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Upstate sculpture artist recognized with South Arts State Fellowship

Cash prize, shot at Southern Prize among benefits

[caption id="attachment_53344" align="aligncenter" width="951"] 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.”
[caption id="attachment_53345" align="alignright" width="225"] 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: This flagship program involves a state-specific prize awarded to artists whose work reflects the highest quality visual arts being created in the South. A national jury selected one winner per eligible state, for a group of nine state fellows, based on artistic excellence that reflects and represents the diversity of the region. The 2023 Southern Prize for Visual Arts winner and finalist, both of whom will be decided by a second jury and receive an additional $25,000 and $10,000 respectively, will be announced and awarded on August 17, 2023 during the opening exhibition and awards ceremony at the Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi. This touring exhibit will feature the works of all nine state fellows and will be on display at the Ohr-O'Keefe through December 13, 2023. In addition to the larger cash prizes, both Southern Prize recipients will receive a two-week residency at The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences in Rabun Gap, Georgia. The Southern Prize and State Fellowship program is supported by Southern First Bank and the Warner Fund, as well as many individual donors. For more information about South Arts and its programming, visit southarts.org.

About South Arts

South Arts advances Southern vitality through the arts. The nonprofit regional arts organization was founded in 1975 to build on the South’s unique heritage and enhance the public value of the arts. South Arts’ work responds to the arts environment and cultural trends with a regional perspective. South Arts offers an annual portfolio of activities designed to support the success of artists and arts providers in the South, address the needs of Southern communities through impactful arts-based programs, and celebrate the excellence, innovation, value and power of the arts of the South. For more information, visit www.southarts.org.

Jason Rapp

Tuning Up: SCAC grantee gets Grammy nomination + Poetry Out Loud finals

Good morning! 

"Tuning Up" is a morning post series where The Hub delivers curated, quick-hit arts stories of interest to readers. Sometimes there will be one story, sometimes there will be several. Get in tune now, and have a masterpiece of a day. And now, in no particular order...

Wooten gets Poetry Ourselves runner-up honors at POL national finals

From the NEA:

The state champions competing at the national finals also had the opportunity to showcase their creativity through an optional competition, Poetry Ourselves. The students could submit an original work of poetry in one of two categories: either a written poem or a video of a spoken poem, both of which were judged by poet Mahogany L. Browne and announced at last night’s National Finals. The winner in the written category is Natasha B. Connolly from Rhode Island. The winner in the spoken category is Stella Wright from Minnesota. The runner-up in the written category is Irene Jiayi Zhong  from Hawai’i. The runner-up in the spoken category is Catherine Wooten from South Carolina. Winning poems are available on the NEA’s website at the links above.

S.C. music professor gets Grammy Award nomination

From Post & Courier reporting (subscription might be required). Eric Schultz (right), clarinetist and assistant music professor at Coastal Carolina University, was nominated for a 2024 Grammy Award in the Music Educator category. He is one of 212 quarterfinalists chosen from among more than 2,000 nominations. The award recognizes current public and private educators teaching kindergarten through college for their contributions to music and maintaining music education in schools. Schultz was a recipient of an FY22 Artists' Business Initiative grant, which he used to produce the album polyglot, set for release later this year.
Got arts news? Remember to submit it to The Hub! Got arts events? Listings are free on the only statewide arts calendar—Arts Daily!

Jason Rapp

2023 S.C. Arts Awards: Ray McManus

Governor's Award: Artist Category

Graphic with white copy on a dark blue background overlaid on granite blocks. The white text reads South Carolina Arts Awards 2023. As the day nears for the 2023 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: five receiving the South Carolina Governor's Awards for the Arts from the South Carolina Arts Commission and two receiving the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, managed jointly by the SCAC and McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina.

Born and raised in Lexington County, Ray McManus 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 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.
The South Carolina Arts Awards are coming live to SCETV on Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 8 p.m. ET. South Carolina ETV, the state’s public educational broadcasting network, will broadcast the awards ceremony through its 11-station TV network that spans the state. Viewers can access the broadcast via livestream on the homepage of SCETV.org; by using a digital antenna; or through cable, satellite, and streaming live TV providers. Further information about accessing SCETV is available here.

Jason Rapp

2023 S.C. Arts Awards: Emily H. Meggett

Folk Heritage Award: Artist Category

Graphic with white copy on a dark blue background overlaid on granite blocks. The white text reads South Carolina Arts Awards 2023. As the day nears for the 2023 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: five receiving the South Carolina Governor's Awards for the Arts from the South Carolina Arts Commission and two receiving the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, managed jointly by the SCAC and McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina.

With deep appreciation, we remember the light and warmth from a well-lived life.

Official Statement from the South Carolina Arts Commission

As has been reported elsewhere, the sad news from Edisto Island last week was that Emily H. Meggett passed away April 21 at the age of 90. Emily Meggett was indeed a cultural treasure who deserves to be known—and remembered fondly—by all South Carolinians. Her generosity and creative spirit were the embodiment of ideals toward which we should all strive. The South Carolina Arts Commission extends sincere condolences to her family and the Gullah Geechee community for their loss. Though she will be recognized with her Folk Heritage Award posthumously, the South Carolina Arts Awards broadcast will nonetheless pay tribute as we remember her consequential life.

Gullah Geechee chef Emily H. Meggett, known by many as “M.P.,” was born on November 19, 1932 on Edisto Island, the place she called “heaven on earth.”

[caption id="attachment_53185" align="alignright" width="275"] 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
The South Carolina Arts Awards are coming live to SCETV on Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 8 p.m. ET. South Carolina ETV, the state’s public educational broadcasting network, will broadcast the awards ceremony through its 11-station TV network that spans the state. Viewers can access the broadcast via livestream on the homepage of SCETV.org; by using a digital antenna; or through cable, satellite, and streaming live TV providers. Further information about accessing SCETV is available here.

Jason Rapp

After three-decade hiatus because of illness, S.C artist returns to art

“Through my artwork, I feel like I am in a unique position to encourage people in their own recovery and healing journeys,” South Carolina Upstate abstract artist Catherine Conrad says.

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.
Catherine Conrad’s conceptual, abstract paintings will be showcased at the Black Creek Arts Council of Darlington County in a month-long solo exhibition entitled Nature Enlightenment. The exhibit will be on display from May 4-June 2, 2023. An opening reception to meet the artist is scheduled for Thursday, May 4, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Submitted material

Stormwater launches BIPOC residency

Announces Columbia oil painter as first resident


BIPOC artists will benefit from a new residency program announced yesterday by Stormwater, a new nonprofit organization started to support "the thriving working artist community in Columbia’s Vista district."

An anonymous donor and matching funds from One Columbia for Arts and Culture will support the one-year residency program, created to reflect the greater art community at Stormwater by building a more inclusive culture that encourages, supports and celebrates diverse voices. Oil painter Malik Greene (right) of Columbia will join Stormwater Studios as the program's inaugural artist-in-residence. The program was developed when long-time resident artist Robert Kennedy moved to Charleston and vacated his studio. With an empty studio came an opportunity to embrace the vison of creating more diversity and inclusion at Stormwater. “We have always had a lot of diversity among artists who exhibit and attend the shows, but unfortunately, have not had an artist of color rent a studio at Stormwater. We launched this initiative as way better represent the Columbia art scene within our resident artist community,” Kirkland Smith, president of the Stormwater nonprofit, acknowledged. “I’ve been looking for a community that I can be a part of to expand creatively,” says Greene. “The process was open and welcoming, and I felt a good energy through it all. The work session, led by One Columbia, was a great meeting to establish the possibility of being the artist-in-residence, but beyond that, it felt really good knowing that everyone who attended wanted to see each other succeed.” The mission of the Stormwater BIPOC Residency Program is to provide a professional working environment that is open to all forms of visual creative expression. This year-long residency will offer artists the opportunity to work outside of their usual environment, provide time to reflect, research, perhaps experiment with different materials, and produce a body of work, which will culminate in a solo exhibition. As a resident, Greene will occupy one of the 10 working artist studios at Stormwater Studios, participate in the bi-annual group shows as well as the operational duties that keep the gallery open to the greater Columbia community. Greene will share his voice at the monthly artist meetings as the group works to expand programming and opportunities for others in the community. All the artists will benefit as mentoring among resident artists happens organically as they work together throughout the year.
To find the new artist, Stormwater reached out to well-respected leaders in the art community to bring their years of experience to the process by creating a committee to thoughtfully nominate, and then narrow the selection, to 10 finalists. The panelists included Midlands art consultant Harriett Green; Michaela Pilar-Brown, an award-winning visual artist and owner and director of Mike Brown Contemporary Art Gallery located in the Vista; and Lee Snelgrove, arts and culture manager for the Richland Library. “We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the nominating committee and One Columbia for helping the idea of the residency program become a reality,” says Smith. Before the artists submitted their applications and portfolios for review by the current Stormwater residents, the One Columbia staff team conducted a workshop for the finalists in March to discuss the opportunity for securing the one open studio space at Stormwater. “We were happy to respond to the call from Stormwater to help build a process for selecting an artist to fill a vacant studio space,” says Margie Reese, interim executive director of One Columbia for Arts and Culture. “Stormwater was interested in broadening their reach to include more artists of color in the application process.” Reese also explained that collaborations of this nature follow the goals of the Amplify Plan, adopted in 2018 by the city of Columbia and the One Columbia board of directors. “One of the primary goals of the Amplify Plan was to advocate for more opportunities for artists, and our partnership with Stormwater is allowing us to continue to focus on that goal,” says Reese.

Malik Greene is a self-taught oil painter.

“My work depicts my personal history through intimate portraits of family, moments, and memories conveying my experience as a black man and artist. I create as an act of searching, investigating my cognition and the societal implications affecting those who look and feel as I do. I intend to use this studio residency for diving deeper into creating works that expand and supplement representation for my community at large. A particular goal of mine is to begin developing original stories that further the various facets of black life, capturing nuances often ostracized from figurative paintings and literature respectively.”
Stormwater is a nonprofit created to keep a place of permanence for the visual arts and keep a thriving working artist community in Columbia’s Vista district. Stormwater’s mission is to establish a consistent and supportive environment to foster the growth of artists and demonstrate the value and importance of visual art to the community at large. The organization envisions a creative vibrant hub of diverse visual artists fostering creative expression and forming the nucleus of Columbia’s thriving arts district. Visit stormwaterstudios.org to learn more.

Jason Rapp

2023 S.C. Arts Awards: Carlos Agudelo

Governor's Award: Individual Category

Graphic with white copy on a dark blue background overlaid on granite blocks. The white text reads South Carolina Arts Awards 2023. As the day nears for the 2023 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: five receiving the South Carolina Governor's Awards for the Arts from the South Carolina Arts Commission and two receiving the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, managed jointly by the SCAC and McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina.

Carlos Agudelo has been Ballet Spartanburg’s artistic director since 1991.

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.
The South Carolina Arts Awards are coming live to SCETV on Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 8 p.m. ET. South Carolina ETV, the state’s public educational broadcasting network, will broadcast the awards ceremony through its 11-station TV network that spans the state. Viewers can access the broadcast via livestream on the homepage of SCETV.org; by using a digital antenna; or through cable, satellite, and streaming live TV providers. Further information about accessing SCETV is available here.

Jason Rapp

Amiri Geuka Farris lands artist residency

Sharing photography and painting at Penn Center


Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a partnership between South Carolina’s Penn Center and the University of Georgia’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, has named Amiri Geuka Farris as its 2023 artist in residence.

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 Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Farris is a Bluffton-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been featured in more than 50 solo exhibitions and juried museum shows nationally and internationally. “For my Culture & Community residency I plan on creating a body of work focused on Gullah Geechee culture, land conservation, nature, and heirs’ property, which I plan to explore through various media including photography and painting,” he said. “By examining these themes, I hope to create meaningful works that can be shared with the community and exhibited in museums and galleries.” 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 Penn Center Community Conversations and two cohorts of Student Summer Research Residencies: on-site classes and workshops with students and faculty from colleges and universities across the Southeast. The first of 2023’s public conversations, “Penn Center, Land, and Community,” will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday, April 22 in Penn Center’s Frissell Community House. The research residencies, which will take place in May, will include workshops and conversations that Farris will lead with students and other participants.

About the partners

  • Penn Center is a nonprofit organization committed to African American education, community development, and social justice. It also serves as a gathering place for meetings, educational institutions, and planning activities within the Sea Island Gullah Geechee communities. It sits on the historic campus of Penn School, founded in 1862 to provide education to African Americans who until then had been enslaved in the Sea Islands region. Following the school’s closure in 1948, the site served as a sanctuary for civil rights organizers in the 1960s, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
  • The Willson Center promotes research, practice, and creativity in the humanities and arts. It supports faculty, students, and its extended community through research grants, visiting scholars and artists, collaborative instruction, conferences, exhibitions, and performances, with a focus on academic excellence and public impact.

Submitted material

Hub Quick Hits: Starbucks x #SCartists

If you live in Columbia, your next cup of coffee could come with a side of inspiration.

Starbucks selected two #SCartists, one from Columbia and one from Charleston, to collaborate on a mural in the chain's location at 2509 Forest Dr. According to Christina Lee Knauss at Columbia Business report, it's one of six artworks that are part of a national online publication "that tells interesting and uplifting stories related to Starbucks worldwide." This mural is featured with others in stateside Starbucks Community Stores in Brooklyn, Ft. Lauderdale, and San Antonio and internationally in Taiwan and South Korea. For more, go here to read the story on Columbia Business Report.
Got arts news? Remember to submit it to The Hub! Got arts events? Listings are free on the only statewide arts calendar—Arts Daily!

Jason Rapp

2023 S.C. Arts Awards: Hampton Rembert

Folk Heritage Award: Artist Category

Graphic with white copy on a dark blue background overlaid on granite blocks. The white text reads South Carolina Arts Awards 2023. As the day nears for the 2023 South Carolina Arts Awards, The Hub is focusing on this year's recipients: five receiving the South Carolina Governor's Awards for the Arts from the South Carolina Arts Commission and two receiving the Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award, managed jointly by the SCAC and McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina.

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. 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
The South Carolina Arts Awards are coming live to SCETV on Sunday, May 14, 2023 at 8 p.m. ET. South Carolina ETV, the state’s public educational broadcasting network, will broadcast the awards ceremony through its 11-station TV network that spans the state. Viewers can access the broadcast via livestream on the homepage of SCETV.org; by using a digital antenna; or through cable, satellite, and streaming live TV providers. Further information about accessing SCETV is available here.

Jason Rapp