Announcing the JASPER MAGAZINE Fall 2024 Release Party & Potluck Supper!

Please join

the Jasper Project and the staff of Jasper Magazine

on Sunday September 22 from 4 - 7 pm

at the One Columbia Co-Op 1013 Duke Avenue

for our

Jasper Magazine Fall 2024 Release Party

& Potluck Supper Celebration

as we honor all the artists featured in this issue of

Jasper Magazine!

Please join us for another downhome potluck supper as we celebrate all the artists honored in the fall 2024 issue of Jasper Magazine.

Bring a dish to share and a cooler with whatever you’re drinking (we don’t care) and rub elbows with some of the visual, theatre, film, literary, and musical artists who make our hometown such a rich and beautiful place to live. We’ll have many of our featured DJs spinning for us, art from some of our featured visual artists, poetry readings, and all kinds of surprises. Feel free to bring lawn chairs or blankets to spread out in the co-op’s backyard. Kids are welcome, too!

The event is free (but we love donations to help offset the cost of publishing Jasper Magazine!)

Featured Artists include

Brian Harmon

Bekah Rice

Emily Moffitt

Mike’s Mugs – Kristine Hartvigsen

Chad Henderson

Jon Tuttle

Stan Brown

Libby Campbell

Marybeth Gorman Craig

G. Scott Wild

Jeff Miller

SC Underground Film Fest

Tom Mack

Corey Davis

Roni Nichol Henderson-Day

Michal Rubin

Meena Khalili

Nate Puza

Jeffrey Miller

Wayne Thornley

Mike Dwyer

Victoria Rickards

Eezy Olah -  Kwasi Brown

Todd Mathis – Kevin Oliver

Amos Hoffman

Kenya Spinz, DJ Wandergirl, and The Mixstress Madi Jo

Stay Tuned to This Space as we Announce the Line-Up of Artists Who Will Be Joining Us!

New Brookland Tavern Welcomes THE WOGGLES and the Release of Their New Album

New Brookland Tavern welcomes The Woggles with special guests, Brandy and the Butcher, to help celebrate the release of their new LP, Time Has Come on June 12th. According to musician and Jam Room director, Jay Matheson, “The Woggles have been one of the best garage rock bands in the US since the mid 90s and put on a stage show that is beyond compare.”

Check out their new single as well as their new LP in its entirety.

According to Matheson, the show will be a 2 band affair with Matheson’s own local Rock and Roll band Brandy and the Butcher opening.

Cover tickets to the show are $10 in advance and $15 on the day of the show.

Doors are at 7:30 with music starting at 8:30.

See you there!

Read more about the Woggles from Jasper Magazine music editor Kevin Oliver here.

A Message from Cindi: 37 Issues of Jasper Later and Thanks for Everything

Thank You!

This is the image that popped up in my Facebook memories this morning.

It’s a bundle shot of our second issue of Jasper Magazine released this week in 2011. The cover art is by Thomas Crouch and was designed by Heyward Sims, our art director when we started Jasper Magazine. A small magazine, it featured a piece on Crouch, one on Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School—Ashleigh Rivers was the president of the Columbia chapter, our centerfold was Chris Bickel, articles on Dre Lopez, Caroline Lewis Jones, Bobby Craft, Lee Ann Kornegay, and a story about the 2011 Biennial written by Jeffrey Day. Mayor Steve Benjamin wrote a guest editorial at the back of the book in which he praised the opening of the new Tapp’s Arts Center on Main Street. His editorial was accompanied by an assemblage of the mayor created by Kirkland Smith.

Sigh.

Time goes by so fast.

When this mag came out I had just turned 53 and was realizing that my 50s might very well be the best decade of my life. It was. And for that I am grateful. I’m even more thankful that, 11 years later, someone stills needs me and feeds me now that I’m 64. And I’m particularly thankful for the artists, staff, board, readers, and supporters who made this most recent issue of Jasper—released on Friday night with a lovely little soiree at Kristian Niemi’s Bourbon Courtyard—possible.

This is a photo of artist Wilma Ruth King by Brad Martin holding the image our art director Brian Harmon made into the cover of the magazine we just released.

This is a big fat magazine full of stories about Columbia-based artists and the films they’ve made—Thaddeus and Tanya Wideman-Davis, Monifa Lemons, Dustin Whitehead and his USC crew, Arischa Connor and her list of TV credits, a big piece on jazz by Kevin Oliver, a centerfold story written by Will South about neighbor artist from Conway, Jim Arendt, and another by South on the Elizabeth Catlett exhibition at the CMA. There’s poetry by Monifa and Jonathan Butler, a review of Carla Damron’s new book by Eric Morris, smaller pieces on exciting people and innovative projects—like Amy Brower, Jamie Blackburn, Seitu Amenwahsu, Steven Chapp and Jerred Metz, and Libby Campbell, record reviews of Jump Little Children and Todd Mathis and really, too many subjects to mention here.

I am thankful for this issue of Jasper Magazine and all it represents. An evolving and maturing art community full of grown-ass people who are living the lives they always imagined they’d live, or better. Some of them are stars. Some of them go on brief rides on starlight. And some enjoy basking in the combined and accumulated glow they and their colleagues in the community emit when they make their art and see it received by their fellow humans.

All of this is good.

I’m also thankful for all of you who came out this week to help Jasper celebrate by joining us at Vista Lights.

Jasper Project Board President Wade Sellers at Vista Lights Columbia may, in fact, be Santa.

I’m thankful for all of you who joined us Friday night at Bourbon to welcome this new issue of Jasper to the world.

This is me with Kimber Carpenter and her mom Pat Gillam - both artists - at the Fall 2022 magazine release reception on Friday, November 18th.

I’m thankful for our sponsors, who so generously continue to support Jasper because they recognize it as a gift of art given to the community—not necessarily as just a method media to get the word out about what they alone have to offer. We had 16 sponsors back when issue #2 came out. This issue, we have only 6 — the Palmetto Opera, who have an upcoming concert of Madame Butterfly on January 29th; Harbison Theater who will welcome Tom Papa on January 20th along with a show of Michael Krajewski’s work and who are currently showing an exhibition of David Yaghjian’s work, both sponsored by the Jasper Project Galleries; Trustus Theatre, which opens Hurricane Diane on December 2nd and Mr. Burns, A Post Electric Play on January 20th; CMFA who hosted the Jasper Project’s Play Right Series performance in August; arts activist Eric Tucker’s KW Palmetto Realty, and our truly beloved Columbia Museum of Art who has advertised with us and sponsored us since the very beginning.

I’m thankful for our Jasper Guild Members who, with incredible generosity, trust the Jasper Project with their funding to create a magazine, a literary journal, a film festival, and more, knowing that every penny they give goes right back out to the artists, with no one on our end being paid for their volunteer talent and energy.

Thank YOU for indulging me in this lengthy message, and for reading Jasper Magazine and supporting the many facets of The Jasper Project. From all of our houses, to all of yours —

Happy Thanksgiving,

Cindi

~~~

Coming Up from Jasper

December 1st - First Thursday at Sound Bites Eatery with Lindsay Radford Wiggins - 6 pm

December 11th - Reception for David Yaghjian at Harbison Theater - 2:30 pm

December 15th - Santa Crawl with Jasper at the Art Bar - 7 pm

CALL for PLAYS - Play Right Series - deadline December 31st, 2022

A message from Cindi

Look at these amazing Jasper supporters! Every year for Mardi Gras the Krewe de Jasper Arts gathers to celebrate the arts. Like most of our Jasper projects, it costs very little — mostly just time and energy — but it delivers an incredible sense of purpose, community, and joy. Please plan to march with us in 2023.

Hi Friends!

I’m coming to you once again to ask for your help in bringing to fruition a project that I’ve devoted almost twelve years to–the publication of Jasper Magazine.

As you probably know, Jasper is a grass roots non-profit with no paid employees—including me! Every penny that comes into the Jasper Project goes back out to artists either in the form of promotion, sharing their work via events, or actually as remittance for their work. Other than insurance and a few cyber fees, we have no overhead that would suck up any money you might give. No office, no desks, no benefits.

But we do have an amazing working board of directors and helpers and a volunteer staff, made up of your friends and colleagues, all of whom have invested their energy and talent into the Jasper mission.

Mission Statement

The Jasper Project is a project-oriented, multidisciplinary arts facilitator serving the greater Columbia and South Carolina communities by providing collaborative arts engineering and community-wide arts communication.

~~~

The Jasper Project Priorities

The Jasper Project is committed to four integrated priorities:

  • Process – illuminating the unique processes endemic to all art forms in order to provide a greater level of understanding and respect for that discipline.

  • Community/Collaboration – nurturing community both within and between arts disciplines.

  • Narrative – creating a more positive and progressive understanding of SC culture.

  • Economy – being efficient stewards of arts funding committed to creating more with less.

But to be honest, because we’re small and facing greater and greater costs of publishing Jasper, we’re finding it harder and harder to keep Jasper free. Call us naïve, but we really hope we can continue to put Jasper into the hands of everyone, no matter what their ability to pay, for as long as we can.

So, I’m coming to you once again, our readers, supporters, colleagues, and friends, to ask for your help in continuing the work of the Jasper Project and publishing Jasper Magazine. The fall 2022 magazine is written and ready to go to the printer. We have stories about the Midlands beloved Jazz scene, artists Jim Arendt, Wilma King, Elizabeth Catlett, Jamie Blackburn, stories about three local films—two of which made it to the Tribeca film festival this year, poetry, book reviews, album reviews, and so much more!

Publishing this issue of Jasper will cost well over $10K. Please donate whatever you can at our website , on Facebook, or by joining the Jasper Guild.

I can’t thank you enough for your generous support over the past 11+ years. It’s because of donors and helpers and good-hearted people who believe in arts at the grass-roots level that the Jasper Project has grown to be the force that it is, impacting thousands of Midlands artists and arts lovers each year with our events, publications, and more than 20 active projects.

Thank you. And remember there is always a place for you at Jasper.

Take care,

Cindi

This is me at the launch of Jasper Magazine in 2011. I’m holding the first ever Jasper featuring one of my favorite artists, David Yaghjian, on the cover. Next month, Jasper will install David’s art in one of our captured galleries at MTC’s Harbison Theatre lobby. We’ve grown a lot in the 11 years since we started, but we’re still here for the arts and the artists we value so highly. Thank you for your continued support of the Jasper Project and Jasper Magazine.

Happy Hour Release Party for Jasper Magazine Spring 2022 - Thursday, June 9th at Black Rooster Rooftop Bar

Join us as we celebrate all the artists honored in the spring 2022 issue of Jasper Magazine for the official release event at 5:30 on Thursday, June 9th at the Black Rooster’s beautiful rooftop bar.

Among the artists we’ll be celebrating are cover artist Lindsay Radford (written by Kristine Hartvigsen) and centerfold Michael Krajewski (which was shot by Brad Martin in the Black Rooster itself!)

In a jam-packed 64 pages you’ll find another piece by Kristine Hartvigsen on Mike Miller’s new novel, The Hip Shot, as well as excerpts from Jane Zenger and Angelo Geter’s new books of poetry from Muddy Ford Press.

Music editor Kevin Oliver put together a detailed section of new music called “10 to Watch” featuring new work from Saul Seibert, Katera, Desiree Richardson, Tam the Vibe, Rex Darling, Space Force, Admiral Radio, Hillmouse, Candy Coffins, and Lang Owen, with contributing writing from Kyle Petersen and Emily Moffitt.

Tam the Vibe

Stephanie Allen writes about Josetra Baxter and Tamara Finkbeiner’s Walking on Water Productions and their new series Secrets in Plain Sight, with photography by Bree Burchfield.

And we highlight Columbia artist Quincy Pugh as well as feature Will South’s interview with Tyrone Geter all the way from Gambia.

The Three Graces by Quincy Pugh

USC filmmaker Carleen Maur helps us understand more about the art of experimental filmmaking.

Emily Moffitt profiles visual artists Rebecca Horne, Lucy Bailey, and designer Diko Pekdemir-Lewis.

Ed Madden curates poetry from Juan David Cruz-Duarte and Terri McCord.

Christina Xan details the incredible success of Cooper Rust and her non-profit organization, Artists for Africa.

Cindi Boiter profiles SC Arts Commission executive director David Platts, with photography by Brodie Porterfield, and writes about the new public art, Motherhood by Nora Valdez, with exquisite photography by Stephen Chesley.

Motherhood by Nora Valdez, phot by Stephen Chesley

And finally, we memorialize two pillars of the Columbia arts community, Mary Bentz Gilkerson and Wim Roefs, whose loss this spring we are still reeling from.

——

We look forward to seeing you Thursday night.

The event is free and Black Rooster’s regular rooftop bar will be serving drinks and food. Come by for happy hour and grab a drink, a magazine, and a hug from your favorite folks. Or plan on staying a while and grabbing dinner or snacks.

Thanks to restauranteur extraordinaire Kristian Niemi for hosting us.

We can’t wait to see you and show off these exceptional artists who call Columbia, SC home!

Punk Shakespeare Troupe “Elsewhere” Takes Twelfth Night on Tour

 

“We all believe Shakespeare has been handled with kid gloves when it wasn't intended that way.”

Shortly before the pandemic, three performers and Shakespeare lovers from the East Coast came together to put their twist on Shakespeare. Now, for the first time ever, actors and managers Katie Mixon (Columbia native), Mac MacDaniel, and Hilary Dennis are taking their troupe on tour. Jasper recently sat down with them to learn all about Elsewhere.

 

JASPER: For those who aren’t familiar, can you say a little about where Elsewhere started? 

ELSEWHERE: Elsewhere began as an attempt to apply the production principles of the punk scene to Shakespearean theatre. Mac (from VA) grew up going to punk shows, Hilary (from MA) was trained in modern style theatre, and I (Katie, from SC) have a classical background. We met at a Shakespeare acting workshop in NYC and it was — what's the platonic artistic version of love at first sight? We went from total strangers to best friends starting a theatre company together in about a week. We all believe Shakespeare has been handled with kid gloves when it wasn't intended that way. 

 

JASPER: How exactly is Elsewhere different? 

ELSEWHERE: We cut the plays down to 90 minutes. We keep all the lights on and perform with a small cast and try to drag the audience into the show as much as possible. Fast, minimalist, interactive. We believe that all the things that make Shakespeare easier and cheaper to produce also make Shakespeare more fun and engaging.

 

JASPER: You have to tell me about the name. 

ELSEWHERE: When the title character in Coriolanus is banished from Rome, he says "there is a world elsewhere." As artists who felt like our artistic ambitions and goals weren't being realized in "traditional" theatre spaces, we decided to go outside and find a new world to work in. It's usual for theatre companies to have names like "[Location] Shakespeare," and we thought it was clever to just say that wherever "normal" theatre is happening, we're somewhere else.

 

JASPER: Y’all usually perform in Richmond, right? Any specific places there? 

ELSEWHERE: Because we don't need a stage or lights, we can perform anywhere there's an open space and room to set up a coat rack. Our usual spiel is to reach out to a few of our friends, organize a very limited rehearsal period (somewhere between a day and a week) and then do a single 90-minute performance with no intermission, and then the show is over. We like the urgency of a single show; either you're there and you see it, or you're not and you've missed it.

 

JASPER: Have you toured before? 

ELSEWHERE: This is Elsewhere's first time touring, but it definitely won't be our last. Mac was already planning a road trip with his wife Leah, (who is also the Marketing Director and Graphic Artist for Elsewhere), so he pitched this idea of a tour with a core cast of us three and a rotating local cast that would enable each of us to cast our friends in our hometowns and see how the show changes when more than half the cast will turn over between each show.

 

JASPER: What made you choose Twelfth Night

ELSEWHERE: We wanted to do a comedy after doing two tragedies back-to-back. Artistically it has all of the things we love about Shakespeare — poetry, wit, brilliant characters, music, humor. It is deep without being dour. It is an ensemble show rather than a solo star vehicle like a Hamlet or an As You Like It. Logistically it is an audience favorite that requires very little in the way of fight choreo or intimacy work, which makes it easier to put together really fast.

 

JASPER: How did you cut and change the play for the tour? 

ELSEWHERE: Mac does all our cuts, and what he does with the text would probably horrify a lot of scholars and purists. Mac’s goals with any cut are that the text can be played by a small cast and that the basic throughline of the story is preserved. He is both a Shakespeare educator and someone who is always dragging non-Shakespeare friends out to see plays. It is possible Shakespeare to be staged in a way that is beginner-friendly without being dumbed-down.

 

JASPER: How structured are your shows usually? I know you don’t have a “director.” 

ELSEWHERE: We just run with the vibes. Part of the fun of this tour is seeing how the vibe changes between cities/venues/casts. Mac, Hilary, and Katie are all the same actors playing the same parts, but not only will our characters' relationships evolve as we go, we will be creating new relationships with the other characters. We try to be very clear that even though Elsewhere is our company, we are not "in charge" of the show or the rehearsal room. Anyone we invite to be a part of the show process is an equal partner. They didn't have a director when Shakespeare's company was performing in the 1600's, so we can do that too.

 

JASPER: You already had one show in Columbia. Anything you’d keep or change moving to the next two shows?  

ELSEWHERE: There are usually small edits made to the cut during rehearsal, things you don't notice until you get the cast in the room — for example, Mac cut all of Maria's lines from a scene but forgot to cut the stage direction "enter Maria," so poor Lonetta was just wandering around in the scene with nothing to say. Katie chose to wear a huge hat and sunglasses for Olivia, but Joseph Eisenrich (who played our Toby) marched on to stage and put them on himself and I fell out laughing.

 

JASPER: What are some of your goals with this tour specifically? 

ELSEWHERE: We have been working together in Richmond for a while now, but this is our first opportunity to work in each other's hometowns. Usually, Mac is the one in charge of finding a venue and a cast and hosting everyone in Richmond, so it's nice to come to Columbia and for him to be a guest.  

A perhaps bigger goal is to demonstrate for theatre folks just how easy it is to produce Shakespeare shows. The thing that would make us most happy would be for someone to see one of our shows and think "I can do that!" and then take our resources and start producing their own fast popup Shakespeare plays.

 

JASPER: What’s after this for Elsewhere? 

ELSEWHERE: We haven't the foggiest idea. Maybe we'll start a podcast? Oh! And we have been talking about a longer version of a tour, with a different show.  Maybe Much Ado About Nothing.  Comedies have been fun after two tragedies.

 

JASPER: Last but definitely not least, how can people support you in the future? 

ELSEWHERE: You can donate to cover tour costs by Venoming me @Mac-MacDaniel (make a note that it's for Elsewhere), or you can make a tax-deductible donation on our website www.elsewhereshakespeare.com  

 

Elsewhere’s performance of Twelfth Night premiered in Columbia on May 1st, and its next stop is Richmond, Virginia on the 29th of this month. The troupe’s final performance will be in Northampton, Massachusetts on July 3rd.

 

PRINT WORTHY: MALIK Green from the Pages of Jasper Magazine Fall 2021 + NEW WORK

Keep your eye on this outstanding young artist!

In fall 2021, the Jasper Project ran a brief article on emerging artist Malik Greene. Since then, we’ve been keeping an eye on Malik and his work and, as we suspected it would, the quality has continued to improve and the content has continued to venture into braver, more dynamic, and more unsettling territory.

Below, please find our original interview with the artist and, following that, a sampling of some of Greene’s powerful new art.

JASPER: First, tell us about yourself, please. The normal stuff -- how old are you, where are you from, where did you go to school? 

GREENE: Hey, what’s up, my name is Malik Greene, I was born on July 8th, 1997. I was born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, but in 2019 I received my bachelor's degree in psychology with a late minor in studio art from Coastal Carolina University. 

 

JASPER: How did you get started painting? 

GREENE: I've always had a curious mind and just wanted to find my own way to be different turned me to an exploration of self; figuring out where I stand in this world and what it is I want to accomplish in my time here honestly led me to dabble my hand in anything that conveyed self-expression. As a kid, I gravitated towards art forms such as illustration and clothing design through learned experiences with family and friends, but I developed a strong passion for painting my second semester of college. I actually made my first painting on the floor of my best friend’s dorm freshman year, so I have a pretty vivid memory of my origin as an artist. I remember ripping up an old trash bag and splattering paint as my heart desired. After I made this first painting, I unintentionally started a fire that still burns today and one painting turned into two and two into four now my entire life is covered in paint… I love it! 

 

JASPER: What’s your favorite medium? 

GREENE: I think for me I love how tangible paint is, so I'm constantly amused by how it moves, dries, is applied -- it's almost like a science for me mixing the paints. specifically, I am intrigued by the naturalness of oil paint, and I love that from its origin until its completion finishing a painting is almost like solving a puzzle.

  

JASPER: What visual artists have influenced you and your work most and why? 

GREENE: I think for me I like to be my own biggest influence. I kind of love that I do not know of any artists who create work that looks like mine, especially in my geographic location! My work is uniquely mine and I love how it is strengthened based on the fact that it comes from my own conception. Of course, I have been inspired and have artists that I do admire. George Condo was the first artist whose work I researched greatly and early into my creation of art he was definitely my biggest influence.

Art goes deeper than just something that is pretty I think art can make one uncomfortable and curious respectively, so I seek artists who entertain my psychology and the unconscious pleasures. From older, more venerated artists like Kerry James Marshall (who has become my favorite artist) and Lucian Freud who plays around with texture to younger artists like Gerald Lovell and Reginald Sylvester II, I am truly inspired by artists who do things their own way, aren’t afraid to break the rules and are still extremely aware of these same rules they break.

 

JASPER: Tell us about why you paint – what’s your mission and what are you trying to communicate to your viewer? 

GREENE: For me, my mission is to be able to live a life not controlled by the stigmas that are placed on everyone in this human experience. I think a lot of the things that we as people have been taught are tailoring us to live a carbon copy cookie-cutter "American Dream" -- but who even created that standard? No one asked to be on this earth so it bugs me even further that those expectations are placed on people, why can't we just live life? Do the things that make us happy and inspire others to do the same with what little time we have.

I do believe the role of an artist is to speak on the world that is around them. So, if the world of politics is full of issues, and this is what I see in my world, I think it does become my job to relay my message. I think oftentimes people and artists get pigeonholed into what they should be expected to be, but the only expectation I place on myself is to make the best art I can make while staying authentic to my own story.

 

JASPER: Can you talk more about your Baby Boy exhibition recently held at Stormwater Studios in Columbia?

GREENE: My debut solo exhibition titled ‘Baby Boy’ is literally like my baby, it opened up July 9th, 2021, and closed July 18th, 2021. The title came from just the feeling and sentiment of me always being “Baby Boy” to those closest to me. I’m the youngest of six siblings so to them, to my mother, to those who know me the best I am always a baby boy no matter how old I am. This exhibition was to convey the many sides of me more as a man. Like a coming home for me celebrating the many sides of me the world may never see.

I felt as if the exhibition went extremely well and brought a lot of attention to me and the works that I have put so much time, effort, and love into. It was such a relief to see my work on the walls and to have the feeling of completion. To know an idea of mine was nurtured, developed, and made into a reality empowers me and that alone makes me certain my exhibition was successful.

 

JASPER: As a young Black artist, what are your specific challenges? 

GREENE: I think the biggest challenge for me as an artist is just being labelled solely a “black artist.” I think I am an amazing artist in general! I want to break the barriers and walls that black artists face where they are seen as only “good for a black artist” or the feeling of making art based on the plight of my ancestors. I choose to make art that brings me progression and strength. I think for me and a lot of other artists who are black we get placed in a box of making contrived art as opposed to art that genuinely speaks and has a message.

I love making art that speaks for those who look like me, who feel like me and those who have felt as I have felt before. Within that umbrella those who identify with me may not be black, but within my art I represent what is tangible to me. I find strength in my identify, but the sentiments of my identity span deeper than me just being black. I think that what I create, and the content of my work is what makes me great, I just so happen to be black.

I think another challenge for me is just having a point of reference that looks like me. I’ve been lucky enough to come across some amazing individuals who have motivated me to continue pushing further but when I see my 8-year-old self I wish I had someone pushing me to be better.

As someone who is self-trained, I don’t have a million references or resources, but for me instead of seeing this as a challenge I see it as an opportunity to be what I didn’t have.

 

JASPER: What’s next for you? 

GREENE: I honestly see myself just diving deeper into my process and the narrative of Malik the artist. My work is directly related to where I am in life so to be inspired to work, I have to experience life. For the better or worse, see some things, do some things better, and feel some things. It’s exciting to know as long as I have my hands, I have a gift no one can take from me. . 

PRINTWORTHY! Michaela Pilar Brown is in the Right Place at the Right Time

Reprinted from Jasper Magazine Fall 2021

by Cindi Boiter

Over the past decade, Jasper Magazine has written about Columbia-based multi-media artist Michaela Pilar Brown many times. This passage of time has witnessed Brown become a leader in our community, not only as a result of her myriad accomplishments but also by the now-international stature she commands across the most-sophisticated fine arts circles.

Brown’s career has been punctuated by a steady continuum of shows, awards, residencies, and related experiences that have helped shape the 50-something artist into the fierce icon she is becoming. Taking home the 2018 Artfields Grand Prize for her mixed-media installation She’s Almost Ready is upmost among her accolades, as is being awarded the inaugural Volcanic Residency at the Whakatano Museum in New Zealand that same year.

Born in Bangor, Maine, and raised in Denver, Brown became an influential member of the Columbia arts scene soon after she moved here in 2013. Having spent many a childhood summer visiting the Fairfield County farm where her father lived, Brown had returned to SC a dozen or so years earlier to help care for her aging family patriarch. His land and its legacies were a part of who Brown was even when the she first left home to study at Howard University in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“Howard felt like family. My professors let me continue my work even when I couldn’t afford tuition,” Brown says. “I spent a lot of time learning outside of academia.”

Critically influenced by such trailblazing American artists as Frank Smith and Jeff Donaldson, Brown identifies world-renowned sculptor Richard Hunt as impacting her work ethic the most.

Hunt, who may be the most highly accomplished contemporary Black American sculptor and creator of public art in the country, visited Howard to install a piece of his work during Brown’s time as a student. When a piece of his art was damaged, Brown was recruited to help with the repair. A burgeoning artist-protégé relationship led to an invitation to study with Hunt for a summer in Chicago.

“I was green and just so honored,” Brown says. “He worked fervently all the time and I worked all the time,” noting that she initially wanted to make public art herself. In fact, the young artist had interned at the International Sculpture Center, part of the Washington Project for the Arts, as well as the Smithsonian Institution.

The emphasis on family and the support systems it can naturally provide had followed Brown to Howard, where the faculty became supportive elders for the young artist. The intimacy and sacredness of her ancestral home not only informed Brown as an artist but also provided her with a profound understanding of the strengths and challenges of southern Black art writ large, as well as with the workings of the local arts community specifically.

After her father died in 2007, Brown’s mother soon also came to depend on her and her brothers for what ultimately would be end-of-life care. It was a crushing loss that further strengthened Brown’s resolve to take command of her platform like never before. The artist continued to bring the roots and wings she had embraced — on her home turf, in DC, and in Chicago — into an enduring relationship with Columbia-based theatre artist Darion McCloud and his daughter more than ten years ago.

“All these experiences changed the shape of the work I was doing and what I wanted to do,” Brown says. “My work became much more personal and honest. My focus came to include what it means to me to be Black in SC, but it also focuses a great deal on love and how we grieve.”

Among her major accomplishments over the last decade has been taking on the position of executive director of 701 CCA – Columbia’s Center for Contemporary Art. 701 CCA is located on the second floor of the historic 701 Whaley Street complex and featured on page XX of this magazine.

Arguably the perfect person for this position due to her local and international profile, Brown is the first Black woman to have this role, and she handles the responsibility with a resolute intensity. “701 [CCA] has historically been a place of inclusion,” Brown says. “I am engaged in protecting that and expanding it through exhibitions, programming, community dialogue, and programs outside our walls that engage the community directly in neighborhoods and through community partnerships. … We had a challenging moment recently, and I'm proud of who we are on the other side of it. I'm proud of the public statement we made and the manner in which we supported our artist.”

 

Brown is referencing the night of May 17, 2021. John Sims, an artist-in-residence at the gallery was living in an apartment assigned to him in the building at 701 Whaley Street when he was accosted, handcuffed, and held at gunpoint as a “suspicious person” by the Columbia Police Department. Brown released a statement in response to the attack, saying the incident was not the first time a resident at 701 had encountered the police. “It was the first time, however, such an encounter led to hostile confrontation, detention, cuffing, and a records check. On the contrary, such previous encounters have resulted in courteous apologies from officers. The difference? Race. Mr. Sims is a Black man; the other incidents involved a white man.”

“Like other community-based, nonprofit institutions,” Brown continues in her statement, “CCA has the responsibility to shine light on injustice it encounters and to be part of an active dialogue to make real and discernible change. We cannot ignore the relationship between white supremacy that permeates our culture and the racial profiling we believe infected John Sims’ treatment by CPD officers. … What we can and will do is support the efforts of John Sims as the CCA artist in residence to tell his story, to provide context for that story through his artistic expression, and to seize the opportunity to join with him and the greater Columbia community as we continue the struggle for racial justice.”

It is Brown’s intimate knowledge of the patrons of 701 CCA and the community it supports that informs this position so well. “I am optimistic about the Columbia art scene,” she says. “This is a community that wants change, that's ready to face the challenges of the moment with art leading the discussions. I am hopeful that our politicians recognize the value of art for the betterment of this community, for the comfort it brings, for the space it makes for challenging conversations, and for the expansive learning opportunities it offers young people. I also hope they support it with dollars, and not just the legacy institutions, but in an expansive, inclusive way.”

 

Jasper is Thankful for YOU - a message from Cindi

From the bottom of our hearts, we are …

At this time of year those of us at the Jasper Project like to say thank you to the universe for the treasures that have come our way, just like everyone else.

In addition to all of you who support our mission by donating, volunteering, spreading the word, participating in our projects, and reading what we write, I am also thankful for our hardworking board of directors. The Jasper Project board of directors give of their time, energy, and their own wealth and blessings to keep Jasper afloat and actively serving the needs of our arts community at the grass roots level that we believe is so important.

Here are some of the things this board has done for Jasper this year: They have sold tickets, hung posters, hauled and delivered magazines, put up stages and run sound and light for performances. They have baked and prepared food, picked and arranged flowers, balanced our books, filed our taxes, managed projects, written articles, consulted with artists and donors. They have donated their own funds, and so much more.

They also shared with us the people, places, and things in the greater Columbia arts community that they are thankful for themselves.

Read on to see what they had to say..

—Cb

Jasper Project board vice president & director of Harbison Theatre, Kristin Cobb says, “I am thankful for Larry Hembree because he is always willing to lend a hand to all of us in the arts world.”

L-R Joe Hudson, William Cobb, Kristin

~~~~~

According to USC professor Drue Barker, “I am thankful to live in a city with a thriving contemporary dance community with leaders like Erin Bailey, Martha Brim, Bonnie Boiter-Jolley, Stephanie Wilkins, and Wideman-Davis!” 

Christina Xan, who writes articles and manages the Tiny Gallery project, in addition to always being at the ready to help out wherever she can, agrees, saying, “I’m thankful for Stephanie Wilkins because she has used her compassion and skill to carve new, unique spaces for dancers and dance in Columbia.” 

Stephanie Wilkins and Bonnie Boiter-Jolley, co-founders of the Columbia Summer Rep Dance Co.

~~~~~~

Our intern Stephanie Allen, who is also an excellent writer and devoted to the cause, says, “I’m thankful for the CMA because they continually make themselves accessible to students like me and create open, welcome spaces for the community.”

~~~~~

Web Maven and graphics guru Bekah Rice, says, “I'm thankful for the MANY outdoor markets in Columbia because they make buying local goods, especially art, more accessible and provide artists and artisans in our community more opportunities to make a living.”

~~~~~

Jasper Project board president Wade Sellers says, “I’m thankful for an independent film community that continues to create and grow while supporting their fellow creators. The past ten years have seen imaginative new voices emerge in our city. More importantly we have seen those filmmakers get to know each other, share ideas, and share their skills. Our city and the surrounding areas are the rare place where roadblocks that usually hinder access for independent filmmakers don’t exist. I look forward to the new stories these filmmakers will tell in the coming years.”

~~~~~

Bert Easter, who manages the Jasper Gallery in the Meridian Building in downtown Columbia, says, “I am thankful for ceramics artist Virginia Scotchie of USC who has partnered with me to show student work alongside her art at the Jasper Gallery at the Meridian on Main and the display windows along Washington and Sumter Street.

I am also thankful for the neighborhoods who have had art-in-the-yard events. These meet-the-artist events have been fun,” Easter continues. “I am thankful for the city’s poet laureate, Ed Madden. He’s so cute... oh and he does poetry and art stuff too.”

Columbia City Poet Laureate (and Cutie) ED Madden

artist - Virginia Scotchie

~~~~~~

Paul Leo says, “I am thankful that we have a lively Opera scene here in Colombia, between the productions of The Palmetto Opera Company and The Southeast Division Metropolitan Opera Competition which is starting back up in January 2022 at Columbia College. Columbia's art scene is rich in the preservation of the classical art forms as well as encouraging new and innovative art forms. That is what makes it a truly great city!”

~~~~~

Board member and manager of the Lizelia project Len Lawson says, “I'm thankful for Columbia Museum of Art, Writer-in-Residence Ray McManus, and Drew Barron for the excellent work on the Hindsight 20/20 Series and Binder Podcast of which I'm grateful to have been a part.”

~~~~~~

Thanks to all of our diligent board members including Grayson Goodman, Al Black, Barry Wheeler, Diane Hare, Christopher Cockrell, Laura Garner Hine, and Preach Jacobs.

If YOU feel like you might have a gift to offer the Jasper Project by way of contributing to our publications, helping out at events, or even applying to be a member of the board of directors, please let us know! We’re always looking for sisters and brothers in the arts who want to join us in our labor of love.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving from all of us at the Jasper Project!

The Concert Truck Returns to Columbia for South Eastern Piano Festival

“Something changed for me in that moment,” Luby says, “and I started to question why concerts always happen in concert halls. Spaces started to look different to me … everywhere I went seemed like a great place to have a concert.”

The Southeastern Piano Festival’s “Piano X” initiative aims to find alternative and nontraditional ways of connecting people to piano music. This year’s headline features a show on the go.   

The aptly named Concert Truck will be returning to its Columbia roots on Monday, June 14th to perform at Boyd Plaza at 8pm. The box truck is a mobile music venue, fully furnished with lights, a sound system and, of course, a piano.  

The South Eastern Piano Festival (SEPF) is an annual event that is both education and performance based, featuring shows from some of the world’s best pianists and serving to train some of the nation’s top youth pianists. This year, the festival takes place from June 12 - 20 at the University of South Carolina’s concert halls.  

The Concert Truck, however, takes the music hall experience outdoors. 

According to Marina Lomazov, SEPF founder and artistic director, the truck erases the “invisible formality” of traditional piano performances, leaving more space for interaction between the audience and performers.  

Lomazov noted that not everyone can afford tickets to concerts or is comfortable in a formal music hall environment. The truck brings the experience to people so that they can embrace the music for themselves or at least have enough exposure to appreciate it. “The people who play on the truck … passionately love the music and they want to share that love with as many people as they can,” Lomazov says.  

The people who will be performing on the truck next week are its founders: Susan Zhang and Nick Luby.  Zhang herself is an alum of the Southeastern Piano Festival and attended as a participant when she was a teenager. Both Zhang and Luby studied piano at UofSC and were students of Lomazov and her husband Joseph Rackers.  

Luby first had the idea for the truck while traveling. He had the habit of practicing piano in churches while on the road, and one day found that his playing had drawn a small crowd from the street. “Something changed for me in that moment,” Luby says, “and I started to question why concerts always happen in concert halls. Spaces started to look different to me … everywhere I went seemed like a great place to have a concert.”  

Luby started researching mobile concert halls only to realize that they didn’t exist. That’s when he approached Zhang with the notion of the Concert Truck.  

The truck debuted its first show on a bright summer morning around five years ago for an audience of nearly 200 people — many of whom had never experienced classical piano before.  

The Concert Truck really took off when the pandemic hit.  

“Suddenly you could not be inside a concert hall. And that’s when their idea really exploded” Lomazov says. The duo began collaborating with major companies such as the Kennedy Center, the Washington National Opera, and the Dallas Symphony, to name a few. They hardly had a break in the past year, sometimes performing up to three concerts a day.  

Recently, Zhang and Luby signed on with artist management company Opus 3 which is, according to Lomazov, “as high as you can go in the world of classical music, of music in general … it’s a real success story.” 

As the Concert Truck continues to tour, Zhang and Luby want to challenge what is expected from a classical piano concert. “Working with organizations during this time is really exciting because we can work with them to push on those boundaries as well,” Zhang says.  In the future, the two want to focus on local collaborations and connecting more deeply with the communities they serve.

-Stephanie Allen

CORONA TIMES - Wade Sellers talks with 2nd Act Alum Tamara Finkbeiner

Tamara Finkbeiner - all photos courtesy of the artist

Tamara Finkbeiner - all photos courtesy of the artist

Tamara Finkbeiner is a Columbia based filmmaker and graphic artist. She is a member of WOW Productions an urban inspirational entertainment company. Through her involvement with WOW and her own independent work she has been leaving a huge creative mark in our area for many years. She is an alum of the 2nd Act Film Project. Tamara’s films took home the 2nd Act Audience Award in the 2nd and 3rd year of the festival.

Wade Sellers

film editor, Jasper Magazine; president, Jasper Project board of directors

 

JASPER: Tamara, how have you and your family been coping with the pandemic shutdown?

FINKBEINER: We've actually been doing pretty well given the circumstances. We've had to make many adjustments, but overall we have become even closer as a unit and that has been a tremendous blessing during this time.

JASPER: For those who don't know about WOW, tell us about Walking on Water productions.

FINKBEINER: Walking On Water Productions (WOW) is an urban inspirational theatre company founded by Tangie Beaty and is run by Beaty (CEO) and Donna Johnson (COO). My business partner, Josetra Robinson and I also run One7evenOne Productions (O7O) and we partner with WOW to mount stage productions and are also looking to venture into television and film. Josetra and myself are part of the management crew at WOW; our emphasis is in visual production and marketing.

Finkbeiner with creative partner Josetra Robinson

Finkbeiner with creative partner Josetra Robinson

JASPER: Introduce us to other members of the team.

FINKBEINER: Josetra Robinson is co-founder of O7O. She's a tremendous talent and I'm honoured we get the chance to work together on so many amazing projects.

JASPER: What project(s) have you and the team been working on during the shutdown?

FINKBEINER: Through O7O, we've been editing for various projects, which has been, again, a major blessing. We've also been writing for a project that we have coming up and that everyone will hear more about very soon. 

JASPER: What is the overall mission of WOW?

FINKBEINER: One of WOW's missions is to produce impactful productions and also cultivate talent in our local community, which aligns with our passion and purpose at O7O. It's been a beautiful partnership.

JASPER: What's next for you or Walking on Water productions/One7evenOne Productions?

FINKBEINER: Many details are still unfolding but we (O7O) will be partnering with WOW again on a really cool project and are looking forward to the team coming together to do what we love and challenge ourselves as we push this next level!

 

 

 

Corona Times - Sharing Randy Spencer's Fall Lines-Winning Short Fiction, New Poetry, and Interview with Jasper

Author & Retired physician Randy Spencer

Author & Retired physician Randy Spencer

Earlier this summer, Jasper announced the accepted contributors to this year’s Fall Lines - a literary convergence, now in its 7th year, but opted to hold the release of the book until our community of writers can safely gather together for a reading and celebration. But we won’t make you wait any longer to read the winning entries of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

In this edition of Jasper’s Corona Times Blog Series, please meet Randy Spencer, winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose. You can learn a bit about Spencer, and check out both his winning short fiction as well as a new pandemic-related poem debuting on the Jasper Project website below.

 

Days by Days

                                                H.R. Spencer

                                                8.5.20

 

Flying is easy. It's hovering that's hard.

Watch the hummingbird

how effortlessly he flies

from plant to plant

and how much more difficult

to remain stationary in the air

wings beating three thousand

times a minute

or the osprey circling

and struggling to balance himself

keep an eye on his target

until in a blink

he plunges into the water

as if he were a sharp stone

pulled down only by gravity.

 

We are hovering now

this last half year or so

marshalling all our energies

only to stand in place

unable to flit gracefully plant to plant

or dive forward like the osprey

unable even

to make the days count

caught in this miasma

this ancient warp of "bad air"

this terminal inertia 

our frantic wingbeats

our desperation

our grim paralytic fear. 

 

Today's agenda:

open my eyes, think hard

is this Wednesday or Thursday

or maybe did I skip Tuesday altogether

have I slipped unannounced

from July into August without noticing

or have I inadvertently

announced that August is about arrive

our days by days gather us in

relieved only by a late-day shower.

~~~

Thank you, Randy, for agreeing to share your work and a bit about yourself with Jasper. You have a fascinating background so let’s start with that.

 

JASPER: For folks who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet, I can share that you are a retired physician, right? But can you please elaborate on this – how long did you practice and what was your specialty? And, while we’re at it, where are you from – did you grow up in SC or did something bring you here?

SPENCER: I was born and grew up along the James River in Virginia and went to college 20 miles from home at William and Mary. I came to South Carolina in 1972 to do a 2-year fellowship in Child Psychiatry and have remained here since that time. I retired several years ago, but for 45 years I practiced primarily in a number of Community Mental Health Centers here, but also as a consultant for the Department of Social Services and, back in the eighties, for the juvenile justice agency. I also helped develop the S.C. Continuum of Care for Emotionally Disturbed Children.

JASPER: And now you live on Lake Murray, right? How long have you been there?

SPENCER: We've been living on a quiet cove on Lake Murray since 1986.

JASPER: When did writing become a part of your life?

SPENCER: This question is easy. When I was a junior and senior in high school I was one of the editors of the school magazine and things took off from there, and I studied playwriting and short story writing in college. In medical school, maybe for obvious reasons, creative writing took a back seat. I went back to college at U.S.C., at first just a few classes under James Dickey and later to enter the M.F.A. program in Poetry.

JASPER: Who have been your influences as a writer?

SPENCER: People always ask whose work influenced you the most, and the truth is that influences from other poets constantly changed over different periods in my life. I can look back now at who I was most influenced early, Robert Lowell, and wonder "why." But Theodore Roethke has been an early favorite who has stuck with me. Early on, I studied with Jim Dickey, a remarkable class out of which came a number of remarkable published poets and which really stimulated me to write. Right now, today, my favorite poet is David St. John. If you read a lot of my poems, most of which are unpublished, you'll see a number of poems in tribute to or elegies for poets or visual artists I felt a kinship toward.

JASPER: We know your work has appeared in several Jasper and Muddy Ford Press publications A Sense of the Midlands and Limelight (MFP) as well as in a number of additional anthologies such as The Art of Medicine as Metaphor and the South Carolina Collection and journals, Borderlands and Yemassee. Can you tell us about The Failure of Magic and What the Body Knows?

SPENCER: Like many poets starting out (and later, too) I would go to workshops to study under already successful writers and The Failure of Magic came out of a writers conference at Winthrop and they published it. What the Body Knows was published out of the Poetry Initiative at the University of South Carolina. Both were smaller chapbooks. Revised versions of a few of the poems in the second chapbook are in my full-length The Color After Green. Getting to discuss that book on SCETV's By the River has been the highlight of the year.

JASPER: In 2019, Jasper had the honor of writing about your publication, The Color After Green in our magazine. How long did you work on this piece of writing and what was the origin of these poems?

Spencer: The Color After Green was a themed book and all of the poems were contemporary nature poems, or what is called "ecopoetry," or poems about the environment in some fashion or another. To put together an entire volume of poems with a similar focus meant using some older poems written as long as twenty years ago along with some which were very recent at the time the manuscript was submitted, plus all the time in between. There are a lot of poems with coastal settings, sometimes in Virginia where I grew up and others in South Carolina, where I've lived since 1972. There's a poem about Hurricane Hugo, for example, which was first written probably 10 years after the storm. There are other poems reflecting the frightening changes in our environment as related to various species, from barnacles to monarch butterflies to horseshoe crabs and birds.

JASPER: You’ve also created the stage work, Becoming Robert Frost. Can we hear more about this piece?

SPENCER: It started as just a few short poems, then grew into a three-act verse drama, and now has been submitted as a hybrid verse-prose novel. It meant a lot to see several staged reading of the work as a play, and I got to read almost half of it at Piccolo Spoleto paired with another to read the dialogue. It has been worked and reworked over years and I like the way it reads now, but I've also broken various characters out as short stories, so we'll see where it goes. The play/ poetry/ novel/ short story is the imagined last day in Robert Frost's life in the hospital in Boston and the fictional conversations he carries on in dreams with deceased family members and the two characters from his poem, "Home Burial." I studied playwriting again at U.S.C. and playwriting has had a tremendous influence on the germination of my poetry. Writing for the stage forces you to write in the multiple voices of different characters, and in my book I write poems in the voices of Thomas Jefferson, John James Audubon, Georgia O'keeffe, and in one poem, a fable, have animals conversing with one another. You so often hear about "finding your own voice" as a poet, but it has always seemed more challenging and "fun" to me to deliberately steer in the other direction.

JASPER: Congratulations on winning the Broad River Prize for Prose in this year’s Fall Lines literary journal. Given that we’re sitting on the release of the journal until we can gather all the writers to celebrate together, we’re stepping out of the box and publishing your winning story, Ghost Ship, below. Set that story up for us, please. Where did it come from and what meaning does it carry for you?

SPENCER: "Ghost Ship" is part of a continuing project to bring to life a fictional group of characters living on an unnamed island in the Chesapeake Bay, not too different, I suppose, from Tangier or Smith Islands. These few remaining inhabited islands are threatened with annihilation both simply from chronic erosion, but also by sudden, catastrophic storms. A story from that same cast of characters was in Fall Lines 2019. I grew up close to the Chesapeake Bay and have visited Tangier Island. I would stress, though, that the characters are totally fictional. Winning the Broad River Prize is a great honor.

JASPER: We also opened this post up with a new poem from you, highly pertinent to where so many of us find ourselves today. Can you talk a bit about the origins of this piece, too, please?

SPENCER: "Days by Days," I hope, would resonate with all our frustrations with the tedium of isolation and lack of social contact, trying to stay healthy and keep others healthy. It certainly reflects my own feelings toward a life that seems to simply hover in one place and yet use up or waste tremendous energy. At the end of the day you feel physically and emotionally exhausted, but haven't done anything.

JASPER: So, as a physician and an author, what’s your advice for the rest of us on how we can get through this pandemic and the political turmoil that we find ourselves in?

SPENCER: I would say "Do as I say and not as I do," that is, don't watch the news obsessively. Instead immerse yourself in a hobby or something creative. Read, although I know if I said to "read poetry," that would truly fall mostly on deaf ears. I'd say, "Don't follow all the conspiracy theorists to convince you of the real truth." and "Take the vaccine when it's available. No one in going to inject  you with alien proteins that take over your brain." We can get through this, however painfully.

 

~~~

GHOST SHIP

 

Randy Spencer

 

            "It was a dark and stormy night. A pissy dark and stormy night."

 

            Sarah didn't like it when I said that--making jokes at a time like that. But she's young. Hess understood. Sometimes you make bad jokes to hide when you're scared. Hess and I grew up together--had been through it before. A hurricane riding up the Bay and flooding the island like this. Anna didn't grow up here, but she got the joke--the need to laugh when things seem the most desperate.

 

            But it's funny how the mind works times like that--

           

            What I was thinking about--at that time--back in the church--the four of us huddled together, feet soaked, water sloshing over the cushions in the pews, rising  almost up to the pulpit--the wind tearin' at church windows--shutters slamming and still four hours until the peak tide. Not knowing anything--feeling helpless. Totally helpless.

 

            And, God, through it all I couldn't stop thinking about how it was when we were children, at least when Hess and I were. And thinking of Ollie and Ted, and Roland, too.

 

            And we were there earlier last night, and only a few hours later, wading--swimming--out of the church, and climbin' up onto Roland's empty old break-away boat, a Godsend, a miracle floating up out of nowhere--a ghost ship--then huddled aboard her when it seemed like the church would have collapsed around us. The last chance we had.

 

            Hess said she thought this one was worse than the others. I was thinking, too, all things considered, this might be a pretty shitty rescue vehicle. Terrified--that piece of rust  might tear loose again, float off--sink--capsize--and you knew we were fuckin' screwed any whichaway.

 

            And so I just sat there telling the others how forty years ago--Christ--our childhood I'm telling them about, and they could care less--we could have all been drowned by morning. I can say that now. It was Anna's idea that we keep talking. Tell stories, anything--it was a low bar--just try to stay awake.

 

            We were in so much shit--but I only wanted  to talk about re-living being a child..

 

            You know what I kept remembering--this vivid image coming to me back in the church. Us being invited into Roland's bedroom one night--in this total darkness--where he kept that big aquarium. I asked Hess if she remembered?

 

            She did. "I remember--full of creatures he brought home."

 

            And that night he swished his hand into the water and the whole room lit up when he brushed against comb jellies he had collected. Tonight when I looked down in the aisle at the church--in the total darkness--and I ran my hand under the water and jellies would light up-- LIGHT  UP--fuckin' light up in the total darkness in the sanctuary, and I panicked--I don't think the others realized it. I didn't scream out loud, but I panicked just the same--like I was trapped in this giant aquarium.

 

            Then Ollie's drownin' came back over me. I panicked inside--inside, my breath cut off, my heart racin,' where I felt darkest--and I could feel Ollie grabbin' at my ankles under the water --I could look down and see his face all crowned over with seagrass--his hands reaching out from  it --tryin' to pull me under. I never felt anything like that since he died--and I'm thinkin'--he's here--he's right here--in this water--this is where he drowned--

 

            I knew he wasn't there--far from it--but I  couldn't stop thinking he was.

 

            That's why I tried to think about how it was when we were children, the three of us--Hess and me and Roland, had such good times--how kind the water seemed then--before all the shit that came after--and tonight just topped it all off--and I think about it,

 

            So I just told these happy stories, and blocked everything else out.

 

But it was Anna trying to figure out how we could survive. She left us, wading--half-swimming--in water up past her waist and headed toward the front door.

 

When she pulled it open, the water surged in and she yelled at us there was a large boat of some sort out there. All dark, but big as life. And when lightning struck again, she hollered it was Roland's old abandoned supply boat, all forty foot of her. It was so dark and she couldn't see anybody onboard. It seemed to be stuck on the bottom, shaking, but not really rocking up and down in the waves. And the waves are coming pretty hard, pinching through the church door and knocking her off her feet.

 

You don't know prayer honestly--real, heartfelt prayer--until you're in a spot like that, and the wind is howling around the church and through the open door and we're breathing nothing but salt spray, and Anna screamed at us to work our way along the wall to stay out of the swells and come toward her.

 

Anna keeping us in her direction, her voice yelling louder than the wind and I hear her say the boat is only about fifteen feet away, and between us and the worst of the storm and there's debris piled up where we can maybe crawl on top of it, climb on the platform at the stern. She's calm like there's nothing to it and we just need to trust what she's telling us. The water wasn't cold. Not warm exactly, but warm enough. I'm having to grab the end of each pew and inch myself along. And halfway along the wall I touch the bronze plaque. The one that honors all the crabbers lost in storms and accidents, and I stop for a moment and run my fingers across the raised letters and the last name is Ollie's and I start to cry, didn't  want to leave. Then I hear Anna speaking, closer now.

 

            You could see the lines hanging limply from the starboard side, like she had been tied up and torn free afterwards by the wind. We climbed on,  bunched there, the four of us--all women-- inside on the main cabin. It was still dry and the large boat--steel-hulled--a former ocean-going tug  refitted to carry passengers and ferry supplies. It was stuck on what should have been the West Ridge, opposite the church and seemed to be impervious to the storm.

            The wind whistled around the pilot house. Made a banshee-like sound like nothing I had ever heard. We were soaked and hungry, but just crouched there listening to the storm, knowing in our hearts the wind was going to split her top open and the rain to pour inside. But everything held together and we just waited. Hess had a watch, said it was 1:30 and we had at least three and a half hours before we could see outside. Sarah made her peace with God and was asleep off and on. I tried not to, but I think I dozed off from exhaustion, five, ten minutes at the most. I never saw Hess close her eyes.  Like she was our nurse, on duty to the end.

            The water was still rising. If we had stayed in the church we would not have any way out.  We would have all drowned.

            There were loud, creaking, hollow sounds that were are terrifying. Then a lurch. Then we pitched wildly and heeled over toward one side. Then broke free. You could actually hear timbers underneath us cracking and releasing us, the whole sequence over in less than a minute.  We  thought for a moment the boat might  tip over. I knew the Margaret Ann to draw about six feet of water, and we were floating again. She seemed to regain her balance, rocking back and  forth like an unsteady drunk, but not falling too far. And we were moving. The winds, the high-running surf breaking over the island, carried us away from the island, a rudderless meandering, a sickening motion that could end up to no good. We were crying, momentary relief and fear bound into one emotion..

            That night on the boat I didn't really sleep. Crumpled there, almost getting too drowsy where I couldn't control it, but never giving in. We talked a lot. When there was a lull we told stories.

           

            I talked about soft crabbing, just Roland and I. I was probably eight or nine and he was two years younger. We would push a dip net through the eelgrass, dropping soft crabs into the floating crab box he had hammered together. Those were times when the island was easily a hundred, maybe two hundred yards wider all the way around than it is now. There were shallow shoals outside the spartina where the eelgrass was so thick you had to struggle your way through it. I can step out my back door now and walk fifty yards and on a king tide be up to my knees in water.

           

            Back then we used to sell the soft crabs to the wives of hard potters, and they loved getting them like that, still fresh and kicking. "I still remember your mother, Hess," I told her, "You don't know this. I was ten, and I had never cleaned one of those crabs and she told me she was too busy and she wanted me to clean them for her and she would pay me extra, so I did what I had seen my own mother do when they had been in the cooler, only these crabs were alert and feisty and when I took the kitchen shears and tried to cut their faces off they raised a ruckus and I can still remember that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I never sold, offered to sell, your mother another crab. That's the truth."

 

            Then there would be a sudden jolt and we'd all pitch forward and sprawl out on the deck and stop, then suddenly started moving again. Then we struck hard against the bottom. Stopped for a bit, then the whole thing all over. No one knew what was going to happen. Whether the hull would rip open. Whether we'd sink or even capsize if we really got blown out over deep water. It was 3:30 in the morning when we really seemed to break free. Pitch dark. And the real fear, the dread, even hopelessness took over. We were drifting west, but none of us knew how far it would be to the other side.

 

            When it started to get brighter out I stood up. The wind had stopped. The water was calm. We thought we had blown to the west side of the Bay, but had hardly drifted anywhere. Maybe a few hundred yards from where we started. 

            I could look east when the sun broke between clouds and I could really know why we had to leave the church. It had caved in. You could see a section of wall with one stained glass window light up in the early sun. Everything was gone. I could see it was gone, the whole island just wiped away. A few slight smears of sand creasing the surface, water lapping at jumbles of  marsh grass. Houses simply gone. Debris everywhere, as far as I could see. Boats sunk. Crab shanties marked by a few stark poles supporting a broken cross joist or two. A few nets draped over the surface.

            When I glanced over the side, a crab, a large jimmie, swam next to us--that peculiar sideways crab swim, the one where you think it can't look ahead, can't see where it's going.

~~~

by Cindi Boiter

Cindi Boiter is the editor of Jasper Magazine and ED of the The Jasper Project.

To support the work of Jasper, including articles like the one above,

please consider becoming a member of the Jasper Guild at www.JasperProject.org

Corona Times: Darion McCloud ‘Storyteller’ Brings Families Together with The Magic Purple Circle

by Christina Xan

“…part of what The Magic Purple Circle is supposed to do is to bring a little bit of joy into while the world is burning. And hopefully we're burning off impurities, and we're leaving behind things we don't need. This is going to sound grandiose, but I really do believe this: sometimes just laughing, just loving, is revolutionary.” – Darion McCloud

photo thanks to John Allen

photo thanks to John Allen

In these scary but often enlightening times, Jasper continues to interview artists, sharing their creations and ideas, new and old, with the community. I recently talked with local artist, performer, and all around wonderful human being, Darion McCloud, about his new project The Magic Purple Circle, in which he reads children’s stories to families at home during quarantine.  

Jasper: You’ve been creating art and performing for so long now. How has that changed or transformed recently with COVID and other social/political events.

McCloud: We are in a real, full-blown pandemic with people in leadership positions not knowing what to do, and now it's out of control. I never imagined the economic, the physical, the spiritual/cultural, the mental havoc it could wreak, and it's pushed me to The Magic Purple Circle. This is my response to the world being on fire. And fire can hurt, but it also can burn away impurities and forge things. I'm thinking after this, hopefully, we learn our lesson until we finally think, "You know, healthcare is pretty important for everybody. Police brutality, police just rolling up on people and killing them is wrong." These are things that we can fix. These are things that we're going to have to fix. That's one thing the uprisings and the pandemic have shown us. All these things that we have, these privileges that we think we have, even the ones we don't have but we think we have, they're not a birthright. We think it's a birthright to go wherever we want to go, and do whatever we want to do, and have whatever we want to have. No, those are the things that people have worked for, and sacrificed, or some people have stolen, but you don't just get them because you're an American. And, so, part of what The Magic Purple Circle is supposed to do is to bring a little bit of joy into while the world is burning. And hopefully we're burning off impurities, and we're leaving behind things we don't need. You can still smile and laugh and be silly. This is going to sound grandiose, but I really do believe this: sometimes just laughing, just loving, is revolutionary.

Jasper: Of all things to create as a response in these times, why a children’s series?

McCloud: Actually, my first time performing, period, was for children as a storyteller. In 1993, I started working with what was then Richland County Public Library. I’m lucky that today a large part of my practice is still with families and with kids. This past March, it was Dr. Seuss's birthday, so I was entered into a lot of Dr. Seuss gigs, and I just thought about all those kids who were at home, not reading Green Eggs and Ham, which is one of my favorite books ever. I would see all these posts online about people complaining about being stuck home with their kids, and I saw my own daughter struggling. She was quiet, but that was the scary part. I knew she had to be struggling. So, this was my little contribution to all that, and people just dug it. People dug it, dug me, and kept hitting me up, and I started making more. Before I knew it, people were hitting me up like, ‘Hey, my kid's mad at you because you haven't made a Magic Purple Circle in a week.’

Jasper: The title – Magic Purple Circle – is so fun. How did you come up with it?

McCloud: I'm from Columbia, and when I first started working with the library, the story time room was on the other side of the building, and inside the story time room, there was a big, plushy purple carpet, and then inside that carpet was a deeper purple circle that I called the story time circle. I used to have a little speech I gave to the attendees, to the people coming to the story time. I'd tell all the parents that if you sat inside the magic purple circle, you had to do everything we did. That included singing songs, the Hokey Pokey, whatever. It was kind of a release, an excuse, like, "Well, I have to do the Hokey Pokey, because I'm inside the purple circle," without them admitting, "I love the Hokey Pokey!" Because of that I always called it the magic purple circle, so when I was trying to think of name for this project, it just brought me full circle to where I first started: sharing stories with families.

Jasper: And how do you choose what stories to share?

McCloud: A lot of it for me is nostalgia. A lot of the books are old. They're books from 20 years ago that I thought were special. Or maybe it’s just something I think is cool, something I think is interesting. Sometimes it’s something I think it is more suited for other people, something I think reflects people. Even today, children of color are underrepresented in children's literature. I don’t know – it's not a real scientific process. It's just what moves me. What moves me, what I think will move someone. It's kind of cool, people often say, "Oh man, this made my day," or sometimes, every blue moon, somebody's like, "I cried". It's just cool. And, I mean, I love picture books. I don't think you outgrow a great picture book. Everything that you're looking for in the arts, period, is there. Great storytelling, great words, economy of language.

Jasper: Would you say the whole process of the show is organic like that?

McCloud: Yeah, it's unscripted. I'm real comfortable in that environment. One of the things I did was I ran an improv group for a while. I just say what's real for me. That doesn't mean I don't make mistakes. If it's a minor mistake, I just keep it. Like if I mispronounced a word or something. And I kind of like that, too, because I like the kids knowing. It's not so sterile as a lot of times on television, there's never a flub. So unknowingly, you make this impression that a flaw is a mistake. I just know I'll make a flub and come back and say, "Oh, I mispronounced that word." I think it's easy because I speak my truth, and it's easy because I'm doing what I love, and I hope what I love, what I'm doing, is good for people. I love it. I love what I'm doing. I love the books. I love doing that, I love having fun with the families. So, like I say, I just kind of speak the truth of the moment.

Jasper: Do you plan to do The Magic Purple Circle for as long as you can?

McCloud: Yeah. I didn't envision it getting where it is, and it's made me think. One of the things I've always wanted to do is I want a TV show. I'm hoping The Magic Purple Circle can evolve into a family TV show. I grew up on Electric Company, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers, Zoom. My childhood is the '60s, '70s. So, I want to do something like that.

Jasper: And you said Magic Purple Circle moves around, right?

McCloud: Yeah, I did one for Colleton County right at the beginning of the summer and with the Columbia Museum of Art a couple weeks ago. One just aired with Richland Library, and I still want to do smaller ones for families.

Jasper: What's the best way people can support you and the project?

McCloud: Find Magic Purple Circle on YouTube. I mean I'm just like every other artist during COVID-19. This is what I do. This is my gig. Money is always appreciated. 99% of the people you see on stage, they're out of work now. That's how it is for most artists. We're making work, but even that is limited. People sharing the work, that helps a lot because hopefully the more people see it and the more people can talk to me about it, the better I can make it. People may know networks or venues I could use. But the most important thing for me is sharing. If you don't have any money, if you don't have any influence...that's not what I'm doing this for. I'm doing this just for people, hopefully to make people's day a little bit better. Make people laugh a little bit, make people hug their kids a little tighter.

Jasper: Have you had help from people putting the show on and sharing it?

McCloud: I'm kind of a one-man gang, one-man operation. Michaela [Pilar Brown] has done some great work; she designed my logo for this. I’ve co-created with Molly Ledford, Heather Leigh, Bonita Peeples, and Drew Baron. Sam McWhite has done this incredible music. When I can expand it, I have people, but for the most part, it's just kind of me.

Jasper: And, as a storyteller, do you have people or figures that have inspired you?

McCloud: There are too many to name but Prince, African American painter Jacob Lawrence, comic book creator Jack “King” Kirby, and the Pittsburgh Steelers to name a few.

Jasper: How about other adventures? Are you working on any other projects right now?

McCloud: It's not defined yet, but I’m trying to work on some adult stuff, too, because working for families is good, but there's more. I'm lucky enough to have those two halves. To love the family work and have that, but also, I love to do very…I call it the backbreaking stuff. So, like when the uprisings happened, the conversations now, these are conversations I've been having with my art since I became an adult, when I was still a visual artist. As a theater artist, this is the type of work I love. Like I said, I call it the backbreaking planes, where it forces you to look in the mirror, even if it's not ‘you’ that you see. Maybe it's your friend or maybe it's your family or maybe it is you, but it forces you to look. Or maybe the you, the we, is sometimes larger. Race, gender, class, nationalism, whatever. I love that type of work in my adult work, so I'm working on some stuff to address that.

Jasper: Well, as you and others continue to work on these projects, do you have any advice you’d give to creators who want to respond to this world on fire but don’t know how?

McCloud: I can't really give advice but trust yourself. It's different for everybody. Somebody might take two years to process all this, or it ekes out into your work little by little, or you do one big thing. I think that's one of the traps of this thing has been everybody feels like, "Well, I'm stuck at home. I have to create. I should be creating. I have all this time." And you put this weird pressure on yourself. Hell, I'm still processing. I'm working, making things, but I'm not done processing. For one thing, this thing, it shifts so often. I would just say trust yourself, man. Don't try to beat yourself up too much. Just trust yourself.

You can find The Magic Purple Circle at YouTube here and check out McCloud’s recent collaboration with the Richland Library here.

 

Be sure to follow Jasper on social media (The Jasper Project on Facebook; @the_jasper_project on Instagram; @JASPERadvises on Twitter) to keep up with local art events like The Magic Purple Circle.

 

Darion McCloud, winner of the 2018 Jasper Theatre Artist of the Year

Darion McCloud, winner of the 2018 Jasper Theatre Artist of the Year

Announcing Accepted Submissions for Fall Lines & Winners of Fall Lines Awards

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The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, Friends of Richland Library, and One Columbia for Arts and Culture, is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in the seventh edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2020 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to Randy Spencer whose short fiction, Ghost Ship, was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to Lisa Hammond, whose poem, Hydrangeas, was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

Judges for this year’s awards were Barrett Warner for fiction and Julia Wendell for poetry. 

Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco Press, 2016) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014. He has won the Salamander fiction prize and his short stories have appeared in The Adroit, Phoebe, Crescent Review, Oxford Magazine, Berkeley Fiction Review, Quarter after Eight, and elsewhere. He has also won the PrincemereLiam RectorLuminaire (Alternating Current), and Cloudbank poetry prizes; and the Tucson Book Festival essay prize. In 2016, he was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for his personal essays on farming and the rhythms of farm life. He used those funds to move to South Carolina. In May, 2019 he received the nonfiction fellowship at the Longleaf Writers’ Conference. Recent efforts appear in Beloit Poetry JournalRabbit Catastrophe ReviewAnti-Heroin ChicDisquiet ArtsSou’wester, and Pirene’s Fountain. 

Julia Wendell received her B.A. from Cornell University, her M.A. in English and American Literature from Boston University, and Her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa, Writer's Workshop.  She is the author of five full-length collections of poems and three chapbooks. Her most recent book of poems is Take This Spoon (Main Street Rag Press, 2014). Additionally, she is the author of two memoirs, Finding My Distance (Galileo Press, 2009) and her recent Come to the X (Galileo Press, 2020). A Bread Loaf and Yaddo Fellow, her poems have been widely published in such journals as American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nebraska Review, Crazyhorse, and many others. She is the Founding Editor of Galileo Press since its inception in 1979. She lives in Aiken, South Carolina, with her husband, editor and critic, Barrett Warner.

While the annual release of Fall Lines is typically accompanied by a reading and celebration, this year, due to restrictions accompanying COVID-19, the editors have opted to reveal the names of the authors whose work has been accepted for publication, but delay the actual release event and book distribution until the writing community can safely gather together to share and celebrate.

Fall Lines – a literary coalition is edited by Cindi Boiter and Ed Madden, with assistance from Lee Snelgrove and Tony Tallent.

Congratulations to the following authors:

Ann Humphries – Kite Boy from Bangladesh, To Think I almost Missed These Paintings, and The Bench

John Gulledge – Forgetting Pop

Al Black – Night Watchman, Pandemic Meditation on the Second Anniversary of My Mother’s Passing

Lisa Hammond – Hydrangeas *

Lawrence Rhu – Amends

Lisa Hase-Jackson – Her Wild Self, Privilege

Derek Berry – landscape with ritual superstition, on the morning I tell my father

Jennifer Gilmore – Flecks of Gold

Debra Daniel – Why the Rabbit Died, As we Move On

Nathalie Anderson – Lamp-Lit

Betsy Thorne – For the Love of Pete, View from Office in a Small City

Ruth Nicholson – Spring Safari:  Hartsville, SC, Overdue

Ellen Malphrus – Refusing the Flood, Premonition: January 2, 2020

Eric Morris – Medicine Game, They, and The Gift

Rachel Burns – mortality tastes Like key lime pie

Dale Bailes – Time/Travel, Columbia to Pawley’s, After the Hurricane

Arthur Turfa – unfinished Kaddish

Betsy Thorne – New Restrictions

Danielle Verwers – The Governor Issues an Executive Order Before the Evening News, 1993, and Horseshoe Falls

Randy Spencer – Quarantine, Ghost Ship

Susan Craig – The Way We See a Goldfinch

Libby Bernardine – Ode

Kristine Hartvigsen – Sleepover

Tim Conroy – Balances

Bo Petersen – Little Gleams

Ceille Baird Welch – The Inevitable Unfriending of Merrily Thompson, Merrily Thompson Remembers

Jon Tuttle – hush

Francis Pearce – Retreat

The Jasper Galleries at Meridian Features Timely Portrait Exhibit on Race and Authenticity

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Since 2019, the Jasper Project has been showing art in the external gallery spaces of the Meridian Building in downtown Columbia as well as in the building's lobby. In one of the first major exhibits since the start of COVID-19, the gallery is presenting a timely and poignant portrait show by Dalvin Spann and Lee Ann Kornegay.

The show features a collection of black and white portraits of everyday people in various poses and places. Aptly titled Black and White, the show “came out of a desire to gain and promote a better understanding of people of different color,” the Artist Statement says.  

Spann, a black 36-year-old photographer, and Kornegay, a white 57-year-old filmmaker and photographer, together “envisioned it as a project that would challenge themselves, then ultimately viewers of their work, to learn new things about their subjects and talk about what it feels like to be black or white in the current times.”  

Each photographer agreed to photograph people of a different color.  

“The goal was to step outside of our comfort zones and shoot outside of our race. We wanted to spark change and conversation in all walks of life,” Spann reflects, “This was important then and now more important than ever with what we are seeing socially around the world.”

These portraits show people as themselves, as human beings. Through dance, sport, or a simple smile, the subjects of these photos express themselves authentically. The portraits present not just a reflection of the subject but a reflection of the witness.

 

“I think if we take the time to talk to people without stereotyping or having a classism approach, we would be further along in changing the world we live in,” Spann asserts, “It is important that we first look in the mirror at ourselves and accept the things we were misinformed about or taught to ensure we do not repeat the cycle again.”

The photos are set up throughout the window that lines Washington Street.

In addition to the portrait exhibit, Bert Easter, Jasper board member and manager of the gallery, has refreshed the space by adding a couple new UofSC student pieces and an extraordinary pottery piece by Virginia Scotchie as well as moving a few current pieces around to give a fresh look.

The Jasper Galleries at Meridian is located at 1320 Main Street, and interested individuals can drop in or drive by Washington and Sumter Streets to see the art.

With a message ever so important in today’s world, the show aims to say that regardless of race, we can never move forward with successful and positive race relationships until we get to know each other, share fears and joys alike, and have authentic relationships. 

“We produced Black and White in 2017 to create a vehicle for meaningful conversations between blacks and whites in our community,” Kornegay shares, “A way to get to know each other in a deeper way and to prompt dialogues of understanding.

-by Christina Xan

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July’s Virtual Tiny Gallery Features Lucas Sams’ Acrylic & Glass Ruminations on Past and Future

“If I can make any impact on other artists it would be just to encourage them to create whatever it is they want, create their own world, and don’t worry about how it will be perceived or try to compete with what is accepted or popular, or even if it ends up being ‘good.’ Make what makes you happy.”

—Lucas Sams

Artist Lucas Sams

Artist Lucas Sams

Last month, Jasper transitioned our Tiny Gallery series online in a show featuring ceramic artist Vanessa Hewitt Devore. This month, we’re thrilled to feature our longtime friend artist, Lucas Sams, and his new collection, Paintings on Glass.

Sams, 30, is an award-winning Columbia based multi-media artist working in painting, sculpture, film, digital/multimedia, and installation art.  He was born in Greenwood, South Carolina and has resided in SC for most of his life, except for a year spent in Tokyo, Japan. “I think both of these facts have greatly influenced me in ways I am not yet fully aware of,” Sams shares.

Sams has been drawing since he could hold a pen, constantly supported by his family; specifically, his father, Carroll Sams of Greenwood, SC, and grandfather, John Proctor, both of whom helped teach Sams some of the basics. Sams shares that a lack of art classes at his Christian school made him have to search for ways to be self-motivated. “I drew during most of my classes whenever possible,” he says, “Drawing cartoons and comics before slowly transitioning into a shudder ‘fine artist.’”

Despite the lack of classes, Sams exhibited work throughout middle and high school, going on to attend the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and the University of South Carolina, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Art History.

Sams started showing work “professionally” in Columbia in 2009. In the past decade, he’s worked in a variety of 2D and 3D mediums, including film and installation art. These days, however, he’s mostly painting and drawing or working with ceramics. “This show with Tiny Gallery consists of paintings on glass,” Sams details, “using a technique of painting images in reverse directly on glass taught to me by my father when I was a kid.”

Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child

This technique, which Sams’ own father used extensively in his work nearly 50 years ago, is not the only thing he taught him. “My father taught me how to paint more than any art teacher or professor, by teaching me not to be afraid of painting,” Sams illuminates, “The worst that can happen when painting is something has to be painted over, and glass is an even more forgiving medium, where mistakes can be simply wiped away.”

This approach carved a new perspective of art for a young Sams, who admits once upon a time, he hated painting. “I couldn’t get a grasp on the medium despite excelling with pen and ink and other media, until I learned how to do it in reverse,” Sams reflects, “The painted surface itself is messy, layered over with many layers of paint, and there is no definition, but flip it over, and it makes sense – the image has clarity, depth, and definition.”

Fault and Fracture

Fault and Fracture

Many figures and ideas have emerged from the depth of the images on Sams’ glass, inspired by a mix of science fiction, anime, pop culture, modern art, religion, psychology, and history. Born in 1989, he grew up playing with '80s hand-me-downs, constantly experiencing a decade he never lived in. “I think nostalgia, even a hireath-like nostalgia for a world that never really existed, has always been under the surface,” Sams ruminates, “Being a small-town kid with big dreams and ideas led to creative world-building, of the past and future of imagined realities that are never fully realized.”

The imagined realities that exist in this crux of past and future are represented across panes of glass in Sams’ exhibit for Tiny Gallery. Drawing on memory, history, and current times, the paintings tread a multitude of different waters. In this collection, you’ll find various faces in different modes of contemplation, diptychs with bodies in conversation with one another, and vivid colors coming together to tell their own stories. Specifically, Sams works with an “almost manga-like visual style” that he’s been returning to recently. 

Masked Girl with Flowers

Masked Girl with Flowers

“My work draws from the unconscious, and from conscious repetitions and explorations of various interconnected but vastly diverse symbols and archetypes,” Sams shares,” Most of the figures or portraits are some of these archetypes, often a personal twist on a historical or mythological character/idea used as a framework to explore.”

Sams’ works have been exhibited locally and regionally in major art festivals, galleries and alternative spaces, and featured in Jasper Magazine, the SC State newspaper, Garnet and Black Magazine, and the Timber Journal of the University of Colorado, Boulder. He’s had about 30 formal shows, 8 solo shows, and 4 two-man shows with his good friend, and recent JAYS visual arts winner, Michael Krajewski

His favorite memory in all of these was the first time he won something. At the 2006 McCormick Arts Council’s Juried show, he won 1st place for an installation of ceramic masks, and somebody offered him a solo show at USC upstate…or at least they thought they did. “They actually offered it to my Dad, who they thought was me, and who was there accepting the award for me because I was in still high school, out of town,” Sams recalls, “When they found that out, the offer was rescinded. We laughed about that a lot and still do; it’s a good memory.”

Candy Colored Clown

Candy Colored Clown

Whether it’s experiments with new mediums or cases of mistaken identity, Sams has one piece of advice for fellow artists: “If I can make any impact on other artists it would be just to encourage them to create whatever it is they want, create their own world, and don’t worry about how it will be perceived or try to compete with what is accepted or popular, or even if it ends up being ‘good.’ Make what makes you happy.”

Lucas Sams’ show, which holds 17 pieces ranging from $75 - $150, will be up until August 9th. You can see the works 24/7 at the following link: https://the-jasper-project.square.site/tiny-gallery

While he says it’s impossible to know what the future holds, for further viewing you can visit his website https://lucastsams.wixsite.com/sams, his weekly updated webstore https://lucassams.bigcartel.com/, and follow him on Instagram @trianglezero.

-Christina Xan

*Are you an artist interested in showing your work for a Virtual Tiny Gallery show? Email Tiny Gallery Manager Christina Xan at JasperProjectColumbia@gmail.com.

To support the work of Jasper, including articles like the one above,

please consider becoming a member of the Jasper Guild at www.JasperProject.org

 

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DR. JO ANGELA EDWINS TALKS EDUCATION, POETRY AND THE NEW NORMAL by Dana Nickel

The Pee Dee’s first poet laureate explains the importance of art in an uncertain era.

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“I was always really taken with art, but I was never quite good at it,” Dr. Jo Angela Edwins explains with a laugh. “I tried different instruments, even played the piano for three years. Nothing stuck.”

It wasn’t until a young Edwins saw a poet on the PBS channel giving out writing advice that she considered poetry. The advice was to write one poem a day, everyday in order to develop poetry skill. “For a long time as a kid, I wrote really bad poetry everyday,” she says. “I do think that it  made me really attuned to word the sounds of words and how words fit in a phrase.”

Today, Edwins is a professor of poetry for Francis Marion University’s English department. She usually teaches three to four classes a semester. This spring, she taught two classes on advanced poetry writing and American women authors. Her courses are reading and writing intensive, and COVID-19 really affected how she was able to foster a connection with her students.

“One of the things we do in creative writing is workshopping and feedback.” Edwins continues, “Getting feedback face-to-face is a whole lot different than getting [feedback] through notes on Blackboard.”

To remedy this, she started doing video calls through Zoom with some of her students to go over their work in a more in-depth fashion.

“That was really helpful for the students who [attended] those sessions, I think,” she recalls.

In addition to navigating the pandemic as an educator, Edwins also works on her craft. She explains that one of the main challenges of writing during the pandemic is the reliance on publishers. “I had noticed that it seems like it's taking publishers a lot longer to respond because of the pandemic,” she says.

Edwins also expresses her belief that the arts have gained prominence since the start of the pandemic. As the Pee Dee’s first Poet Laureate, she takes this idea with her when she considers methods to get readers to engage with literature and poetry.

Though this has been a difficult task because of the pandemic, she started a Facebook group, Poetry Across the Pee Dee, to connect readers and writers alike through virtual readings.

“[I’m] having to find alternative methods to let mostly depend on the internet to try to inspire people to consider poetry,” she says.

However, Edwins explains that the pandemic has provided a way for people to discover new interests in art, especially poetry. “If you don't think that the art should be funded ... think about what’s sustaining you right now,” she says. “All of these artists who are writers and directors and actors and singers and songwriters, who wouldn't have an opportunity to create that if their talent hadn't somehow been encouraged and nurtured at some level.”

Throughout our conversation, Edwins repeats the sentiment that art is truly all around us everyday, and art keeps track of our history. “We are living through something that hasn’t happened in anyone’s living memory,” Edwins says, siting that both the pandemic and the current “historical moment” that is bringing Black Lives Matter back into focus. “Both of these events really highlight how much humankind depends on art in general, and particularly poetry, to help us through moments of crisis.”

To help provide a sense of comfort and strength during this uncertain time, Edwins is working with a group of writers to compose Poetry in a time of crisis. “Sometimes with poetry, we can find ways to salve the wounds of the spirit at a time when the physical life feels out of balance,” the poet says.

Her poem, Outbreak, was included in the collection, and it provided an inspiring vision of the pandemic’s conclusion.

 

“In a world full of fear and profiteering hoarders,

look down at your hands, folded now, skin parched,

and know that they are powerful.”

-By Dana Nickel

Corona Times - The Multi-Talented, Multi-Faceted Katrina Blanding

“Right now, more than ever, that is where my passion is. I want to see us all grow together.”

-Katrina Blanding

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As COVID-19 continues to impact the way artists create their work and the way the Jasper Project covers that creation, Jasper is bringing you a series of interviews with artists whose work you might have been seeing in person were these different times. I loved learning more about one of my favorite actors and vocalists in town, Katrina Blanding, and I think you will, too. - cb

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JASPER: I know you graduated from Columbia High School in 2001 and then went on to attend Queens College where you majored in Business Administration and Theatre, graduating in 2005. Did you grow up in Columbia? Did you always know you wanted to go into theatre? When did you start acting?

BLANDING: Yes, I grew up in Columbia, SC. I attended schools in District 1 with some amazing teachers! I first realized that I had a knack for singing and acting when we did our 5th grade play about the 1940s where I sang “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun” from Annie Oakley. There’s nothing like that instant gratification! After that I went onto middle school and joined the band and chorus, which didn’t leave room for theater. I was blessed because the drama teacher saw my potential and would occasionally sneak me into her class when they were doing acting warmups. I was always singing at church and school, as well as taking ballet and performing with the Carolina Ballet in their apprentice company. These activities took up most of my time. The acting bug still didn’t really get me until, once again, the theater teacher at my high school begged me to audition for the school musical “Grease”. I snagged the lead role of Sandy in our all black production! It was so challenging and exciting that I couldn’t let it go.

I went to college in Charlotte, NC and just knew I was going to be a neurosurgeon, but God had other plans. I switched majors to business and minored in theater, thinking that I would get into Business Entertainment, but once I started the classes, I knew that I had to dive in completely.

Right now, I sing with 3 different groups, I have written and produced soundtracks for two original stage plays. I have been the Musical Director for two plays. I am a classically trained singer and dancer. I teach voice and acting. I have stared in a nationally distributed play (“Yesterday is Still Gone” rent at Walmart.com, Amazon, Redbox, and also available for purchase) that was written and produced by SC’s only Urban Black Box Theatre (WOW Productions). I’ve done a few short films, commercials, and voiceovers. I have been in numerous shows all over the midlands in every major theatre. If I sound like I’m bragging, I am. I’m bragging on every teacher and adult that saw something in me that I didn’t. It’s because of them that I am where I am. For them, I still try my best every day.

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JASPER: You are also a brilliant vocalist – does that come naturally, or did you train in vocals, or is it a combination of both?

BLANDING: My mom always tells people that I was singing before I could talk! I am not unlike most singers that started in the church, where I was encouraged and cultivated. I took my first formal vocal lessons in college where they tried to push me into opera. I can do it, but that’s not my cup of tea. I will say however, that classical training has helped to push my gift to a different level.

JASPER: How do you spend your time when you aren’t performing?

BLANDING: When I’m not performing, I spend time with my mother and my kids, Tripp 12 and Madison 3. They really keep me on my toes. I am also in the process of writing two books (be on the lookout) and learning the stock market.

 

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JASPER: You are a member of a beautiful performing trio called IndigoSoul – can you tell us more about Indigo Soul and your partners in the project? How long have y’all been together? How often do you get to perform? What’s it like working with Terrance Henderson and Kendrick Marion? What are some of the highlights of your work with Indigo Soul – what type of performances are your favorite?

BLANDING: IndigoSOUL is my music family made up of me, Terrance Henderson, and Kendrick Marion. We have performed together in part since 2010. I performed in “Ain’t Misbehavin” for the first time with Terrance Henderson in 2006 at Workshop Theater. Then after a long break, I did “Hairspray” at Workshop Theater in 2010 with Kendrick. We performed in the same show for the first time at Trustus Theatre doing “Passing Strange.” Here’s where they messed up. In 2014, Trustus asked the three of us to MC the “Henderson Brothers Burlesque Show” and we just clicked! We did a few other shows together after that. In 2015 Terrance pulled Kendrick and me in to work on the Harbison Theater ‘s Annual “Incubator Project” where he created a new piece called “Ruins”. This piece is a mixture of dance, poetry, music, and symbolism, that explores the human condition, what it means to live, and what we leave behind.

After we spent so much time together creating and collaborating, we knew we had something special together. There’s a unique and wonderful synergy that happens when we work together that cannot be duplicated.  We love exploring the beauty of art, life, and our place in it. This is what makes us work. Terrance dubbed us “IndigoSOUL” and the rest is history.

Rehearsing with these two can be challenging because all we do is laugh and play. I’m not really sure how we get ANYTHING done. I always leave their presence happier then when I came.

For the past 3 years, we have been performing an “Original Musical Fable” which we call “Shine” which is truly a spinoff of Ruins. With Terrance at the helm, we created this show to speak to young people and the young at heart about their unique purpose and about how they can use their purpose impact in the world.

My favorite part about performing with IndigoSOUL is meeting people in our communities. We don’t just perform and run. After school performances, we try to have talkbacks with the students to allow them to ask us about the performance as well as the work that we do in the community. Sometimes they ask us very poignant questions about how we have overcome obstacles in our lives, which is really the most rewarding part. We love being able to pour back into our young people the way that we have been poured into by our ancestors and loved ones.

L-R Kendrick Marion , Katrina Blanding, Terrence Henderson

L-R Kendrick Marion , Katrina Blanding, Terrence Henderson

JASPER: How has COVID-19 and the quarantine requirements impacted your ability to rehearse and perform?

BLANDING: COVID-19 hit while I was smack dab in the middle of rehearsals at Trustus Theatre for “Fairview”.  Terrance was directing this project and had to make the very hard decision for us to stop rehearsing in person. We rehearsed for about a week online and via telephone conference before he handed down the sad news that Trustus would be shutting down all performances and rehearsals until further notice.

We actually began rehearsing for “Fairview” in November because of the subject matter. We wanted to be uber prepared and truthful in our performance. It has been hard to set this piece aside, but we look forward to joining together again next year to mount this production with new eyes, ears, and hearts.

I have been extremely blessed in that I have had a constant flow of opportunity coming my way since the quarantine began from voiceovers to virtual concerts. I am so grateful.

JASPER: If I recall correctly, I’ve noticed that you have a large support network of family and friends when you perform. Can you talk about the importance of having family and friends in your corner as an artist?

BLANDING: Most of my supporters are my blood family and my theater family. They really keep me going. I can’t honestly say that I have all of the support that I would like to have, but I have the support I need. I feel like it is important to have people around you that genuinely support you because they believe in you because they recognize the hard work that you put into what you do. It’s cool having fans, but fans come and go. They are with you when you are up but not necessarily when you’re down. I love the people that are in my circle. They make me what to be better. The other day I posted on my Facebook page that I wanted to get into film acting, but I wasn’t sure that I could do it. My theater family swooped in and offered advice from “Suck it up and do it!” to “Why don’t you try to record yourself and get used to seeing yourself on camera.”. Whatever I chose to do, I know I’m never alone, and that keeps me grounded and grinding.

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JASPER: What have been some of your favorite theatrical roles that you’ve been able to perform?

BLANDING: That’s such an unfair question! I would have to say my favorite lead role was Delores Van Cartier in Village Square’s “Sister Act”. This was my first main leading role in a musical. It was challenging but it was a challenge that made me a better singer and performer. Singing almost 2 hours nonstop is not for the faint of heart. I also LOVED playing Shug Avery in Workshop Theatre’s “The Color Purple” for obvious reasons. Come on! Its SHUG AVERY!

My favorite ensemble roles were in “Passing Strange” as the mother and “Ain’t Misbehavin” as Nell Carter. “Passing Strange” allowed me to explore the anguish and heartache of a mother that just wants what’s best for their child. “Ain’t Misbehavin“  transported me into another time. Those two shows allowed me to bond with those casts in a way that was truly life changing. I would do all of these plays every year if I could.

JASPER: Any advice for young artists just getting started in theatre and musical theater?

BLANDING: Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy. There will be times that you don’t try because you feel you may fail. My advice to you is this: Go to every audition. Take voice and acting lessons. Read plays. Go to plays. Sing. Dance. Do it!

JASPER: Finally, what’s next for Katrina Blanding? Where will we get to next see you perform?

BLANDING: I have a lot cooking in the pot. I am currently working on my books and trying to get comfortable in front of the camera and off stage. I am going to be joining a board that will be addressing how we can encourage diversity and equity in our theatres. Right now, more than ever, that is where my passion is. I want to see us all grow together.

Thanks, Katrina!

-Cindi Boiter

Cindi Boiter is the editor of Jasper and the founder and ED of the The Jasper Project. To support the work of Jasper, including articles like the one above, please consider becoming a member of the Jasper Guild at www.JasperProject.org

Jasper Project Galleries Adds New Location at Motor Supply Company - Curated by Laura Garner Hine

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The Jasper Project is pleased to add Motor Supply Company Bistro in Columbia’s historic Vista to our growing list of Jasper Project Galleries, including Harbison Theatre Gallery and the Meridien Building Sreetside Galleries (curated by Bert Easter) at Washington and Sumter Streets in downtown Columbia.

Jasper Project board member and Jasper Magazine visual arts editor Laura Garner Hine will be curating the series for the Jasper Project and is opening the series with a selection of her own work beginning this week.

Below, please find an excerpt from a story featuring Hine written in 2019 for Jasper Magazine by Christina Xan.

Laura Garner Hine

Laura Garner Hine

Though many people struggle to decide on a career path, Hine knew she was going to be an artist for as long as she can remember. “It's my strongest sense,” Hine says, “There was never a question, my whole life.” 

Hine started seriously studying art as soon as she became cognizant of her choice to commit to it. Upon graduating high school, when she got a scholarship for USC, she knew immediately she was going major in art studio. “I didn't know what I was going to focus on yet,” she recalls, “but eventually it became oil painting. You can make it so many different things.”

Hine is indebted in large part to her mentor, Pam Bowers. She remembers her and Bowers harvesting dirt from which they would make their own paints: “I felt like I was doing alchemy,” she said. This is when she ended up minoring in art history.

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After Hine graduated, she studied abroad in the Netherlands. While there, she heard of a conservation course happening in Maastricht, and she decided to go – a decision that would change her life. Hine reflects on her first experience with conservation: “It was the marriage, to me, of all the things that I'd loved: art history, that alchemy, and the science behind art.”


Although this trip was the first time Hine had experienced conservation hands on, she believes she was always meant to conserve art. She remarks that, “I think I'm in the business of seeing. Everybody has the capacity to look, but there's merit and thought behind really seeing. It's kind of a fantastical thing.”

Hine believes her relationship to seeing beyond the surface of an image or object is really what led her to first her path as an artist and then her job as a restorator, a process she is incredibly lucky to be a part of: “It's quite meditative,” she ponders, “I think it transcends you into this moment of this dissolving of perception, and you become one with it.”

The process of conserving and restoring art is a multistep process, and it’s not formulaic. However, there is a system to work through. First, Hine has to do research, find out what the materials are and what they're sensitive to. After preliminary research, Hine begins testing to deduce what would be safest to use on the art piece. Grime or dirt can be removed with something as simple as distilled water to something as damaging as toluenes, but Hine avoids using anything toxic unless it’s absolutely necessary.

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Sometimes, though, the painting is further compromised. If there is a tear or severe damage, Hine must remedy that first. These losses need to be fixed by covering cracks and shaping areas that have lost texture. Last, it’s time to color correct, which is where “the fun starts” for Hine and where her jobs as artist and restorator most closely overlap. When just a little color is missing, she looks at the surrounding area and mimics, but if something major like a face is missing, then she has to do more detailed research to create an impression as close to the original as possible. From start to finish, on average, it takes Hine around 8 hours to restore a painting.

Hine worked at the CMA as an Assistant Preparator for two years, but now she works full time for Carolina Conservation. For her, restoring art is just as intimate as creating it: “I want to hear the paintings talk to me. I want to know what they've seen. I'm a firm believer that energy never dies. People always come back through the ethers.” This conversing is one aspect that strongly connects Hine’s restoration and personal creation.

Hine laughs when trying to pin point herself as an artist, claiming people will go into a show of hers and think the art is from multiple different artists. One continual tether Hine has with her art, however, is her sensitivity and how once something has touched her, she has no choice but to create in inspiration of it. “My inspiration can be pretty; it can be grotesque,” she muses, “Any moment that arrests you, whether it's disgust or awe, I like those moments.”

While she might feel all over the place as an artist, she feels a strong importance in her work: “I think that what really inspires me is how people are inspired by me. I feel that anybody I meet likes to listen to my story, and I like to listen to their story.”

-Christina Xan

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Motor Supply Company Bistro is located at 920 Gervais Street in Columbia, SC’s historic Vista

Find out more about Motor Supply at

www.motorsupplycobistro.com

To support the work of Jasper, including articles like the one above, please consider becoming a member of the Jasper Guild at www.JasperProject.org

Corona Times - Inside Clay Wooten's Celebration of the Life & Heart of Anastasia Chernoff

“Honestly I couldn't believe it when they reached out to me about this and I was extremely honored.” — Clay Wooten, sculptor

Artist Clay Wooten pictured with his sculpture, “Her Heart,” honoring our late friend, artist, gallerist, and arts advocate, Anastasia Chernoff

Artist Clay Wooten pictured with his sculpture, “Her Heart,” honoring our late friend, artist, gallerist, and arts advocate, Anastasia Chernoff

Last week, One Columbia for Arts and Culture announced the completion and installation on Senate Street in the Congaree Vista of the latest piece of public art to punctuate the landscape of Columbia, SC.

“Her Heart” is a metal wire sculpture of a human heart, designed and created by Clay Wooten to honor the late Anastasia Chernoff, who died in 2016 after an extensive battle with cancer. Anastasia was an artist who used her gallery space on Main Street, Anastasia and Friends, to sometimes show her own quirky and imaginative sculptures, but primarily to exhibit the work of artists friends, old and new.

Wooten was selected by Chernoff’s family to design and create the memorial which was funded through contributions from family and friends.

According to One Columbia, the organization “provided administrative support in accepting contributions and working with family members and close friends to assist in the selection and installation of the piece.”

While everyone looks forward to the opportunity to gather together to welcome the art to the city in an official celebration and dedication, the Jasper Project wanted to take a moment to chat with sculptor Clayton Wooten and get some inside information on the creation of this important and moving work.

Here we go —

Jasper: Hi Clay, thanks for talking to Jasper, and thanks for adding another interest point to the growing collection of public art in Columbia. This piece is special to so many of us because it honors our late beloved friend and colleague, Anastasia Chernoff. What can you tell us about your relationship with Anastasia?

Wooten: My relationship with Anastasia started when her daughter Lauren (Melton) and I became friends back in 2010. I would go to dinner parties at her house, she was always welcoming friends into her home. The amount of amazing art she had really blew me away.  I met a lot of creative people at these parties. She then asked me to exhibit some of my paintings in her gallery and of course that was an honor in itself. 

Jasper: How did it feel to be the artist selected to honor someone so beloved by her community?

Wooten: Honestly I couldn't believe it when they reached out to me about this and I was extremely honored. I felt excited and nervous at the same time, I knew that I would have to create a piece that represented her contributions to the art community in Columbia.

Jasper: Tell us about how you arrived at the concept of your sculpture. Did you receive direction from Anastasia’s family, One Columbia, or the Vista Guild, or were you able to approach the project carte blanc?

Wooten: The first time I met with the committee, they explained to me that I would have complete artistic freedom. I sat down and thought about Anastasia and came up with three or four concepts. When I presented the sketches to the group a unanimous decision was reached almost immediately. I then created a small scale model of the sculpture that was used to drum up interest in the last show held at Anastasia and friend’s gallery. 

Model of “Her Heart”

Model of “Her Heart”

Jasper: Can you share some of the specifics of the piece with us? Like – how long did you work on it? How large is it? How much does it weigh? What is the material?

Wooten: The heart is made of 1/4 inch steel rod. I used a number of different methods to bend the rods but ultimately ended up using my hands and some elbow grease to get the shape I wanted. I worked on it for several months on and off. It took longer than I thought but in the end i'm very happy with the finished product. It stands over 12 feet tall and 9 feet wide, weighing around 150 pounds and that does not include the two large stands that connect to the sides. 

Jasper: How did you arrive at painting the piece with sparkling lavender? Is the color representative?

Wooten: The sculpture is actually powder coated in that sparkling lavender color, thanks to the guys over at the Stuyck company. The committee wanted to go with a lavender because it was Anastasia’s favorite and we thought it would blend well with the natural greens surrounding the location.

Jasper: What kind of upkeep of the sculpture require? Is it malleable at all? Will it change with age and weathering?

Wooten:  I'm hoping the sculpture will last forever! I'm sure it will see some discoloring and rust over the years but it will not need much maintenance.

“Her Heart” by Clayton Wooten

“Her Heart” by Clayton Wooten

Jasper: I know the pandemic has kept us from celebrating the official unveiling of the sculpture, but we hope to be able to come together to celebrate your art and all the visions Anastasia left us with soon. Are there any plans for this yet?

Wooten: We are still waiting to see how all this plays out and have not planned the official unveiling.

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Jasper: Where can we see more of your work and what’s your next project?

Wooten:  I build and design exhibits at EdVenture Children's Museum as a full time job so you can see some of my work there. I also have a woodworking instagram @spruce_creations along with my art page @wooo10_art.

Thanks Clay!

By Cindi Boiter

Cindi Boiter is the editor of Jasper and the founder and ED of the The Jasper Project. To support the work of Jasper, including articles like the one above, please consider becoming a member of the Jasper Guild at www.JasperProject.org

Anastasia Chernoff, photo credit unknwon

Anastasia Chernoff, photo credit unknwon