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.
I wrote this after visiting the Charleston Artist Guild Gallery last night for their “Painted Palettes” Silent Auction. The Charleston Artist Guild will also be participating in tonights French Quarter Art Walk(which occur every first Friday of the month) from 5pm to 8pm.
The shuffle of feet
Bring the old ones out of their
Faded lawn Chairs
Eyes twinkling
Behind Dusty Frames.
Colors trumpet so they almost
Spring canvas and wood
Off of walls
On their own accord.
Scratches made on paper
Finalizing a well
Thought out
Decision.
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).
Even though I am merely a poor young professional (heh), I have found that the greatest aspect of Piccolo has nothing to do with the various things one can do for free (although, yes an added plus). The greatest aspect is that Piccolo uses local venues for programs, in this case, City Gallery at Waterfront Park hosting the Sundown Poetry Series. Not only was I given an entrancing hour of “spoken word” poetry last night, but I was allowed to wander around afterwards and enjoy the present show in the gallery titled Vanishing Landscapes. How fantastic is it that the Arts always seems to flow into one another?
The poet last night was Barbara G.S. Hagerty. I would describe her work as being quite varied, covering a large spectrum of concepts and forms of poetry. Understanding this about herself, she gave the audience samples from each area of interest. Several of her works were based on Charleston, some so specific as being named after the streets themselves. We were also given poems based on word play (these were used as self explorations by Hagerty, such as the repetition of her initials forming words she associated with). She used her interest in the haiku to put together an entire stream of small poems describing her recent trip to Asia (appropriate…and also my favorite). What I most enjoyed about Hagerty was her use of the pause. Each word had its own meaning, like individuals holding hands to make up a circle, or as if after every word there had been placed a period.
Vanishing Landscapes had some very fine pieces in it. It was a juried art exhibition, so it was curious to see which pieces has been given ribbons and which ones had not…and whether or not I personally agreed. I recommend going to the gallery, and if you can manage to kill two birds with one stone, listen to some poetry as well. The next one is tonight, with Paul Allen at 6:30 pm.
Today, I took inAn 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 ShortHistory 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.
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 inone 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.
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!
Seeking A Landscape
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