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June Issue 2003
School's Out: Emerging Artists of the Southeast Continues Through June 28, 2003 at City Art Gallery in Columbia., SC
City Art Gallery Director Teri Tynes explains the genesis of this exhibit:
"Last fall, in my desire to identify talented emerging artists, I asked studio art faculty at colleges and universities from around the region to recommend recent graduates who showed exceptional promise. Many of these art professors passed on their lists, overwhelming me with a large pool of candidates for this exhibit. In addition, this past February, while attending the annual Art Papers auction in Atlanta, I was introduced to over 250 artists from Georgia. I jotted down several names in my journal as worthy of follow-up, often based on only one image. The day after my Atlanta visit, I drove to Savannah, where I saw an exciting group exhibit (for Artista Vista, now on display across the street at 1223 Lincoln). There I also met Mary Hartman who I asked to send me a portfolio in anticipation of showing her work here. The resulting exhibit, School's Out: Emerging Artists of the Southeast, is in part collectively juried and also based on my judgments as an art critic and Gallery Director at City Art in Columbia, SC.
In what I jokingly refer to as my "American Idol" search for talented visual artists, I wanted to bring new artists to new audiences. And for our art collectors, there's the thrill of collecting work by artists early in their careers, artists who will most likely achieve considerable recognition in the art world several years from now. Who now, for example, does not wish he or she would have bought a painting by Tarleton Blackwell (one of City Art's premier artists) ten years ago? As he is still only in his mid forties and creating even stronger art, there's still ample reasons to collect his work. I chose the individuals for this exhibit for aesthetic reasons, but their professionalism, drive, and body of work also suggested to me exciting futures.
An important secondary motivation for this show emerges out of a desire to build a larger arts culture for Columbia, one that puts the city at the middle of geographical crossroads - Charlotte/Rock Hill to the north, Savannah to the south, Charleston to the southeast, and Atlanta to the west. We're almost dead center. By extending an invitation to artists from around the region, we can open up a larger art world for people here. Artists from places like Chapel Hill, NC, and Athens, GA, can begin to think of Columbia as an exciting visual arts center. The concept of regional art is thus expanded.
And what a surprise to find how the concept of regional art is shifting! School's Out: Emerging Artists of the Southeast includes artists born in Moscow (Anya Belkina, now on a tenure track job at Duke University), Bath, England (Angus N.M. Galloway, now a resident of Atlanta but who moved to Durham, NC, in his pre-teens when his father began a medical residency there), and northern China (Bo Zhang, who also lives in Atlanta, and whose parents are retired professors of traditional landscape painting in Beijing). While some of the artists here have grown up in southern culture, others have not and bring to us the realization and acknowledgment of an increasingly global culture. It's exciting to see on a visual level, for example, how the sculpture by southerner Jason Blalock - inspired as it is by history and archaeology - works so well in a room shared by artists born on different continents thousands of miles away."
For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings, call the gallery at 803/252-3613 or on the web at (www.cityartonline.com).
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