Upstate sculpture artist recognized with South Arts State Fellowship
Cash prize, shot at Southern Prize among benefits
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Michael Webster | Signal | crystal tableware, utility pole, threaded steel rods, walnut wood | Provided photo; click to enlarge.[/caption]
As part of their Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Visual Arts program, South Arts is pleased to announce the 2023 State Fellows for Visual Arts—a cohort of nine visual artists across various disciplines and career levels, who represent the Southeastern region.
Each of the awardees are provided a $5,000 state fellowship and an opportunity to win the annual Southern Prize for Visual Arts, which will be announced in late summer 2023.
Upstate sculpture artist Michael Webster is South Carolina's fellow for the 2023 cycle.
As a response to a gap in regional funding opportunities for individual artists in the South, the Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Visual Arts were created in acknowledgment of the important role artists play in the wellbeing of a region’s culture. Now in its 7th year, South Arts’ State Fellowships for Visual Arts are awarded annually to one artist in each of the nine states in South Arts’ region: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee.
Launched in 2017, the program aims to empower artists with visual narratives that speak to deeper truths about the perils and hardships as well as the opportunities for optimism and justice in daily life in the south and beyond. Spanning the diverse scope of visual arts, the program supports artists across disciplines and categories, including craft, drawing, experimental, painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, and multidisciplinary.
The 2023 cohort of fellows—selected by a national jury—vary in their individual artistic practices and disciplines. Taken as a whole, though, their work explores thematic narratives of resilience, physical disability, and identity, along with the motif of location expressed through environmental and social challenges.
“We are so excited to celebrate the 2023 State Fellows for Visual Arts,” said Susie Surkamer, president and CEO of South Arts. “Their work is a deep reflection of our time, powerfully telling their individual stories of immigration status, disability, race, sense of place and more. Each state fellow has the talent to convey so much through their creativity, and they collectively build toward our better understanding of artists in the South.”
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Michael Webster | Set it down right there | 3D modeled and printed PLA plastic, Thonet #18 chair | Provided image; click to enlarge.[/caption]
The 2023 State Fellows for Visual Arts are:
- 2023 Alabama Fellow for Visual Arts: Kelly Bryant | Drawing | Auburn, AL
- 2023 Florida Fellow for Visual Arts: Chris Friday | Multidisciplinary | Goulds, FL
- 2023 Georgia Fellow for Visual Arts: Victoria Dugger | Multidisciplinary | Athens, GA
- 2023 Kentucky Fellow for Visual Arts: Rachel Moser | Multidisciplinary | Lexington, KY
- 2023 Louisiana Fellow for Visual Arts: Carlie Trosclair | Sculpture | New Orleans, LA
- 2023 Mississippi Fellow for Visual Arts: Alexis McGrigg | Multidisciplinary | Bryam, MS
- 2023 North Carolina Fellow for Visual Arts: Nadia Meadows | Sculpture | Charlotte, NC
- 2023 South Carolina Fellow for Visual Arts: Michael Webster | Sculpture | Drayton, SC
- 2023 Tennessee Fellow for Visual Arts: Beizar Aradini | Craft | Nashville, TN
About South Arts
Good morning! 
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As the day nears for the 2023 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: five receiving the 
He serves as the writer-in-residence at the Columbia Museum of Art. McManus founded Split P Soup, a creative writing outreach program that places writers in schools and communities across South Carolina, and former director of the creative writing program at the Tri-District Arts Consortium that serves Columbia area schools. He coedited a collection of writing responding to historical photographs from South Carolina archives.
He writes of the Carolinas’ semi-rural and sometimes repressive culture, often including the haunting presence of the imagined Ireland that exists in family stories and immigrant memory. His work explores themes of loss, faith, denial, and rebellion, offering both a narrative of hope and a heroics of failure. His poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and StorySouth, as well as anthologies of Southern and Irish-American writers.
McManus earned his master’s in poetry and his doctorate in rhetoric and composition from the University of South Carolina. Now an English professor at USC Sumter, he teaches creative writing, Irish literature, and Southern literature. He is division chair of both arts and letters and humanities and social sciences and director of the school’s Center for Oral Narrative.
McManus is the author of five collections of poetry. His first was selected for the S.C. Poetry Book Prize and published in 2007. Since, he published three more collections and a fifth, Last Saturday in America, will be published by Hub City Press in 2024.
Emily H. Meggett, 1932-2023[/caption]
Meggett grew up with her family on her grandparent’s farm, where they grew a wide variety of vegetables and also kept livestock for butchering. Meggett learned to cook traditional Gullah Geechee dishes with the ingredients grown on the farm, standing next to her grandmother, Elizabeth Major Hutchinson, whom she called “mama.”
Meggett learned more formal cooking in 1954 when she took a job at a house on Edisto Island owned by the Dodges, a white family from Rockport, Maine, who were in the oil business. Ms. Julia W. Brown, a Gullah woman, was the head chef of their family kitchen, and she was in charge of teaching Meggett how to prepare dishes correctly. Meggett recalled Ms. Julia telling her “You do it right or you do it over,” and true to her word, Ms. Julia would throw anything that wasn’t up to her standards straight into the trash can.
Meggett married Edisto native Jessie Meggett, with whom she had 10 children. They built a four-room home on one acre of land where she cooked for everyone in her family, and many more as she remembered, likely more than a hundred children in the area. Meggett woke up around two o’clock in the morning with inspiration of what to cook the next day. She cooked every day for her family, her neighbors, and anyone who might need a meal. When you saw the small door to her kitchen open you know you’ll be fed, no money needed and no questions asked.
Meggett’s family and friends encouraged her throughout her life to share her recipes in a cookbook, but the idea perplexed her as she had never used one herself. But eventually her friend Becky Smith convinced her to start the long process. Every day Smith would visit Meggett where they would work on one recipe at a time, figuring out measurements, and documenting the process.
In April of 2022, Meggett’s cookbook, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking was published. The book, which was written with the help of food writer Kayla Stewart and oral historian Trelani Michelle, quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Meggett received numerous accolades for her work, including the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from President Joe Biden.
Biography written by Amanda Malloy, McKissick Museum
After graduating in 1988 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, she adventured up to Alaska for several years with her husband. With the diagnoses of autoimmune diseases, including Sjogren’s Syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, and Reynaud’s disease, Catherine found herself unable to pursue her art aspirations. Although affected by chronic illness, she started the next stage of her life as a homemaker and a mother in South Carolina while battling liver, kidney, and digestive diseases.
When Catherine entered her fifties, her health progressively worsened. Even though her doctors diligently treated symptom after symptom, they were unable to pinpoint the cause. As months turned into years, Catherine isolated herself from her family and community. Her only solace was the woods behind her house.
“Witnessing the changing of the seasons was inspiring to me. A dead, fallen tree might find itself home to a luscious carpet of moss. A small trickle of water during the summer might turn into a moving stream come fall,” Catherine remembers. “Nature had a way of rejuvenating itself, which brought me hope that my body and spirit might find itself revitalized during a new season.”
Everywhere Catherine looked in nature, she saw an organic shape that she had first started exploring visually while in art school. Described by others as visually similar to a nest, fruit, seed, cell, oyster, egg, or womb, she realized that she identified this nascent and amorphous shape with hope and possibility. She picked up the paintbrush once again to explore these thoughts and emotions. After a nearly 30-year hiatus from creating art, during the throes of COVID-19, Catherine resumed her art career.
At first, she faced more troubles than she expected.
“Because I had been afflicted with a series of strokes due to cardiac issues, my early works in 2018 and 2019 are full of frustration: the paintbrush in my hand would not go where I wanted it to go; blind spots in my vision meant that I would paint over my work accidentally.” Despite this, Catherine persevered and continued to explore nature’s promises of restoration in her art.
In 2020, Catherine spent over 40 days in the hospital after open heart surgery. Following that, the long process of recovery began. Catherine started painting almost every day, finding her art an integral part of her physical and spiritual recovery. Beginning in 2021, her paintings took on a new and vivid perspective of nature, filled with bright colors and enthusiasm.
Over the last two years, Catherine's works have been featured in shows at the Piccolo Spoleto Juried Art Show, the Trask Gallery of the National Arts Club, South Carolina Juried Art Show, Southworks National Juried Art Exhibition, the Rocky Mount National Juried Art Show, the Macon Arts Gallery, the Spartanburg Public Library, the South Carolina State Fair, and the Artists’ Guild of Spartanburg, among others. She is a member of the National Association for Women Artists (NAWA), NAWA’s South Carolina chapter, and the Spartanburg Artists’ Guild.
When asked about her expectations for her future art career, Catherine simply hopes that her artwork can encourage others. “Due to the miracle of modern medicine, people are asking themselves: What happens when I can no longer physically be who I used to be? I have frequently asked this question myself.”
Instead of allowing emotions to fester into fears, Catherine takes this insecurity about her health and turns it into something productive. She explores the emotions of recovery, faith, change, and growth. Her works are a testament to the healing power of art, as well as the tenacity of the human spirit.
Oil painter 
Among his choreography are classic and contemporary favorites, from The Nutcracker, Coppelia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Carmina Burana to The Hobbit, West Side Story, The Little Mermaid, The Wizard of Oz, and An American in Paris. Some of these have been performed at Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Columbia, Greenville, Greenwood, and Rutherford County, North Carolina.
Under Agudelo’s direction in 2012, Ballet Spartanburg formed a resident professional company comprised of a diverse group of dancers from across the world. For 10 years, it has performed from Spartanburg to North Carolina, Texas, and Las Vegas, in the process staging more than 85 presentations of his choreography.
A native of Colombia, Agudelo began his training with the Atlantic Foundation for the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale under the direction of Ruth Petrinovic. He received a scholarship to study at the Harkness Ballet School in New York City and danced with the Israel Classic Ballet in Tel Aviv. He toured the world dancing with the International Ballet de Caracas under the direction of former Harkness Ballet dancer Vicente Nebrada. Alvin Ailey coached him in Ailey’s ballet, The River. He also danced with Ballet Hispanico of New York under the direction of Tina Ramirez.
Mr. Agudelo received the 2021 Civitan Servant’s Heart Award for the community of Spartanburg and the 2022 Spartanburg Citizen of the Year awarded by the Spartanburg Kiwanis Club. In 2018, Ballet Spartanburg was awarded the S.C. Governor’s Award for the Arts in the organization category.
Through the residency and its theme of “Land and Justice,” Farris will engage with the history and heritage of Penn Center, located on St. Helena Island, and with its surrounding community in the 
Farris was appointed to the residency by a committee including members of cultural and artistic organizations connected to Penn Center and led by Deloris Pringle, chair of Penn Center’s board of trustees.
“Amiri Geuka Farris’s experience as a preservationist, educator, musical performer, videographer, and cultural curator places his bold and brilliant art at the intersection of people, place, and time,” said Penn board member Tia Powell Harris, vice president for education and community engagement at New York City Center, who served on the selection committee.
“His art is often rooted in the legacy of the Gullah Geechee heritage and his desire to uplift the tenacity of the Gullah people,” Harris said. “We look forward with great anticipation to Amiri’s residency at the historic Penn Center and to the dynamic visual stories that will emerge from his interactions with our supportive staff and board, a welcoming community, and the indomitable spirit of the elders past and present, who have served as stewards of the land.”
The Culture and Community project is funded by a $1 million 2021 grant to the Willson Center by the Mellon Foundation. Barbara McCaskill, professor of English and associate academic director of the Willson Center, and Nicholas Allen, Baldwin Professor in Humanities and director of the Willson Center, are the grant’s principal investigators and serve on the project’s steering committee with Pringle, Valerie Babb, Andrew Mellon Professor of Humanities at Emory University, and interim Penn Center executive director Bernie Wright. Angela Dore, the project’s research coordinator, provides day-to-day oversight of the project’s programs.
The beginning of Farris’s residency launches the partnership’s second year of public programs, which will include two 
If you live in Columbia, your next cup of coffee could come with a side of inspiration.
He learned with his family who would sing on Sundays and during family reunions. With little formal education, Rembert started working at the age of 13, plowing with his own mule all day with his father. At age 20 he married his wife Mabel and joined the church that he still attends today, Unionville AME Church in Mayesville.
Rembert was offered the job of assistant Sunday school superintendent at the church and was eventually promoted to superintendent. He held the position for 13 years before leaving to drive trucks, allowing him to see 28 different states. He continues to work today doing lawn services.
Rembert worked hard at his professions throughout his life, and he always sang. He has 10 living siblings with whom he grew up singing. When they were younger, they formed a gospel choir of up to 21 members at one point. They would travel to sing at a different church every Sunday evening in Lee and Sumter counties.
Singing is one of his greatest joys and an experience that connects him to his family and his faith, but his gift was threatened in 1998 after receiving a serious cancer diagnosis. One month after leaving the hospital from surgery he was diagnosed with another form of cancer and returned immediately for mouth and throat surgery. After that, there was a possibility that he would never talk, much less sing, again.
Yet at 85 years and 25 years since that diagnosis, he still sings twice a month at his church and as often as he can with his siblings. Rembert credits the power of prayer from his friends and family for his recovery eventually testifying at his church just three months after surgery, with no small contribution from his attitude and tenacity.
Written by Amanda Malloy, McKissick Museum