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February Issue 2006
Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia, SC, Features New Works by Laura Spong - at 80
Opening
a year of celebration for Columbia, SC, artist Laura Spong, if
ART, International Fine Art Services of Columbia presents Laura
Spong at 80: Warming The Chill Wind With Celebration. The
exhibition, on view from Feb. 17 - 28, 2006, will present new
or not previously shown work at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in
Columbia's downtown Vista district. The show will consist of 50
new paintings by Spong, who turns 80 years old in February.
"The abstractions that characterize Spong's ongoing body of work have always been within her," Teri Tynes, visual art critic, writes about Spong's lyrical abstract paintings. "There was never an early phase of representation or a foray into explicit figuration." Spong approaches the paintings like a riddle, Tynes adds. "Often the choice of color comes first and then the first marks. The rest becomes the solution to what works best with the established marks, but she feels her way through the painting intuitively, never intellectually."
In 1957, after she had
joined the Columbia Artists' Guild, Spong won with J. Bardin and
George W. Gunther the guild's annual exhibition. As a novice painter,
she beat out the work of local, even regional mainstays such as
Gil Petroff, Catherine Rembert, and Dorothy and Edmund Yaghjian.
The prize was a three-person show at the Columbia Museum of Art.
"I couldn't believe that I was in the show, that I got recognition,"
Spong says now, "but I didn't realize, looking back, how
unusual it would have been to be in a show like that with university
professors and professional artists." Spong also made juror
Lamar Dodd's cut for that year's Guild of South Carolina Artists
exhibition. There she was in more heady company that included
Sigmund Abeles, Carl Blair, William Halsey, Willard Hirsch, David
Van Hook, Nell Lafaye and Corrie McCallum.
Three years later, she won an award at the state guild show. In
1961, Spong was once again a Columbia Artists' Guild winner, earning
another Columbia Museum show. "But I didn't know enough to
be impressed with the company I was keeping," she says.
In the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s, Spong's art production came in fits and starts. Taking
care of her six children prevented a consistent art career, as
did the need to work full-time after her husband died in 1973.
In the late 1980s, when she was in her early 60s, Spong decided
to be a full-time artist. In 1991 she got a studio at Vista Studios,
the studio complex in downtown Columbia's Vista district.
Her life as a working artist took off. Spong became a regular
at statewide and regional art exhibitions, frequently winning
awards. Local media paid attention to her, favorably. She had
solo exhibitions in Columbia and elsewhere in South Carolina and
at Vanderbilt University. She was invited to join galleries in
Columbia and elsewhere in South Carolina, Charlotte, NC, and Atlanta,
GA.
"Some
35 years after her first successful but brief burst onto the Columbia
art scene as a novice among some of the area's most legendary
artists," Wim Roefs of if ART says, "Spong's halting
career came to bloom among artists many decades younger than her."
The exhibition will be accompanied by a 32-page catalogue with 14 color plates as well as essays by Roefs, visual art critic Teri Tynes and Robin Waites, former chief curator at the South Carolina State Museum and the executive director of the Historic Columbia Foundation.
Simultaneously, another
Spong exhibit will take place at Columbia's Carol Saunders Gallery.
The exhibit, called, Evolution, will present 20 paintings
from the 1989 - 2005 period, most of them from the past three
years. The show runs from Feb. 16 - Mar. 18, 2006.
Also in February, Spong will be in a two-person show at Vinson
Gallery in Decatur, GA. In July, the University of South Carolina's
McMaster Gallery will mount a retrospective of her career.
Gallery 80808 will be
open during this exhibit, Mon.-Fri., 11am-7pm; Sat., 11am-5pm;
Sun., 1-5pm or by appt.
For more information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings,
call the gallery at 803/252-6134 or at (www.gallery80808vistastudios.com).
Call Carol Saunders Gallery at 803/256-3046.
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