wasn't meant to be beautiful in the first place," Moore says, "and that surprise is a big part of what I'm going for." His work has been shown at Richland Library Main and at Stormwater Studios via Jasper’s Degenerate Arts Project Part II, where it won the Artists’ Choice Award.

Beyond the studio, Moore is the Art Lead at Camp Cole's Camp Rise Above program, he founded the community art series The Sessions, and is currently building The Source Columbia, a creative studio space aimed at underserved neighborhoods. He's been showing publicly since early 2025 and moving fast ever since.

Featured Artist – Emily Moffitt

Emily Moffitt is an illustrator based right here in Columbia, and a familiar face in Jasper's world. She serves as Secretary on the Jasper Board of Directors and as Visual Arts Editor for Jasper Magazine, alongside her day job as Gallery Curator for the Koger Center for the Arts. A graduate of USC's School of Visual Art and Design, Emily has exhibited at the Driggers Center for the Arts in Greer, at Stormwater Studios for Jasper's inaugural Degenerate Art Project, and at the Richland Library. She's spent her post-grad years deep in the Columbia arts scene and says helping build exhibits for fellow artists keeps pulling her back toward her own studio practice.

Featured Artist – Kate Timbes

Kate Timbes is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, and digital media, weaving paint, seeds, handmade paper, and other materials into pieces that make us think hard about where our resources come from. Her practice, as she describes it, searches for "a finish that borders raw, vaguely familiar, and other worldly all at once." Timbes has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Koger Center, The Morgan Paper Conservatory, Visalia Arts Center, and the DIS Student Hub in Copenhagen, and she teaches papermaking workshops across the Carolinas. She runs Woven Studios, holds a BA in Studio Art from Wofford College, completed a Work-Study Fellowship at Arrowmont School of Craft, and is a member of Zero Space Collective. Originally from South Carolina, she is currently based in Charlotte.

Come shop, have a drink, and hang out with all the cool kids in the alley. We have DJ Saiteron scheduled to keep us dancing throughout the evening, as well as the featured artists aboce and Jasper Board members on site to chat about the work and what’s next for Jasper.

TONIGHT at The Jasper Alley at Tapp's