Art from the Ashes Book Launch and Gallery Opening on February 1st at Tapp’s - A JASPER Project

 

Over the course of four evenings in the summer of 2014, more than two dozen literary, visual, and musical artists gathered in the Jasper Magazine office with experts on the February 17^th, 1865 burning of Columbia. The artists immersed themselves in the events that took place the night of the burning as well as the days and nights leading to and immediately following it. Six months later, their inspirations have come to fruition in a multi-disciplinary series of arts events – Art from the Ashes.

Art from the Ashes: Columbia Residents Respond to the Burning of Their City is a collection of poetry, prose, and even a screenplay by some of Columbia, SC’s most dynamic writers, including Ed Madden, Tara Powell, Ray McManus, Susan Levi Wallach, Tom Poland, Al Black, Jonathan Butler, Rachel Haynie, Debra Daniel, Will Garland, Betsy Breen, and Don McCallister. Edited by Jasper Magazine’s Cynthia Boiter, it is a publication of Muddy Ford Press and the first in the press’s new series, Muddy Ford Monographs.

In concert with the book launch, Art from the Ashes: The Gallery will open on the same evening, also at Tapp’s, and will run throughout the month of February. Participating visual artists include Susan Lenz, Kirkland Smith, Christian Thee, Michael Krajewski, Jarid Lyfe Brown, Whitney LeJeune, Mary Bentz Gilkerson, Cedric Umoja, Michaela Pilar Brown, Alejandro Garcia-Lemos, and Kara Gunter.

Join us as we celebrate the book launch and gallery opening from 5 – 7 pm. Visual artists will be on hand to answer questions about their work and literary artists will be signing and reading from their writings. Musician Jack McGregor, who created a three movement musical composition in response to the burning, will premiere his work as well.

Additional events include a Visual Artists Panel Presentation on Thursday, February 5^th at 7 pm and a Reading and Book Signing on February 17^th at 7 pm, followed by a concert by Columbia-based musical artist, the Dubber.

All events take place at Tapp’s Arts Center on Main Street and are free and open to the public

Will South Show continues at Gallery West through November 16th - by Rachel Haynie

Being surrounded all day by notable fine art neither intimidates nor saturates Will South. He leaves Columbia Museum of Art (CMA) where he is surrounded by notable works of art daily, yet when he wraps up, he goes home to paint in his studio for several more hours an evening. “I love painting and look forward to getting back to it each day, just as I enjoy studying and interpreting it, talking and writing about it in my job as curator at Columbia Museum of Art. I don’t think I can remember a time when I wasn’t making art; certainly I have never stopped trying to paint and draw, but I find I am at a time and place in my life now where I can fully enjoy both being an artist and being a curator. I learn more about creating art from art history than I have ever learned in an art class. ” South says: “There is no substitution for work,” meaning his tenacity at his easel ultimately pays off, and the result of this pleasurable labor is currently on view at Gallery West, 118 State Street (former Café Strudel location.) This show, in which South’s recent work shares exhibition space with the ceramics of Douglas Gray, Francis Marion University art professor, is up through November 16: Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; and Sundays 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

This show marks the first opportunity for Metropolitan Columbia to see evidence of South as an artist. All of South’s pieces for this show have been painted or drawn in the months since he arrived in Columbia to assume curatorial duties at CMA so have not been exhibited previously. “Simplicity is a virtue,” says South, and that philosophy is notable in the works in this show. To him, “what is enduring about an image is the sensuality of color, the refinement of shape, the human intelligence contained in a line. I challenge myself to edit out all but the essential and, of course, the problem is in knowing what the essential is.”

Spare and lean are words that surface when looking at these pieces, both the oils and the charcoal drawings. One Ahh! moment elicits from the ethereal Back in Blue, oil wash over charcoal. A playful note, revealing something of the artist’s drawing side, is the label for Self Portrait as Pencils, an oil on canvas. Wake Up in New York, an oil and charcoal on linen, may conjure up a bit of déjà vu for this artist who honed some of his skills at the Art Students League in New York. He had come to the city for PhD studies at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York following a Master’s degree in art history and an undergraduate studio art degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

In co-exhibiting with Doug Gray, South and his work provide textural contrast. Gray’s interest in color and surface are evidence in the pieces selected for this show. -- Rachel Haynie

For more information, call 803-207-9265.

James C. McMillan's Art-Life Itself at Gallery West by Rachel Haynie

 

Gallery West’s current exhibition of James C. McMillan’s career-spanning work – Art – Life Itself, will conclude in a way most appropriate for this venerable artist and teacher – with his paintings, drawings and fine art prints sharing space with local art students.

To cap off the McMillan exhibition, Gallery West plans September 30 as an evening on its back terrace featuring the young African American urban jazz musician known as Dubber. And on the gallery walls, McMillan’s work will be joined by works of two art students from Benedict; the students’ work will remain on view a view weeks beyond McMillan’s show - Art – Life Itself - which ends October 1.

Although McMillan’s work, currently on view at Gallery West, 118 State Street in West Columbia, is not presented as a retrospective, the North Carolina native and octogenarian said the pieces gallery owner Sara Cogswell chose for Art - Life Itself span many of his creative and artistic iterations. When he arrived for his own show, to see for himself how the work had been hung, he sauntered through the connected gallery spaces as though he was perusing a review of his life.

A ground-breaking arts educator and college professor, having retired in 1988 from Guilford College where he became the Art Department’s first African-American chair, after teacher earlier at Bennett College, McMillan nurtured many fledging artists during four decades of teaching. At his Gallery West show, he reminisced about the art teacher who first validated the artist in him.

“The first time I had real art materials in my hands, they were given to me by an art teacher who had bought them and brought them back from New York, so the way she presented them to me articulated that this was special. I was special; she saw promise in me,” McMillan recalled. “They were charcoals, and I began to realize you could do different things with different materials. I was just a kid then, only in the eighth grade.”

Yet the realization that an art teacher could have such impact on an inspiring young artist remains with McMillan still, and he has taken great care, and felt great responsibility throughout his career as a teacher – to protect and nurture creativity. “Because I was encouraged by teachers as well as my parents, who were educators before me, I sensed a particular obligation to encourage curiosity, creativity’s doorway.”

Having begun college at only 15, McMillan had barely completed three of his undergraduate years at Howard University when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and he was drafted, with one year remaining before he would have earned his degree. His early service in the U.S. Navy took him back to the Pacific, to the very place where WWII was ignited for America. After armistice the G.I. Bill allowed him to continue his education at Skowhegen School in Maine. Visiting artists to the revered school, from Europe and America’s cultural centers, became McMillan’s mentors.

He recognizes that his own art was “still blooming when I began teaching. I felt that teaching came with the requirement to continue learning, growing, experimenting, and that I must take care of my own creativity as I was coaxing it out of my students.”

Before Gallery West officially opened Art-Life Itself, McMillan was welcomed to Columbia one day early by Friends of African American Art and Culture. This show, in mediums ranging from painting and drawing to printmaking, represents work created before and during his time in Paris, carrying through to the Civil Rights Movement, and now into McMillan's most recent work that captures the "movement" of North Carolina’s landscape, from mountains to sea, created from the 1940s to the present.

"Body of Work: Faces and Figures" opens at Gallery West Tuesday, July 8

Just as any vibrant summer gathering should be, Gallery West’s fast-forthcoming show is destined to take on qualities of a reunion and a first meeting of new friends – referring to both art and patrons. For a reunion with the past, work - created over three centuries - grace the walls at 118 State Street in West Columbia. New friends will show up as new work in all media; featured will be new work by outstanding Columbia artist Pat Callahan. Patrons will converge for the show opening Tuesday, July 8 with a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception hosted from 4 to 8 p.m.

Many Columbians are already familiar with the sensitive and beautifully-crafted figure drawings by Pat Callahan. On view for this summer exhibition will be a selection of Pat's work that showcases her refined viewpoint and poetic drafting skills. Callahan comes to art and to craft through graphic design. Perhaps to balance her computer-based career, Callahan draws a classical subject - the body - in traditional drawing media. She works from life, capturing beauty and strength embodied in her subjects. With descriptive line and gesture she captures exquisitely bodies of weight, ruled by gravity and time.

Among the many other highlights in Body of Work is a small, elegant photograph by internationally acclaimed photographer Edward Weston. This intimate, wistful portrait of Weston's friend, Mary Buff, is contrasted by a large, flashy oil on canvas by New York society portrait painter, Mabel Hatt. Hatt's painting of Evelyn Siegel looks like a direct descendent of John Singer Sargent, and for good reason - Hatt's father was a student of Sargent's. More contemporary is a brightly-colored painting by well-known South Carolina artist Jonathan Green of a family enjoying the beach.

In addition to paintings and photographs, there are numerous works on paper in Body of Work. Of note is a haunting etching by nationally-acclaimed printmaker and former head of the Yale University Art Department, William Bailey. A forceful graphic note is struck in Sigmund Abeles and his print of a mother and child. Among the most geometric works in the show is a large original print entitled, Builders, by renowned American artist Jacob Lawrence.

Side-by-side with these well-known artists will be paintings, photographs, prints, drawings and sculpture by artists of great talent. Gallery visitors will note a 1930s portrait of a young girl by Elsie Budd, an astonishing wood engraving by Alfred Tinayre, or the whimsical sculpture of Tom Soumalainen.

Gallery West has quickly become characterized by its director’s innate talent for unearthing affordable treasures and spotlighting them evocatively in the gallery. Several area artists are also featured in the exhibition, including Russell Jeffcoat, Philip Hultgren, and Bonnie Goldberg.

The exhibition remains on view through August.  Gallery West is located at 118 State Street in West Columbia.  For more information, call (803) 207-9265,  e-mail gallerywest.sara@aol.com , or visit their Facebook page.

~ Rachel Haynie