Preview: if ART's December exhibition One / Group: Michael Cassidy + Mark Flowers + Jaime Misenheimer + Jay Owens

Columbia’s if ART Gallery’s December exhibition, One / Group: Michael Cassidy + Mark Flowers + Jaime Misenheimer + Jay Owens, is now on view. The show opened December 4th and will run through January 2, 2016. With the exhibition, if ART Gallery presents four artists who are new to the gallery: Michael Cassidy, Mark Flowers, Jaime Misenheimer, and Jay Owens. Cassidy and Misenheimer will be giving a gallery talk on Saturday, December 12th at 2 pm.

West Columbia resident and Michigan native Michael Cassidy has lived in the Columbia area for more than a decade. He earned an MFA from the University of South Carolina. Cassidy was included in this year’s 701 Center for Contemporary Art’s South Carolina Biennial 2015.

South Carolina native Mark Flowers, who lives in the Ashville, N.C., area, has been a presence on the South Carolina art scene for decades despite having taught for more than two decades in Pennsylvania. Flowers used to show at Columbia’s Morris Gallery, which closed more than a decade ago, where he had his last solo exhibition in 1999. The current exhibition at if ART Gallery presents a new entrance into his home state for Flowers, who earned in BFA from the University of South Carolina. His work is represented in museums throughout the Carolinas, including the Columbia Museum of Art, the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Gibbes Museum in Charleston.

Columbia resident Jaime Misenheimer, who is from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, in 2014 received her MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, one of the most prestigious MFA programs for painting in the country. She holds BFA and BA in History from the University of South Carolina, where she teaches art.

Upstate South Carolina native Jay Owens, who lives in Travelers Rest, S.C., attended Winthrop University before earning his BFA from Utah State University. He traveled to Niger, in West Africa, to study pottery. He also studied ceramics at the Peters Valley Craft Center in New Jersey and Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine and worked as a studio assistant at Penland School of Crafts.

Opening at if ART: PETER LENZO & JOE SCOTCHIE–LENZO

The breakthrough for the ceramic sculptures for which Columbia artist Peter Lenzo now is known nationally came in 2000 from his then four-year-old son Joe. Lenzo was making face jugs steeped in Southern tradition when his son asked whether he could stick all kinds of stuff into Lenzo’s ceramic heads. He could and in the process set his father on a course that would result in highly embellished, at times frightening ceramic figures and faces adorned with found and created objects sticking in and out of bodies and faces that are at times unrecognizable as the face jugs from which they originate. The adornments range from ceramic shards to found or purchased porcelains dolls, animals, pipe heads, trains, shoes, roosters or Virgin Mary statues and snakes, leaves, sticks and other things that Lenzo makes himself. For its June exhibition, if ART Gallery will show 22 ceramic sculptures that Lenzo and his son, the now 19-year-old Joe Scotchie-Lenzo, created together in 2000–2002. The exhibition, Peter Lenzo & Joe Scotchie-Lenzo: Origins 2000–2002, will open June 5 and run through June 27. The opening reception is Friday, June 5, 6 – 9 p.m. A gallery talk by Lenzo and Scotchie–Lenzo will be Saturday, June 20, 2:00 p.m. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

“I made my dad famous,” Scotchie-Lenzo used to say about his dad.

“He started saying that right away,” Lenzo says. In truth, Lenzo already had a considerable reputation with other kinds of work – cabinet-like altarpieces filled with found objects and personal mementos. But in the late-1990s, Lenzo no longer could make such pieces as brain damage from a bicycle accident in his youth had caught up with him, and he increasingly suffered from seizures. Working with a table saw and other power tools to create the altars was an accident waiting to happen. As a result, Lenzo had switched to clay exclusively, making Southern-style face jugs. While Lenzo loved making traditional face jugs, he also worried about abandoning the fine art world from which he came. The new work inspired by his four-year-old bridged the gap. “Working with Joe gave me a direction to go in when I didn’t know where to go. I wouldn’t say Joe made me famous, but he made me sane.” Peter Lenzo (b. 1955) is a widely recognized ceramic sculptor with a national profile. The New York City native, who grew up in Detroit, was selected for the 1995 and 1998 South Carolina Triennial exhibitions at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia; the 2011 exhibition Triennial Revisited and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial 2011 and 2013, all at 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia; and Thresholds, a 2003 exhibition of Southeastern art dealing with religion and spirituality that traveled extensively throughout the Southeast. Lenzo’s work is in several museum collections, including at the South Carolina State Museum, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., and the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. His solo exhibitions include those at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art, the European Ceramic Work Center in Den Bosch, The Netherlands, Great American Gallery in Atlanta and Ferrin Contemporary gallery in Massachusetts.

Lenzo and his work have been featured in numerous books, exhibition catalogues and articles about ceramic sculpture and Southern art. They include the Threshold catalogue, 500 Figures In Clay (2005), Robert Hunter’s Ceramics in America (2006) and Poetic Expressions of Mortality: Figurative Ceramics From the Porter–Price Collection (2006). He holds an MFA from Wayne State University in Detroit and used to teach at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. Joe Scotchie-Lenzo (b. 1996) has been making and selling ceramic sculptures off and on since he was four years old, although he hasn’t produced any in three years. One co-production with his dad is in the collection of the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. One of his individual works is in the South Carolina State Museum collection. Scotchie-Lenzo is a native and resident of Columbia, where he is a business major with an interest in retail and clothing at the University of South Carolina.

June 5 – 27, 2015

Artist’s Reception: Friday, June 5, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. Gallery Talk: Saturday, June 20, 2:00 pm

Gallery Hours: Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; & by appointment

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART: (803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, SC 29201

Steven Chapp and Diane Kilgore Condon at if ART Gallery

NOW ON VIEW @ if ART Gallery

STEVEN CHAPP: Running With Crows

&

DIANE KILGORE CONDON: Holding The Songbird

Through January 10, 2015

if ART Gallery presents two simultaneous December-January solo exhibitions of paintings and prints by two Upstate South Carolina artists, Easley’s Steven Chapp and Greenville’s Diane Kilgore Condon. Both exhibitions, Running With Crows and Holding The Songbird respectively, opened last week and will run through January 10, 2014.

Steven Chapp, owner of Black Dog Press, will conduct a drypoint workshop at if ART on Saturday, January 10, 2015, 10:00 am ­– 4:00 pm. During the workshop, participants will create their own drypoint plates, which will be printed by Chapp at the end of the workshop. Enrollment will be limited to 10 participants; cost is $65 per participant. Those interested should contact the gallery to enroll.

Both artists typically include a lot of animal imagery. Chapp has a go-to-bird, the crow, which features in many of his monotypes, drypoints, linocuts, woodcuts and other prints as a metaphor for humans. Kilgore Condon creates in her oil paintings fantastical but technically often possible scenes featuring birds of many kinds, bees, deer, hare, geese, dogs and other animals.

            Chapp (B. 1952) is a native of Kansas City, Mo. For three decades, he has been a steady presence on the South Carolina art scene, especially in the Upstate. Best known as a expert printmaker, Chapp has shown in galleries, art centers and museums throughout the region, including the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Burroughs and Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C., the Spartanburg (S.C.) Art Museum and the Pickens County (S.C.) Museum of Art and History. He worked on two projects with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in Kansas City in 1978 and Key Biscayne, Fla., in 1983. In 2011 and 2014, Chapp organized Shifting Plates I and II, traveling exhibitions of works by South Carolina printmakers. Chapp has retired as a teacher for the Greenville County School District. He holds an MFA in printmaking and drawing from Clemson University and a BFA from Appalachian State University.

Kilgore Condon (b. 1964) is the owner of ArtBomb Studios. ArtBomb, established in 2001, launched what is now Greenville’s most important arts district, the Pendleton Street Art District. The Wassau, Wis., native was raised in the East and Midwest and in 1983 moved from Florida to Greenville to attend Bob Jones University. There she studied with Carl Blair and in 1988 received a BA in Fine Arts. Kilgore Condon is among the South Carolina Upstate’s most prolific and respected painters.

Drypoint Workshop Steven Chapp:

Sat., Jan. 10, 2015, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Gallery Hours: Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.;

& by appointment

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St.

Columbia, SC 29201