Carolina Arts Unleashed

The Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC, Invites You to Déjà View Day - July 18, 2009. Wait! That sounds familiar. Actually, it’s “Déjà View Day: Rediscover The Museum Collection”. On July 18, 2009, from 10am-2pm, the Columbia Museum of Art will proudly unveils its art collection in newly re-installed galleries for the first time since 1998. Experience 1,000 years in a new light! Enjoy gallery talks, slide-illustrated lectures, new cell phone tours and hands-on art projects for the family! And, it’s all free - admission, lectures, activities - everything. That means you’ll have plenty of money to spend at the Museum’s Gift Shop.

The Museum went through a major redesign for the recent blockbuster exhibit, Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales, which attracted over 46,000 people to the Museum.

The day’s schedule is: at 10am - Ribbon Cutting and Opening Words from elected officials and executive director Karen Brosius; 10:30am - Passport to Art open studio drop-in for families; 11am - American Art lecture by Dr. Todd Herman, chief curator and curator of European Arts; noon - Gallery Talk: Highlights from the Collection (paintings) by Dr. Todd Herman; and at 1pm - Gallery Talk: Highlights from the Collection (decorative arts) by Brian Lang, associate curator of decorative arts.

Say, did you notice there is only 30 minutes between Opening Words by elected officials - good luck with that.

As an added bonus, photography and filming inside the Museum will also be permitted. You can’t do that everyday in a museum.

While you are there you can also check out the exhibitions: Cleve Gray: Man and Nature, featuring a 30-year retrospective of noted American painter Cleve Gray, on view through Sept. 27, 2009, and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg: 20th Century Masters in the Collection, on view through Oct. 4, 2009.

And, like most episodes of Déjà View, admission will be free again on Sunday July 19, 2009, from noon-5pm.

The re-installation of the galleries is made possible by a leadership gift from the City of Forest Acres, with additional funding provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Lectures are part of the Humanities American Lecture Series sponsored by the Humanities Council of South Carolina.

And, as always, if you are traveling to Columbia from somewhere else, I would also recommend that you visit some of the commercial galleries in Columbia. You can find info about them in our SC Commercial Gallery listings on Carolina Arts Online.

And, in case you were wondering - Yes, the Museum is fully air-conditioned. That’s hours free of that Carolina sun.

The Columbia Museum of Art is located at 1515 Main Street in downtown Columbia, SC. For further information call 803/799-2810 or visit (www.columbiamuseum.org).

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I just finished loading up some info to our website at Carolina Arts Online. For years we’ve been receiving e-mails about all sorts of things going on in the visual art community of the Carolinas. This is stuff we don’t and wouldn’t have room for in the printed version of the paper - like the results of juried shows which have taken place. These pages are very popular with artists. They like seeing their names as winning awards or being included in juried show or to see who got in when they didn’t. We have these results going back ten years.

Then there is our ART NEWS section. It carries all kinds of info about the visual arts. Here you can find out info about lectures being offered, dated call for enties for juried show, dated opportunities (for all kinds of things) and news about artists, art administrators, and arts organizations. We get this kind of info on a regular basis and we try to post it as soon as we can, but it does take a backseat to the printed paper. And, sometimes people don’t give us much time to let you know about things before the deadline is up.

We also receive info about art groups’ meetings, fundraisers, and tours.

I just wanted some of our blog readers to know a little bit more about what can be found on our website. Some of you may have known about this, but some may not have known. So, now you do.

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