Contemporary Charleston at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park.

Don’t miss Jack Alterman’s return to art photography, full-time, on view at his studio at 654D King Street.

Up through the run of Piccolo Spoleto, the exhibition is called “Red Right Returning” and consists of alternately atmospheric and bright images centered around leaving and returning home to Charleston.

Battery Point Buoy by Jack Alterman

He left on a plane to visit Colorado and New Mexico, landscapes far different from our watery life in the Lowcountry, and returned to explore — in fog, still water, bright sun and early morning sidelong light — the aids to navigation bobbing in Charleston’s harbor and rivers that mark mariners’ way home and mark our  existence as a port city.

The trip photos … printed on long rolls of archival paper as strips to evoke the feel of large, color contact sheets — are beautiful studies of the colors yellow, orange and red. The home water photos, on canvas, are shot from water level; they are beautiful and often painterly. Alterman has the consumate eye for composition.

Alterman has sold the Center for Photography he founded at that location (which continues to teach classes in digital photography, hosts guest photogs and lecturers, give workshops, etc.) and is moving to a new studio at 36 George Street.

Find “Red Right Returning” at 654D King St. Find Jack, by appointment, on George Street after Spoleto ends.

Notes on a few interesting artists around town:

Linda Elksnin of Mount Pleasasnt. I loved her colorful, whimsical, textile-inspired paintings. Find her at Piccolo Spoleto Outdoor Juried Art Show, Marion Square

Her artist’s statment:

“Linda Kitchen Elksnin has been drawing and painting since childhood. Folk, self-taught, and visionary artists from around the world are the inspiration for her mixed media works.  Recent works are influenced by textile art of the Kuna, Oaxacan woodcarvings, and Haitian folk paintings. She creates many paintings by layering watercolor and gouache on a painted background, then building up color and texture with colored pencils. Animals, birds, fish, and insects often are the subjects of her paintings.
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This afternoon, I took the short drive out to the the Navy Yard at Noisette to take in From Quilts in the Attic to Quilts on the Wall: Exploring Textile Art by African Americans.

I had met two of the artists, Torreah “Cookie” Washington and Catherine Lamkin, several months ago, and I was so impressed with their work that I just has to see more.

Here’s a detail of Eye of the Sparrow by Wendell Brown.  I liked the extra dimensions of this quilt.

The label next to this quilt was missing, but I can hear the music in this piece.

Not everything was a quilt, Cookie Washington’s Goddess of Joy is a beautiful doll.  All the blues reminds me of the earth, sea, and sky.

While I enjoyed each work of art. Washington’s Sophia Rising was my very favorite.

Isn’t it gorgeous? Just looking at it lifts my spirit.

Take a closer look at the beadwork at the bottom.

The exhibit is on display until Saturday, June 6, 2009.  If you love textile arts, it’s worth the trip.

THIS JUST IN:

Gibbes Museum of Art

Special Hours and Tours May 25 - June 7
Though typically closed on Mondays, the Gibbes Museum of Art will be open both Mondays during Spoleto: May 25 (Memorial Day) and June 1.
Also, docent-led tours will be offered daily at 2:30 — FREE with admission.

WhetstoneArtist Talk: Jeff Whetstone
This Friday, May 22 at 2:30pm
Join photographer Jeff Whetstone as he discusses his career and the current exhibition Jeff Whetstone: Post-Pleistocene.
The Artist Talk is FREE with museum admission.

(North Carolina artist Jeff Whetstone, self-portrait.)

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PICCOLO SPOLETO

“Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead.” Comedy at The Footlight Players. It’s about Snoopy, and anything with the words “teenage” and “blockhead” in the title has to be funny.

“The Islands.” PURE Theatre. Setting not so funny, a prison cell on Robben Island, South Africa, during apartheid. But anything by Athol Fugard has to be good.

“The Gentleman Pirate.” PURE Theatre at the Powder Magazine, a truly eccentric offering since the Powder Magazine is arguably Charleston’s strangest building. It’s about Stede Bonnet, in case the title didn’t give that away.

Skinny White Comics. Back and whiter than ever.

One Man Star Wars Trilogy. Oh, come on, you know you want to check this out. Try? There is no try. Only do. Or do not.

Improv marathon. 3 improv shows for the price of one — 12 bucks.

Smoky Weiner & the Hot Links. At Bowen’s Island.!At sunset! Does it get any better? Well, yes, it probably does. The entire Blues & Jazz series at Piccolo looks strong.

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Richard Hagerty’s Piccolo Spoleto poster image is a fascinating marriage of family-friendly colors and impish myth. Hagerty has an invitational show at the Corrigan Gallery on Queen Street, and the opening way back on May 15 (which seems like a lifetime ago) was well attended.

I hit the show early expecting it to be fairly quiet. Instead, I could hardly squeeze in the door. The gallery was packed with lively figurative work, abstract paintings and a crowd of attendees. Viewers were intrigued and collectors snapped up six artworks.

I managed to break out of the mob long enough to grab a few photos of the exhibition, which is up through June 15 and has create a surge of visits to the gallery.

“We’ve sold a bunch of pieces and had lots and lots of interest,” says Lese Corrigan, owner of the gallery and a fine artist in her own right. “There’s been a fascination with the variety of Richard’s artwork and his ability to be a surgeon and still be a prolific artist. He’s been doing both in parallel for 30 years.”

Usually, Piccolo poster artists get their own shows at one of the Office of Cultural Affairs’ City Gallery spaces. But with the Dock Street Theatre closed for refurbishment and its back-up space the Gaillard kind of busy with Spoleto, it fell to Corrigan to present Hagerty’s art.

“I’d already set this show and the opening before Richard was asked to be the Piccolo poster artist,” says Corrigan. “I think we helped the city by providing a venue, and the gallery was helped with high visibility and having the original image for the poster hanging in the front window. It’s worked out well for everyone.”

Hagerty’s eclectic exhibition includes images and colors that seem to have leaped from a children’s storybook, alongside sophisticated art and hints of Miro, Kandinsky and Escher. The work of other artists, including Corrigan, Karin Olah and Manning Williams, are on display too. Corrigan’s mascot is also there – a crimson fish called Dot. That way, there will always be a red Dot in the gallery.

Sundown Poetry Series–Paul Allen

Yesterday evening,  I attended an excellent Sundown Poetry Series reading by Paul Allen. His poems from his new collection, Ground Forces, were on target in describing the human condition as well as quite hilarious.  The new venue for the event, the City Gallery, provided a lovely backdrop of the series as well as air conditioning.

Allen also played guitar, and sang.  The line the stayed with me the most is, “In my mind, bi-polar is a bear with an interesting sex life.”

What a unique way to think of illness.

Ten Trees

After the reading, I went to check out the Ten Trees Exhibit and documentary by Sam Fleischner that was is in the back on the gallery. 

The exhibit is a theatre made of ten trees worth plywood, and the accompanying film, which was made in South Carolina–one of the largest producers of plywood–was shown in the structure. 

The film shows the entire process of the plywood manufacture from cutting the trees to finished product, on a truck, awaiting delivery.

The movie is very much like an episode of How It’s Made, except it doesn’t have narration or music.  The only sounds are the sounds of the production of the sheets (even with workers taking breaks and looking bored).

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An Afternoon of Porgy and Bess

Today, I took in An Afternoon of Porgy and Bess. The program, which played to a capacity crowd, featured selections from the Heyward/Gershwin opera by soprano D’Jaris Whipper-Lewis and tenor/baritone Richard Blakeney. Robert Rosen provided a excellent overview of the history surrounding the work with his A Short History of George Gershwin in Charleston.

Both Whipper-Lewis and Blakeney, accompanied by Chamber Music Charleston thrilled with their beautiful renditions of Summertime, Oh, I Plenty O’ Nuttin, and It Ain’t Necessarily So. I found Whipper-Lewis’s Strawberry Woman especially beautiful.

If you can, do catch this gorgeous program of history and music time next around. It’s a lovely way to spend an hour.

Seeking A Landscape

Next, I headed to the Gibbs to see the exhibitLandscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art.

Dan’s post about race and art got me thinking about my own skittishness on the subject of slavery and plantation life. My maternal grandparents were sharecroppers in Marlboro County, SC, and my mother would tell my siblings and me how she picked and chopped cotton for $2.00 a day, how she hated it, and what she did to avoid it.

She also told us about how my grandfather picked 1000 lbs of cotton in one day, and how proud he was of that. I thought about how difficult that must have been and how determined he was to excel at something. For my grandparents, “smart” implied more industriousness than intelligence, and my grandfather was known as especially smart.

As I toured the exhibit which, had art ranging from the pastoral to the provocative, I thought a lot about my mother, grandparents and other sharecroppers and slaves who worked those fields with the hope of a better life.

I thought the exhibit well done and thoughtful. Some of the works, a photo of the charred remains of a lynched man and a photo of a slave woman stripped to the waist were a bit jarring, but it’s all part of a journey that our country is still traveling.

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Piccolo Spoleto Day 1: Don D. Lewis reports from Don D. Lewis on Vimeo.

SpoJo Don D. Lewis got out and about yesterday and recorded this piece on Piccolo’s artist’s village at Marion Square. I should have posted it last night, but I’d gone to bed before it arrived. Enjoy!