Orangeburg FAC hosts rural creatives exhibition
Creative Connectors: The Rural Experience
- Wednesday March 8-April 21, 2023
Visual artists, who reside and work in places where fields and trees outnumber roads and street signs, create works that are uninfluenced by trends or movements. And, they may not have much in common with other rural creators. What they often do share is an artistic expression evolved from contemplation and observations that imagination in solitude can produce.
Imagination in solitude is what the six artists whose works make up
Creative Connectors: The Rural Experience have in common. Even though their styles, media and themes are vastly different, the connectors are their rural expressions. The excitement and delight these juxtaposed pieces bring to this exhibition communicates the same harmony the six artists have for each other and the work they have produced.
They came together from across the state to bring their contributing collection to the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center:
Terrance Washington, from Barnwell County,
Ian Thomas Dillinger, from Colleton County,
James E. Wilson, III, from Bamberg County,
Robert Matheson, from Newberry County.
Ernest Lee is from Richland County.
Rajasekhar Yarraguntla teaches in Barnwell County.
“Seeing the artists greet each other with such warmth, helping one another with final preparations before hanging the works, listening to their lively conversations, it quickly became obvious that the Arts Center has a very special show by these confident, energetic artists,” said Vivian Glover, director of community arts and development. “They have an air of excitement around them. Combined, they pull together something current and significant out of South Carolina. And this dynamic came from rural perspectives.”
Portions of this exhibition were previously shown at the Aiken Center for the Arts. For this show, several new works were added by artists, including all the works by Robert Matheson. The invitation from the Orangeburg County Fine Arts Center was summed up by Dillinger. “It was encouraging to the group. To have another opportunity to be shown. It inspired me to make new work to be seen.” The exhibition, located at 649 Riverside Drive, Orangeburg, 29115, opens on Wednesday March 8, 2023, and runs through April. 21, 2023. The Artists’ Reception is Wednesday, March 15, from 6-8 p.m., and is free and open to the public. For additional information, call 803.536.4074 or email
vglover@orangeburgarts.org.
Creative Connectors: The Rural Experience, as an exhibition, is supported and has been encouraged by the South Carolina Arts Commission. The program is funded in part by grants from USDA- Rural Development as well as from a Neighborworks America grant won by the Center for a Better South
.
Ernest Lee is probably the best known of the artists having honed his own reputation by painting and selling his pieces in a devised “outdoor street corner gallery.” His iconic dancing chickens are popular and recognizable. For
Creative Connectors, he has brought a variety of less seen themes, where his masterly use of colors and visual perspective show a greater, more reflective talent. “Most people know me as the chicken artist. This time I wanted to show my other paintings.
Rainbow in the Sky and
Deep in the South, two of Lee’s other works are included in the show. “Painting is a privilege and a blessing,” says Lee, who has painted all his life.
James Wilson, III, has been a photographer for over 25 years capturing images in deeply rural settings that strike him as unique or as natural phenomena, which he regards as an experience akin to reverence. “I look for something different, uncommon. Something that you won’t see again.” He includes the solitary and long-deserted homes he spots while driving in Pickens County. “Back in the day most people lived in small houses alongside a road. Now they are dilapidated. Ten or twenty years from now they will be gone,” Wilson observes, adding that they are architecturally significant. “Their structures say something about the people who lived there. I try to imagine those lives were during their time, to appreciate how people used their homes.”
From a child, Wilson was entranced by clouds and skies. Many of his images illustrate his awe for the changing formations and colors. “I’ve never seen anything as rare as the shifting shapes and colors found in the sky.” His collection consists of images capturing light and hues in the heavens not only in rural environments, but anywhere he travels.
Travel is what
Rajasekhar Yarraguntla did leaving India in 2014 for the United States finding himself an educator in the most rural sections of Mississippi and Louisiana, before accepting a teaching position in Barnwell County. Still teaching in a remote area, where the nearest stores and businesses are miles away, he is as unique as his art, with his use of flower patterns and colors. Yarraguntla began teaching himself art during his own school days. “I like to experiment with natural materials and to represent nature in my work,” he says of his art, which was recognized by India’s Ministry of Education. “I apply different materials like dried grass sticks and magazines upon acrylics.”
Elegant Beauty on hardboard showing an Indian woman styling her hair, uses natural grass culms collected in India, with different precision cuts and colors to form her image.
Coming from a culture with thousands of years cultivating the arts in paintings, sculptors, pottery, and textiles, Yarraguntla, is self-assured experimenting with modern, abstract compositions including those of Hindu gods like “Ganesha” and “OM.” He is intertwining traditional and sacred art, from his perspective of the past and present now influenced by his years in the rural South.
Terrance Washington, also an educator, has roots entrenched in Blackville. His paintings are a tribute to his affection and devoted appreciation of the artistic beauty his sees. That same sensitivity takes measure of the world from his homebase, especially these parts of the world that can be perilous for a young Black man. Living in rural domesticity doesn’t divert his attention from watchfulness nor the urge to articulate the continued struggle for justice. His works managed to convey aesthetic messaging using rich colors and defining lines. “I see myself as a modern-day Impressionist illustrating what is going on in the world around me.”
Washington says he wants to create works that evoke conversations, that prompt people to think especially about the role of art in his time. His colors are bold and alive, and subtle and intimate at the same time.
Love 44, Grove Like That, and
Woman in Thought, who figure is mother, grandmother, sister, wife, proud but contemplating, draws the viewer into the past and present themes in his work.
Robert Matheson digital images celebrate the present but with a broad historical premise that has captured his imagination since moving to Newberry from Utah, via California, becoming engrossed in the history of South Carolina. He agrees that South Carolina, as a state, may have the most significant places and fascinating people of the 50 states. His current focus is the Revolutionary War battles and in particular a battle in Orangeburg. “Fortunately, there were no causalities, but it was a significant battle,” observes Matheson a digital artist. Digitizing prints for his contribution to the exhibition “really pushed the limits of my digital art skills while telling the story of the Surrender of Orangeburg, which to my knowledge has never been illustrated before.” He is excited about introducing a key element of the war for independence to the area. “I hope the community enjoys it and learn a bit about Orangeburg from interpretation. I know I did.”
Matheson, who describes his work as “using technology as the paintbrush” noted that the title of the series is
Re-Imagining the Surrender of Orangeburg. “I trained an Ai to blend a sketch in my style with descriptions of the American Revolution battle that took place on May 10 and 11, 1781, in Orangeburg.”
Ian Thomas Dillinger from Colleton County creates and actively lives the life of an outdoorsman residing in a rural South Carolina setting. Dillinger makes his home beside the Edisto River in Walterboro. A former educator, Ian now farms, does carpentry, and paints inspired by the rural decay and natural beauty of the river and its inhabitants. He is known for his reuse of natural and man-made materials in the creation of his work.
Stop Y’all,” a graphic representation of the reappropriation of cast away materials and common place signage in the rural South. “I hope visitors to the Arts Center are intrigued by the experimental techniques I use to demonstrate how art and nature can ingeniously and harmoniously make a statement.”
Mullen is scheduled to give two public gallery talks:
In 2020, the SCAC honored Mullen's significant body of work with the Governor's Award for the Arts in the lifetime achievement category.
Some notable items for your attention as we close out another week...
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Provided photo.[/caption]
Emily Meggett | Edisto Island | Artist, Gullah Geechee Chef
Gullah Geechee chef Emily H. Meggett, known by many as “M.P.,” was born in 1932 on Edisto Island, a place she calls “heaven on earth.” Meggett grew up on her grandparents’ farm, where they grew a wide variety of vegetables and kept livestock for butchering. Meggett learned traditional Gullah Geechee dishes standing next to her grandmother using ingredients grown on the farm. She honed her skills in the kitchen of wealthy white family’s Edisto Island house. Miss Julia, the Gullah head chef, had a mantra of “You do it right or you do it over.” Anything that wasn’t up to Ms. Julia’s standards went straight to the trash. Meggett married Edisto native Jessie Meggett and they built a four-room home on one acre of land for their 11 children. From there, she cooked for everyone in her family and, as she recalls, likely more than a hundred area children. Meggett’s family and friends long encouraged her to share her recipes in a cookbook, a novel concept to someone who never used one herself. She eventually relented, and a friend visited her daily to work on one recipe at a time. In April of 2022, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking was published and quickly became a New York Times bestseller. Among Meggett’s accolades is the President’s Lifetime Achievement Award from President Joe Biden. To this day, she wakes around two in the morning with inspiration of what to cook that day for all comers. When the door to her kitchen is open, you know you’ll be fed—no money needed, and no questions asked.
[caption id="attachment_52744" align="alignright" width="250"]
Credit: Amanda Malloy/McKIssick Museum[/caption]
Hampton Rembert | Bishopville | Artist, Gospel Singing
Raised on a sharecropper farm in Bishopville, 85-year-old Hampton Rembert has been singing gospel from a very young age. He learned with his family who would sing on Sundays and during family reunions. When he and 10 living siblings were younger, they formed a gospel choir of up to 21 members at one point that would sing at a different church every Sunday evening in Lee and Sumter counties. Rembert worked hard at his professions throughout his life. From working at his church to driving trucks through 28 states, and the lawn services he performs today, he always sang. Singing is one of his greatest joys and an experience that connects him to his family and his faith. His talent was threatened in 1998 with a prostate cancer diagnosis. Rembert had surgery in February, but one month after leaving the hospital, he was diagnosed with oral cancer and went back immediately for mouth and throat surgery. He knew that there was a possibility that he would never talk or sing again, a fear confirmed by his doctors. But Rembert credits the power of prayer from his friends and family for allowing him to testify at his church three months after surgery, and while that might be true, his attitude and tenacity played no small part. It has been 25 years since that diagnosis, and he still sings twice a month at his church and as often as he can with his siblings.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nigel Redden (Special Award) retired as the general director of Spoleto Festival USA in 2021 having rejoined the festival in October 1995 after having previously served as its general manager from 1986 to 1991. Redden was director of the Lincoln Center Festival from 1998 to 2017. He has also served as executive director of the Santa Fe Opera (1991-1995), artistic consultant to Philadelphia’s American Music Theater Festival (1992-1994), and consultant to the chairperson of the New York International Festival of the Arts (1991-1992). He was director of the National Endowment for the Arts’ dance program from 1981 to 1986 and has served on numerous panels for the NEA, regional arts organizations, and various foundations. He is president of the Spaulding-Paolozzi Foundation and serves on the board of South Arts. In 2001 he was awarded the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters and was promoted to Commandeur in 2019. He has received honorary doctorates from the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina. He is currently the project leader for the Anson African Burial Memorial in Charleston which will honor 36 Africans/African Americans buried in the late 18th century whose bodies were disinterred during the renovation of the Charleston Gaillard Center.
Born and raised in Lexington County, Ray McManus (Artist Category) is frequently active in poetry initiatives across the state. 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 is the author of five collections of poetry. His first was selected for the S.C. Poetry Book Prize and published in 2007 and a fifth, Last Saturday in America, will be published by Hub City Press in 2024. His poems and prose have appeared in numerous journals and 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.
Carlos Agudelo (Individual Category) has been Ballet Spartanburg’s artistic director since 1991. Among his choreography are classic and contemporary favorites; 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. The native of Colombia, Agudelo began his training in Florida 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 and the International Ballet de Caracas. Alvin Ailey coached him in Ailey’s ballet, The River. He also danced with Ballet Hispanico of New York. 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.
Real-world implications led Charleston’s School of Building Arts to become the American College of the Building Arts (Arts in Education Category) in 2003. A 1968, a warning came that American artisans in the traditional building arts were aging out of the job market. As school systems cut traditional crafts training, no new generation was being trained to create or repair, restore, and preserve American architectural, historic, and cultural treasures. Then, owners of historic Lowcountry properties had to look to Europe to find artisans who could repair and restore damage after Hurricane Hugo. A group of Charleston’s preservation leaders created ABCA as a unique higher education experience that fills a gap. ACBA was the first to combine old-world apprenticeship training with a liberal arts core curriculum. ACBA students graduate with the skills to practice their trade and broad liberal arts foundation that allows them to design while leading their fields. They understand not only how to do something, but to think critically within the context of their specialization, manage a business, and communicate effectively with clients. ACBA students have trained through a wide range of community service projects, restoring or creating from the Oval Office back to the Lowcountry.
Making art more inclusive and accessible is a high priority for Aiken Center for the Arts (Organization Category). Staff and board of directors use this lens to make the vision a reality for the 40,000 people who come through its doors yearly. Three galleries change exhibitions every six weeks. ACA staff work to incorporate each exhibition into their ongoing educational programs, making a cohesive experience for the community. ACA provides instruction from local artists and musicians, enabling community members to find a creative voice through lessons, camps, workshops, and classes—with scholarships available. ACA works closely with the Aiken County public schools. A program brings Aiken Head Start 4K students into the gallery, and ACA places authors and artists in schools as the arts that are integrated to connect learning and life. Further, ACA serves individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities in its community. Youth summer workshops and year-round adult workshops provide for the development of communication skills, teamwork, and decision making at no cost to participants, and art experiences relating movement and painting reach the Alzheimer’s/dementia community.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE