Feature Articles

June Issue 1999

 

Works by Blue Sky at Med Deli

 

This year, in celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the unveiling of the mural Tunnelvision which has brought hope and inspiration to so many thousands of visitors to our state, the artist, Blue Sky, will bring a new show of paintings from his travels in Europe to the Med Deli, West of the Ashley, Charleston, SC, a city where the power and beauty of his work is rarely seen.

Born in Columbia, SC, in 1938, Blue Sky earned his master's degree from the University of South Carolina in 1971. After studying at the Art Student's League in New York City and designing for Cushing and Nevelle, a prestigious Park Avenue design firm for a year, he returned to South Carolina to paint as a muralist and landscape artist.

Sky's relatively low profile career exploded into the national spotlight with the painting of his famous mural Tunnelvision in 1975. A two page spread in People Magazine called the fifty foot tall mural in downtown Columbia a "phantasmagoria," and images of the tunnel circulated world wide. Its success spawned a wave of murals by other aspiring artists all across the eastern seaboard.
Sky's paintings have been exhibited in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Boston, and numerous other museums and galleries in the eastern United States.

He has been honored with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the General Services Administration, the Awards in the Visual Arts, and the Federal Highway Administration, among others. His work has been featured in People Magazine, National Geographic, Readers Digest, House and Garden, Southern Living, The National Enquirer, Newsweek, and Weekly Reader. Internationally it has been seen in the London Daily Mirror, The Scotsman, and in Mexico and Germany. Over a dozen books have documented his work.

Blue Sky's work is in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., IBM, Wachovia Bank, the Federal Land Bank, the White House, Federal Reserve Banks, Nationsbank, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the South Carolina State Museum, McKissick Museum, the Columbia Museum of Art, Carolina First Bank, the R.J. Reynolds Company, Price Waterhouse LLP, and numerous other corporate and private collections.

The show European Revelations will be exhibited through July 24, 1999.

For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call Tricia Hitopoulos at 843/722-6974.

 

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