Museum + Gallery
Current Exhibitions
Rising from the Sifting Screen
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Nov. 5-Dec. 13, 2024
"Rising from the Sifting Screen" is a new exhibition in the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts, featuring three contemporary artists who utilize textiles as a locus of memory and resistance. The participating artists, Hellen Ascoli, Kelly Taylor Mitchell and Lars Shimabukuro, adopt techniques as disparate as backstrap loom weaving, beaded maskmaking and papermaking as mnemonic devices for engaging layered histories, both personal and collective.
This exhibition is sponsored by the Office for Civil Rights, Compliance and Community Initiatives, the Department of Art and Art History, the Cultural Affairs Committee, the Richardson Family Art Museum, the South Carolina Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Alumni Art Exhibition
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Sept. 13-Oct. 27, 2024
The League of Extraordinary Artists: The Art Students League of New York and Its Impact on Southern Art Presented by the Johnson Collection
Richardson Family Art Museum, Sept. 3-Dec. 13, 2024
Since its inception 150 years ago, the Art Students League of New York has been a leader in defining and nurturing American art. Many of the country’s brightest luminaries have been formed in its Manhattan halls, and it remains a prestigious proving-ground for artists. Eschewing formal degrees or a standardized curriculum, the Art Students League instead employs the classical atelier method, where instructors mentor and collaborate with students in small studio groups.
Artists with ties to the American South have been pivotal in building the brand, the reach, and the reputation of the Art Students League. For example, at a time when formal arts instruction was largely barred to artists of color in the South, North Carolina-born Charles Alston sought artistic freedom in New York, becoming a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance and the first African-American instructor at the League. Reciprocally, the imprimatur of the League helped propel the careers of many practitioners, who in turn established their own art institutes and academic departments across the American South. Edmund Yaghjian, for example, who was first a student and then an instructor at the League, eventually migrated to the South to become the longtime chair of the art department at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, bringing from New York the sensibilities of celebrating local vernacular to our region.
Spanning a period nearly as long as the life of the League itself, the twenty-five paintings featured here—selected from among the hundreds of League-related works in The Johnson Collection—celebrate the legacy of the Art Students League and the dynamic exchange it has historically facilitated between Northern and Southern art communities. This exhibition offers a cross-section of the diversity, longevity, and reach not only of the Art Students League but more broadly of the extraordinary impact of American art.
Featured Artists: Sigmund Abeles, Charles Alston, Carroll Cloar, Josephine Couper, Sidney Dickinson, Lamar Dodd, Jeanet Dreskin, Anne Goldthwaite, Marie Hull, Rockwell Kent, Margaret Law, Blanche Lazzell, Norman Lewis, Blondelle Malone, Mabel Pugh, Haywood Rivers, Oli Sihvonen, Theodoros Stamos, Eugene Thomason, Edmund Yaghjian, Rufus Zogbaum
Insider Addition: Folk and Self-Taught Art in the American South
Richardson Family Art Museum, Sept. 3-Dec. 13, 2024
Insider Addition: Folk and Self-Taught Art in the American South is a glimpse into the unconventional mixed media art of folk, self-taught, and community-trained artists from the American South. While many of these artists never intended for their creations to fill the walls of galleries and museums, their talent, long overlooked by the mainstream art world, was noticed by Asheville- and St. Simon’s Island-based artist and collector Randy Siegel. His collection, as seen in this exhibition, showcases various ways in which artists interpret and express the unique culture of their Southern communities.
Deeply rooted in African diasporic traditions, the artworks on view convey a heterogenous Southern culture through both materiality and subject matter. The varied materials used—textiles, tin, household items, and wood—are as integral to the works as the stories they tell about family, religion, local gatherings, and fluid expressions of Southern identity. Found objects and everyday materials become extraordinary, imbued with the artists’ personal visions, idiosyncratic iconographies, and diverse heritages, once illegible to orthodox “high art” institutions. While some of the makers included in the exhibition have been referred to as “outsider artists,” the central theme of community present in their works belies this designation, prompting viewers to ask how outsider and insider status shifts depending on who is looking, and where.
The majority of the objects in the exhibition were chosen from the Siegel collection by students in Dr. Gillian Young’s History of African American Art course in the Spring of 2024. Students in this course researched and wrote object labels for their selections.
Featured Artists: Z B Armstrong, Hawkins Boulden, Adam Brandau, Thornton Dial, Sam Doye, Minnie Evans, Howard Finster, Carlton Garrett, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Clementine Hunter, Anderson Johnson, George Kornegay, Charlie Lucas, Ethel Maw Matthews, J.T. “Jake” McCord, Gertrude Morgan, Nellie Mae Rowe, Lorenzo Scott, John Serl, Mary T. Smith, Lizzie Wilkinson, Purvis Young, Malcah Zeldis
Under the Tussling Surface by Allison Spence
Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts, Aug. 6-Sept. 13, 2024
Essence of a Moment
Richardson Family Art Gallery, July 1-26, 2024
Acrylic on canvas landscape paintings by David V. Eckert. Eckert is part of the River Arts community in Asheville, North Carolina. Learn more at davidveckert.com.
Past Exhibitions
A Show of Gratitude by Leroy Campbell
Richardson Family Art Gallery, May 28-June 22, 2024
Originally from Charleston, SC, Leroy Campbell is an internationally renowned artist whose mixed media paintings have been displayed in American galleries in New York City, Philadelphia and Louisville, as well as in galleries in Senegal and Turkey. A self-taught artist, Campbell’s work draws on themes of family, spirituality, community, love, kindness and human connections. His vibrant paintings create colorful tapestries and picturesque landscapes inspired by his beloved Lowcountry upbringing.
The Imperial Eye: Picturesque Photography and Printed Media in the British Empire
Martha Cloud Chapman Gallery, Sandor Teszler Library, Feb. 12-May 18, 2024
This exhibition focuses on early photographic and published media employed by the British and other European powers to document ancient religious sites and practices, with an emphasis on documentation of Buddhist and other Western cave complexes of India within the former Bombay Presidency. The period of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth experienced a growing interest in the dissemination of picturesque images of British-controlled India due to both popular and scholarly curiosity. Prints, postcards, and other ephemera from the latter era of British colonial rule reflect this interest and the necessity of both preservation and reconciling ancient remains to British and European notions of Empire. Images circulating in the British Empire display the subordination of the sites to their common depiction and analysis, while also conveying key features of the status of sites as they transitioned from local curiosities to cultural heritage managed by a central imperial bureaucracy.
Progressions: the Evolution of Style and Subject in Work of Julia Elizabeth Tolbert
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 6 - May 18, 2024
It is fitting for Julia Elizabeth Tolbert’s works to be housed in a college, since she spent so much of her life in universities and grade schools, teaching students as well as furthering her own knowledge and skills. Born in 1911, Tolbert graduated from Columbia College in 1933 with a bachelor’s degree in English, but it was after this that her career in art began. She received a certificate in art from Lander University shortly after graduating from Columbia, and from 1937-44, Tolbert alternated semesters between Syracuse University and Lander, earning her bachelor’s in art at the former, and returning to South Carolina to teach at the latter. These two universities gave the artist a strong foundation of technical skills and artistic knowledge, but it was not until she began attending University of Georgia, Athens in 1947 that she began to develop more creativity and break free from the conventional rules of art. Although Tolbert seems to have inexplicably stopped creating art after graduating from UGA, nearly her entire collection of almost 300 works continue to show her passion and creativity to students and visitors of Wofford College, courtesy of the Tolbert family.
The artist’s progression in several areas, including her use of color and media, her experimentation with abstraction, the way she blurs the lines of painting genres and subjects, as well as her increased interest in the artistic process are subjects to be explored through the works in this exhibition.
Artists Collecting Artists
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 6-May 18, 2024
Featuring contemporary artwork by both local and international artists, Artists Collecting Artists is a multimedia exploration of the principles and elements of art as they intersect with the concept of identity. This exhibition offers a unique perspective on artists and their work through the lens of Jiha and Andy Moon Wilson, two established artists and collectors themselves. Artists aim to interpret the world around them and the emotions within themselves in both realistic and abstract ways. Abstraction in art is the visual contortion of reality or a stylized form of expression that utilizes elements such as shape, color, texture, and line to portray this distortion. Ambiguity as the result of abstraction invites interpretation by the viewer.
Artists Collecting Artists investigates how the experiences and spirit of an artist are captured and reflected in their creations. Art is an act of intimacy between the artist and the viewer, where vulnerability should be celebrated. While individuality is at the forefront of the exhibition, many of the pieces work in conversation with one another. Themes surrounding feminist theory and gender politics are emphasized, which reflect the socio-political advocacy for gender equality and commonly marginalized voices. Created by a male and female artist, pieces such as Alejandro Aguilera’s Abiesto and Lauren Gallaspy’s untitled work stand in contrast to each other and evoke the differences of gendered experience. From two-dimensional drawings to textiles and sculpture, Artists Collecting Artists encourages the dissection of the formal elements of each work along with the recognition and appreciation of the artists and the messages behind them.
Included artists in the exhibition are Alejandro Aguilera, Myoung-Joo Bang, Dawn Black, MC Coble, Drew Conrad, Robbin Deyo, Craig Drennen, Suzanna Fields, Lauren Gallaspy, Amanda Heng, Peregrine Honig, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Hannah Israel, Michelle Laxalt, Kakyoung Lee, Michael Lin, Lin Tianmiao, Conor McGrady, Jiha Moon, Yanique Norman, Brian Novatny, Chiharu Roach, Judy Rushin-Knopf, Wilson Shieh, Venske & Spanle, Andy Moon Wilson, and Ai Yamaguchi.
Touchy Subjects by Maggie Genoble
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Jan. 8-Feb. 28, 2024
Touchy Subjects focuses on how the body occupies both a physical world and a digital world inseparable with the rise of internet use. The internet holds endless possibilities to reimagine and represent subjecthood. Physical bodies are denied that freedom as sites for projected desires and oppression. This notion of avatar building on the internet is undermined by how the patriarchy, capitalism, and consumerism may be amplified in digital spaces, while still allowing for the construction of a body not limited by physical constraints.
By using the screen as a medium for creation instead of the apparatus for viewing, this shifts its function to reflecting or shielding the viewers’ gaze. Screens and fragmented bodies are scratched, scattered, manipulated, and performed to represent a post-human body, or a cyborg. These sculptures deny a fully-formed body, and foreground destruction as a process of creation and attempt to construct or reconstruct itself in a simultaneous state of digital and physical presence.
A GENDER LINE: A Multidisciplinary Show of Female Artists and Writers
Richardson Family Art Museum, Nov. 6-Dec. 8
Featured Artists: Yili Fan, Elaine Quave, Freda Sue, Nina Rastgartalab Tabrizi, Diana Farfán Valente
Featured Writers: Gloria Bayne, Jammie Ryan-Huynh, Jennifer Oladipo, Glens Redmond, Hanna Suarez.
The quote by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “a gender line...helps keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage,” emphasizes the damaging effects of gender roles that are imposed on both girls and boys by society from an early age. These roles perpetuate harmful stereotypes that devalue women, often leading to them being expected to be quiet, pleasant and attractive while solely caring for others. These societal norms create a glass ceiling for women, which has historically silenced their voices and achievements, leading them to be attributed to men and taking away their freedom in all aspects of their lives.
In response to Ginsburg’s statement, five visual artists and five writers, who are residents from South Carolina and representing diverse cultural backgrounds, including African American, Asian, Latina and Persian, have been invited to share their unique voices through artwork and poetry. These artists emphasize the need to break free from gender barriers while highlighting the intersections through interdisciplinary multicultural conversations. A Gender Line is a collaborative effort to strengthen our social fabric through artistic journeys in favor of equity, equality and justice. We hope to create a space for dialogue and bridge the gaps between minority communities and academia.
A Gender Line is curated and organized by ceramic sculptor Diana Farfán Valente and Wofford professor of Spanish Dr. Begoña Caballero García, with the support of Dr. Araceli Hernández-Laroche and Prof. María Francisco Montesó of “SC Centro Latino” from USC Upstate. Funded by the generous support from Wofford College’s Studio Art Program, Cultural Affairs Committee, and USC Upstate's “El Centro.”
Exhibition Reception and Panel Discussion
Introduced by Jessica Scott-Felder and moderated by Dr. Begoña Caballero and Diana Farfán Valente
Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023, 5 p.m., Room 112, Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts
VIEWFINDER by Crystal Z Campbell
Richardson Family Art Museum, Aug. 30 - Dec. 8, 2023
VIEWFINDER emerges from place, directly informed by Campbell’s travels to the small coastal town of Varberg, Sweden which morphed from its historical role as a tuberculosis sanitorium in the early 1900’s into a popular retreat destination boasting the most spas in Sweden following the tuberculosis vaccine. Pointing to the viewfinder mechanism on a camera as a framing and focusing mechanism of capture extending colonial aims and anthropological othering, Campbell’s work playfully contends with this ethnographic history of moving image and the notion of documentary practice in a place marketed for care and healing.
Crystal Z Campbell’s broader creative practice centers the underloved in work that investigates public secrets –– information known by many but undertold or underspoken. For the film, Campbell worked with Black people from the African Diaspora who migrated to Sweden. Working through archival gaps and the limits of translation and transmission, the performers embody the radical possibilities of place within this swatch of Swedish landscape. Campbell reflects on homelands while taking cues from folktales, sound, and gestures to explore belonging, allyship, and living monuments.
Film still image from VIEWFINDER (2020). Courtesy of the artist.
Roots/Routes: Mobility and Displacement in Art of the American South
Richardson Family Art Museum, Aug. 30 - Dec. 8, 2023
The American South is a region of great dynamism—a latticework of intersecting cultures and histories that emerge at the creative tension-points between the roots of one’s origins and the routes by which new identities are forged. This exhibition presents a visual overview of the many ways that Southern artists, from the nineteenth century to the present, have interpreted and responded to these interrelated themes of rootedness and movement. Included in the show are reflections on border crossings, social mobilities, migration and travel narratives, and traumatic displacements. As these twenty artists re-tread pathways (real and imagined) of dislocation and relocation, they memorialize the dynamic histories and evolving identities of their subjects.
This exhibition, presented by the Johnson Collection is guest curated by TJC’s summer graduate fellow, Alicia Gallant.
{Training_camp}
Richardson Family Art Gallery Aug. 30 - Oct. 13, 2023
The Richardson Family Art Gallery features the recent works by Rebecca Forstater, Assistant Professor of Studio Art. Forstater’s practice broadly considers the production of current histories in digital landscapes, questioning whether we can trust our own desires in a society so thoroughly influenced by digital experiences. {Training_camp} examines the creation of public memory in the current AI-fueled rat race through the lens of pop-culture history. Focusing on Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy, she utilized emerging AI software to create audio, image, video, and 3D models. Forstater asked the training models to contextualize the past given the present algorithm’s pool of information. The body of work was created digitally, designed either through user-friendly AI models (Dall-E, ChatGPT, Gen-2) or AI models still in testing-phase (DreamFusion, Firefly, AI: Stability for Blender, Potat1, Tortoise). Each object exists in both digital and physical forms. Existing first as .png, .mp4, .wav, and .stl files that then find physical form to inhabit this room as window decals, TV screens playing videos, and 3D prints. These objects echo the perpetual circulation and transformation of data and society, both on and offline, each informing the other.
Global Anxieties and Existential Dread by Amrbin Ling
Richardson Family Art Gallery, June 12-July 7, 2023
Recycled paper from discarded notes with printer ink and ballpoint pen become textured surfaces and imperfect forms through which I explore ideas of value, ownership, and harm in matter that shifts between the organic and the human made. My scrolls are dyed with indigo, cochineal, and madder, once prized in America and Europe for saturating flags, uniforms, and canvases with color. These international plants, insects, and roots were also connected to enslaved people and forced laborers from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Although these blue and red hues are no longer the coveted objects of the Western world, my scrolls, paintings, and sculptural fragmented works on paper explore how their fraught, global entanglements enable us to ponder how changing technologies— like dye, like paper— reflect modern human and non-human relationships that are as vibrant as they are destructive.
Recent Acquisitions of Korean Arts
Richardson Family Art Museum, June 13-July 28, 2023
The Richardson Family Art Museum features the college’s permanent collection of Korean art from the 19th century to the present. Several traditional paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries were collected by Mr. Bruce Gilland in the 1970s and 1980s while he was stationed in South Korea. An avid art lover, he collected paintings with different themes and styles, including minhwa (Korean folk painting), landscape paintings in traditional painting styles, flora and fauna, genre paintings, and more. A few sets of minhwa paintings depicting hunting scenes of so-called “barbarians” called Horyeopdo are worth noting.
Popular during late 19th and early 20th centuries, this type of paintings was produced as six, eight or ten-panel folding screens, featuring so-called “barbarian” or Qing Manchu people hunting in landscapes. The museum also acquired a few contemporary prints and ceramic sculpture by Korean-American artist Jiha Moon (b. 1973), presently a Guggenheim Fellow. Moon sees herself as a cartographer of cultures and an icon-maker of fictitious worlds, incorporating various sources of inspiration to make her own stories, such as Korean folk art or the mythical creature “haetae.”
Helen DuPre Moseley: Painter, Author, Roller-Coaster Fan and Air Stewardess on Flying Saucers
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 7-July 28, 2023
Helen Dupré Moseley (1897-1984) is worthy of recognition as an artist, writer and community leader in Spartanburg, and she would have agreed. She certainly believed her life was worth documenting, as she collected stacks of diaries, scrapbooks, artworks, stereoscopes and short stories, which are now held in the Spartanburg County Library’s Archives.
Interestingly though, Moseley did not begin her artistic career until the 1940s and claimed this to be just a “hobby.” She was formally untrained, yet not a stranger to the world of art. Her sister, Grace Dupré, was a portraitist practicing in New York, painting subjects including Supreme Court justices and President Harry S Truman. Moseley remained in Spartanburg for the entirety of her life, but was nevertheless just as distinguished in New York as in South Carolina since her brushwork was displayed on programs for the Philharmonic.
Moseley’s work has been exhibited through various museums and universities such as the Mint Museum in 1947, the Civic Art Gallery in 1948, Converse University, the University of South Carolina, the Spartanburg Art Gallery, the Gibbes Art Gallery in Charleston, the Sandlapper Gallery, Piedmont Interstate Fair, the Junior League and the National Arts Club, and she often had to show work as part of the artists guild. Given this, art was not merely a hobby for Moseley, especially since she was a founding member of the Spartanburg Artists Guild.
This show exhibits primarily brush drawings on paper, oil paintings and creative pieces written by Moseley. Almost every one of her pieces is untitled and undated, which gives the viewers a chance to interpret, make their own choices and use imagination. These images display her “creatures,” which she brings from her imagination and childlike influences to the real world, allowing her to step outside the boundaries of traditional Southern art and create works that are wonderful and unique.
Intersecting Methods: 2020 Portfolio
Martha Cloud Chapman Gallery, Feb. 8-May 21, 2023
As a process for creating art, printmaking has many similarities to the scientific method. Printmakers dream up the imagery, experiment with their mediums, proof their plates, manipulate the variables (one at a time) and proof again to be able to create the desired results in the final edition. Scientists, engineers and others in related fields work through similar steps in conducting experiments and attempting to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Intersecting Methods is a portfolio that brings together the arts and the science to create collaborative prints by partnering a printmaker with a collaborator.
Intersecting Methods: 2020 Portfolio
Martha Cloud Chapman Gallery, Feb. 8-May 21, 2023
As a process for creating art, printmaking has many similarities to the scientific method. Printmakers dream up the imagery, experiment with their mediums, proof their plates, manipulate the variables (one at a time) and proof again to be able to create the desired results in the final edition. Scientists, engineers and others in related fields, work through similar steps in conducting experiments and attempting to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Intersecting Methods is a portfolio that brings together the arts and the science to create collaborative prints by partnering a printmaker with a collaborator.
Materiality and the Divine: Baroque art across Europe
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 7-May 21, 2023
This exhibition explores the dynamic and revolutionary art of the Baroque era in Europe. c. 1600-1750. Baroque painters reflect seismic changes occurring in European society at the time, in particular the Catholic Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation. Where Protestant churches were austere and lacked color and ornamentation, Catholic leaders after the Council of Trent (1545-63) decided to encourage art that could move and inspire the masses with monumental compositions, intense color, realistic detail, and dramatic light.
The ornate and dramatic Baroque style soon spread from Rome to France, Spain, Flanders, and the Netherlands. This exhibit documents how artists in different countries mobilized the Baroque style towards different ends. In Italy, Spain, France, and Flanders, Baroque paintings reflected the Church’s desire to increase the power of Christian stories. In the Protestant Dutch Republic, in contrast, painters catered to a wealthy, bourgeoise audience who wanted to see their prosperity reflected in portraits, and in two newer genres of art, landscape and still life.
Wofford art history students in Dr. Karen Goodchild’s Baroque Art class will be researching and writing about these paintings throughout the semester (spring 2023). We encourage gallery visitors to come back throughout the spring to see the students’ research develop.
This exhibition is made possible by Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University.
Behind Doors | Behind Eyes by Walker Antonio, 2023 Whetsell Exhibition
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Jan. 16-Feb. 24, 2023
Reception Feb. 16, 5:30 p.m.
I, along with my peers, have been thrust into the age of technology, forcing our eyes down to our phones – worrying about our online presence rather than creating genuine connections with the people immediate to us. The mental health of young men, including the anxiety that comes with social media, is of great interest to me as I slowly try to care less about what people think of who and what I am.
Concerned with the status of human interaction, I am interested in understanding our unfixed subjectivity as it constantly shifts and molds to the environment like a self-sufficient organism. My paintings focus on the distorting or caricaturing of the human form as a psychological figuring, a limbo between the real and surreal. My work encompasses common motifs of masks and white fences referring to the different barriers we put up in different social situations to feel secure within ourselves.
The connections we make in today’s world are built on how many followers we have, eliminating the intrinsic value of each of us. The danger that I am trying to keep at bay is the unknown. I can brace myself for anything, but the what-ifs scare me because I can’t imagine what subconscious barrier I will put in place to compensate for it.
False Starts
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Oct. 31 - Dec. 15, 2022
The Richardson Family Art Gallery features the recent works by Oscar Soto, Wofford’s Studio Arts Manager. Combining a wide range of materials and processes, from 3d modeling and digital fabrication to traditional painting and woodworking, False Starts is a reflection on the many paths available to artists who are often torn between their desire to explore and their need to advance.
Anne Frank: A History for Today
Martha Cloud Chapman Gallery, Sept. 19 - Nov. 19, 2022
Anne Frank: A History for Today brings to life the story of the young Jewish girl who – in the pages of her world-renowned diary – documented two years of hiding in German-occupied Amsterdam during World War II. By sharing Anne’s legacy with visitors, students and teachers, this traveling exhibit seeks to inspire our commitment to never be bystanders but instead to stand up together against antisemitism, bigotry and inequality wherever they may exist today.
McCallum & Halsey: At Home and Abroad
presented by the Johnson Collection
Richardson Family Art Museum, Sept. 1 - Dec. 15, 2022
Married for sixty years, Corrie McCallum (1914-2009) and William Halsey (1915-1999) forged independently successful artistic careers, acclaimed professional paths that were, in turn, complementary and distinct. Having found meager instructional support for modernism in the South’s traditional collegiate art programs, the native South Carolinians transferred to the esteemed School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. This move marked the first of many expeditions McCallum and Halsey would undertake—individually and in unison—to cultivate their creativity. In 1939, the museum school awarded Halsey a prestigious fellowship that funded the couple’s inaugural foreign excursion, an eighteen-month tenure in Mexico.
Over the course of their decades together, McCallum and Halsey travelled extensively, often eschewing conventional destinations for more adventurous locations, including Central and South America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. These trips offered opportunities to study, teach, sketch, and, most importantly, to absorb a region’s culture and landscape. The impact of these experiences is borne out in both artists’ output, evidenced by the use of innovative media, bold palettes, and a mutual shift toward abstraction.
By necessity, the couple’s personal and professional lives were based in Charleston, South Carolina, where they raised three children and were active in the local community. Early on, Halsey had determined that he and McCallum might be “vastly more useful” in their home state rather than metropolitan art centers. Picturesque Charleston provided ample inspiration for the duo resulting in contemporary interpretations of the historic city. Equally committed to their birthplace and to the exotic locales they visited, McCallum and Halsey melded these contradictory inclinations in their modernist pedagogy and vigorous exhibition activity across the country.
With works dating between 1931 and 1992, At Home and Abroad invites viewers to enjoy the familiar imagery of the Carolina Lowcountry and —as noted in the pair’s 1971 publication A Travel Sketchbook—the fascinating “people and places around the world” that influenced their art.
Michaela Pilar Brown | CONTERMINOUS Elegies
Richardson Family Art Museum, Sept. 1 - Dec. 15, 2022
Conterminous Elegies investigates the process of grieving as a space, not solely for consideration of loss and mourning but an equal opportunity for the exploration of playfulness and joy. The experience of transitions within the course of any human life implies the sharing of and the shifting of boundaries; borders between the materially present and what is remembered; between imagination and the corporeal; between things and ideas. Thus, the installation is not merely a lament for the dead in the traditional elegiac function, but is also a celebration of memory and the many rich and varied possibilities of memorialization.
Works in the exhibition include sculpture, installation and photography. A large site specific installation is central to the organizing of ideas in the exhibition space, creating a non linear narrative employing assemblage, a technique essential to Brown’s praxis.
The Shape I’m In: Tri State Sculptors Member Exhibition
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Sept. 1 - Oct. 8, 2022
Wofford College is honored to host the 44th Annual Tri State Sculptors Conference! This year’s theme, “The Shape I’m In,” was inspired by a stray lyric from a country-folk song. We like that it has many interpretations, from the fleshy forms we inhabit to our present mental and emotional states, from the architecture that surrounds us to our resistance to creative fatigue. When we also consider our two keynote speakers, Michaela Pilar Brown and Allan Wexler, the theme also refers to the limitless configurations we embody as artists and seekers navigating our way to the center of the mysteries that keep us going.
Complementing the conference will be the Tri State Sculptors Members Exhibition, featuring indoor sculptures in the Richardson Family Art Gallery along with outdoor works in the RSRCA courtyard. This inclusive exhibition features student and professional artists alike, hailing from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and beyond. The opening reception promises to be a lively affair, and a wonderful opportunity to meet artists and enthusiast from around the region.
Peter L. Schmunk, Photographs 2010 – 2022
Richardson Family Art Museum, May 5, 2022 – July 30, 2022
Museum will be closed during the academic holiday, between commencement and the summer school
A retrospective of the photographer’s various interests and projects over the past decade, this exhibition explores the different forms a photograph may take and the ways that photographic images may communicate meaning. Document, vignette, souvenir, ephemeral record, visual poem, abstract sign – the images exhibited here play one or more of those roles. Schmunk’s earliest efforts in photography, dating back to the 1970s, were primarily dedicated to the subject of landscape, especially wild places in the western states. Landscape remains for him an area of strong interest, as seen here in photographs of Looking Glass Rock in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina, all part of a recently completed book project which documents that site in comprehensive detail. Other works included here were shown in previous exhibitions devoted to “Music and the Photographic Image” in 2018 and “Haiku” in 2015, the latter a collaborative project with Wofford colleague and poet Deno Trakas.
Since 2010 Schmunk has developed an interest in the transient materials of signage, graffiti, and advertising, especially as found in layered, timeworn condition in urban and industrial sites. His tight framing of these subjects often results in images of abstract character. The seemingly insignificant marks they contain, however, may suggest meaning through allusion and metaphor. To augment the content of minimalist or wholly abstract photographic subjects, Schmunk has employed strategies of juxtaposition, the creation of multi-image groups, the addition of words, and, most recently, the inclusion of other two- and three-dimensional media. He seeks to link such images to music, the history of art, the experience of place, and other domains of memory.
First presented in 2020 but shuttered due to pandemic precautions, the current exhibition includes several new works and alternative examples from earlier projects. For technical, critical, and personal support the photographer wishes to thank Mark Olencki and Gail Schmunk. A full inventory of Schmunk’s photographic work may be found on his website at cultureandlandscape.com.
“I Work With Clay.” American Ceramics from the Hackney-Haight Collection
Richardson Family Art Museum, February 8, 2022 – May 22, 2022
“I Work With Clay.” showcases utilitarian ceramic traditions and innovations over the past 60 years. Many potters such as the Owens of North Carolina’s Jugtown, and their cousin Ben Owen III, have continued family traditions for generations. Cynthia Bringle has centered her working and teaching around the Penland School of Craft for over 50 years. Contemporary potters like Mark Hewitt and Matt Jones use an apprentice system, so new makers can learn their proven methods. Alex Matisse, who started using clay, instead of the traditional painting materials of his great grandfather, Henri, along with John Vigeland and Connie Matisse, have evolved East Fork Pottery from the studio to factory dinnerware production techniques. Taken together, this serves as significant source material for endless creativity and aesthetic achievement.
Collector’s Statement
For more than two decades, we have treasured relationships with makers and the objects they make. We use all of our objects and feel a closeness to artists and the earth that comes with that (Jim Hackney, ’77, Scott Haight).
Hot Now (annual student art exhibition)
Richardson Family Art Gallery, March 14 – April 22, 2022
Dr. Francis Robicsek (1925-2020): The Art of Collecting
Richardson Family Art Museum, February 8, 2021 – April 30, 2022
Dr. Francis Robicsek (1925-2020): The Art of Collecting celebrates the life and legacy of Dr. Robicsek, whose generosity helped grow and develop the college’s Fine Arts Collection over several decades. Best-known for being a world-renowned heart surgeon, Robicsek was an avid art collector and a true Renaissance man. Featured works from the collection, from pre-Columbian pottery to Chinese funerary urns and from 17th-century Dutch painting to 18th-century English portrait painting, exhibit his flawless taste in collecting. Dutch paintings had had a special place in his heart, and it was his first emphasis in collecting after Robicsek came to the US in 1956. He became interested in archaeology from the 1960s, when he worked to expand healthcare facilities and operations in Central American countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Belize and El Salvador. Robicsek authored five books on Mayan culture and art. Even so, Hungarian painting was a channel creating a tie between the college and the Robicseks.
Thanks to their generosity, Wofford had many opportunities to exhibit the family’s collections including Dutch paintings, Spanish Colonial Art, Russian Icons among others for over two decades. The legacy of the Robicseks will continue to be evident in teaching and learning on campus and beyond.
Rural Queer
Richardson Family Art Gallery, February 1, 2022 - March 4, 2022
This exhibition focuses on the deconstruction of gender, sexuality, and relationships. Queer is an umbrella for anything that is not heteronormative, homonormative, or cisgendered. The show is an insight to the different intricacies of being Queer and the intersectionality of all the other identities that a person holds.
Magic School Bus, 2020 Whetsell Memorial Fellowship Exhibition by Mary Kathryn Davidson
Richardson Family Art Gallery, October 9 – December 15, 2021
Elevation from Within: The Study of Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Richardson Family Art Museum, September 1, 2021 – December 15, 2021
In the wake of the Civil War, African Americans—enslaved and freed, in the South and the North—sought and fought for the education they had long been denied. From elementary lessons to advanced academics, standardized instruction was largely provided by white teachers in schools operated by white philanthropic organizations, such as the American Missionary Association. Available public education offerings, especially at secondary and college levels, were unequivocally separate, but never equal.
Following passage of the Second Morrill Act in 1890, land-grant institutions for black students were established in each of the Southern states. The African Methodist Episcopal Church had also begun to open black colleges—schools where African American intellectuals served as administrators and faculty members, schools that offered their student bodies an “unapologetic black space.” The handful of antebellum black colleges and universities grew to over ninety institutions by 1900; in the 1930s, the number of campuses peaked at 121. As the twentieth century progressed and court decisions secured scholastic opportunities for African Americans, approximately seventy-five percent of all black students attending college in the United States were enrolled at historically black colleges and universities—defined as those established before 1964.
Booker T. Washington’s early emphasis on vocational training eventually gave way to more robust curriculums in the liberal arts and laboratory sciences. In HBCU classrooms and studios, fine arts departments nurtured gifted African Americans eager to articulate their individual genius, as well as their shared cultural heritage. Curated by Dr. Leo Twiggs and featuring 47 works by 41 artists, Elevation from Within pays homage to HBCU alumni and professors whose educational backgrounds chronicle a vital chapter of American history and whose aesthetic achievements have made an indelible mark on this nation’s art.
View more information on the The Johnson Collection website: https://thejohnsoncollection.org/elevation-from-within/.
place, memory & identity: contemporary Korean-American women artists
Richardson Family Art Museum, September 1 – December 15, 2021
place, memory & identity: contemporary Korean-American women artists features recent works of three contemporary Korean-American women artists, In Kyoung Chun, Kakyoung Lee and Jiha Moon. Born and raised in Korea, Chun, Lee, and Moon currently live in the United States and are active in making art. As immigrant artists, sense of place, memory, and culture have helped to shape their artistic identities.
For In Kyoung Chun, home is her place of rest and recovery, and Table illustrates her search for personal and artistic identity in an intimate moment from daily life. A minimalistic depiction of recently-cooked rice on a table evokes different stories Chun wants to tell the viewer. For instance, her choice of saekdong (combination of color strips consisting of primary colors in Korean traditional attire) for rice, which is a primary food ingredient in Korean cuisine even among Korean diaspora in U.S., shows her identity deeply embedded in traditional culture. Fresh steam coming from the pot and table setting at night implies her identity as mother, waiting for family members to join.
Barbed Wire Series by Kakyoung Lee was created from the artist’s childhood memory of walking along the barbed wire fence from the U.S. Army base in her old hometown in South Korea, playing cat’s cradle with her sister against the wall. Lee combines hand-drawn images and prints to construct moving images that reflect the sequence of activities in ordinary life and allude to her search for her identity in the different geographic and cultural milieus through which she has passed in the travels between her two home countries, South Korea and U.S.
Jiha Moon sees herself as a cartographer of cultures and an icon-maker of fictitious worlds, incorporating various sources of inspiration to make her own stories, such as Korean folk art, fortune cookies from Chinese restaurants in America, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s brushstrokes, emoticons, even Southern face jugs and peaches, which are the state fruit of Georgia, where she has lived for the past 15 years. Lucky Monster, Keep Calm Carry On depicts “Grumpy Cat” on top of an imaginative beast, based on the mythical creature “haetae,” and Moon believes this creature wards off evil spirits and brings good fortune.
Linda Hudgins: A Retrospective
Martha Cloud Chapman Gallery, Sandor Teszler Library, September 1 – December 15, 2021
A graduate of Converse College and Rhode Island School of Design, Hudgins spent many years teaching art at Spartanburg Day School, in Botswana during her time at U.S. Peace Corps, and in China. Her attentiveness and honest responsiveness in those years and later has been truly inspirational, seen specifically through the rich colors and intriguing lines and shapes found in her works.
The recent pandemic and its consequent uncertainties greatly affected her life, including her art-making. Locked down in her home studio in Tryon, NC, she looked to art as her meditation, therapy, distraction and more. An array of works on pedestals lends the viewer insight into Hudgins’ methods still ongoing, and a glimpse of a path to a productive future.
Hot Now (annual student art exhibition)
Richardson Family Art Gallery, March 1 – March 31, 2021
Art of Printmaking: Global and Historical Approaches
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 9 – May 16, 2021
The Art of Printmaking: Global and Historical Approaches examines printmaking methods throughout history, from early methods of woodblock printing to contemporary photomechanical techniques. Variety in printing methods have allowed artists to experiment with nuanced techniques for the transmission of their images and to display artistic virtuosity, as is evident in Durer’s engravings and Rembrandt’s etchings. In addition, prints played an important role in society because they disseminate information, political commentary, and art to the masses, thus increasing cross-cultural interactions, as with Cuban political propaganda posters. This exhibition unpacks these techniques and their diverse usages throughout history. Illustrated using works from different eras, countries, and stylistic periods, it captures the technical skill and creative ingenuity found in the printmaking medium.
Curated by Erin Mancini (class of 2021), this exhibition is a culmination of her yearlong art history honors project and is partially funded by SCICU (the South Carolina Independent Colleges and Universities) summer undergraduate research grant in 2020. Several prints on view in the galleries have been generously lent to this exhibition by the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University in Greenville, SC and the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, GA.
From: Mangroves To: Magnolias - MEMORIES OF LANDSCAPES, & LINEAGE OF THE EPHEMERAL
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Jan. 11 – Feb. 28, 2021
From: Mangroves To: Magnolias is a collection of work investigating adaptation and memory within landscapes through digital media and craft. The work presented is inspired by the ability of both mangroves and magnolias to continually grow in adverse environments, and thrive in the spaces at the margins as well as existing in areas of immense current population growth. Utilizing found material, digital artifacts, and collected ephemera the works become adaptive to the landscape of the gallery. Through the use of textiles, digital printing, and multimedia works the artists look to land as allegories for how to negotiate migration and nativism. Moving through time and space the artists connect their upbringings in coastal areas with their migration to the upstate of South Carolina and the past familial movements, presenting a body of work that is transitional, both expanding and decaying to ensure new growth. From items of enchantment to surreal moments the works highlight the feeling of being at home and homesick all in the same breath.
Dr. Harry Stille: dynamic shapes • bold colors • geometrical abstraction
Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts, Nov. 9 – Dec. 18, 2020
An artist as well as an inventor, Dr. Harry Stille served as professor of physical education at Erskine College in Due West, South Carolina, for 34 years before retirement. While continuing to teach part-time, he also returned to serving as mayor of Due West and held the office of a state representative from 1991-2003. He was a member of the Due West Town Council at the time of his death. He exhibited his artwork in one-man shows and conducted children’s art programs for the Abbeville Artist Guild; held patents on pitching and batting pads he designed; and created plans on which the design of the Galloway Center at Erskine College was based. The pieces shown in this exhibition display the sculptural qualities of his work that engage dynamic shapes, bold colors, and geometrical abstraction.
Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection
Richardson Family Art Museum, Sept. 8 – Dec. 18, 2020
“Art is central to my life. Not being able to make or see art would be a major deprivation.” Nell Blaine’s assertion about the centrality—the essentiality—of art to her life has a particular resonance. The Virginia painter’s creative path began early and over the course of her life, she overcame significant barriers in her quest to make and see art, including serious vision problems, polio, and paralysis. And then, there was her gender. In 1957, Blaine was hailed by Life magazine as someone to watch, profiled along with four other emerging painters whom the journalist praised “not as notable women artists but as notable artists who happen to be women.”
Spanning the decades between the late 1890s and early 1960s, this exhibition examines the particularly complex challenges Southern women artists confronted in a traditionally conservative region during a period in which women’s social, cultural, and political roles were being redefined and reinterpreted. How did the variables of historical gender norms, educational barriers, race, regionalism, sisterhood, suffrage, and modernism mitigate and motivate women seeking expression on canvas or in clay? Whether in personal or professional arenas, working from studio space in spare rooms at home or on the world stage, these women made remarkable contributions by fostering future generations of artists through instruction, incorporating new aesthetics into the fine arts, and challenging the status quo.
Peter L. Schmunk: Photographs 2010 – 2020
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 4 – July 31, 2020
A retrospective of the photographer’s creative interests and projects over the past ten years, this exhibition explores the different forms a photograph may take and the ways that photographic images may communicate meaning. Document, vignette, souvenir, ephemeral record, visual poem, abstract sign–the images exhibited here play one or more of those roles. Schmunk’s earliest efforts in photography were primarily dedicated to the subject of landscape, especially wild places, which he viewed from both panoramic and close-up perspectives. He continues to create images of that kind, as seen here in photographs of Looking Glass Rock in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina, all part of an extended project to document that site in comprehensive detail.
Since 2010 Schmunk has developed a strong interest in the ephemera of signage, graffiti, and advertising, especially as found in layered, timeworn condition in urban and industrial sites. His close viewing and tight framing of these subjects is highly selective and often results in images of purely abstract character. The seemingly insignificant marks they contain, however, often suggest meaning through allusion and metaphor. Schmunk has employed strategies of juxtaposition, combination, the addition of words in collaboration with poet Deno Trakas, and, most recently, the inclusion of elements of painting and drawing to augment the content of minimalist or wholly abstract photographic subjects. He seeks to link such images to music, the history of art, the experience of place, and other domains of memory. A full inventory of his photographic work may be found on his website at cultureandlandscape.com.
From Botticelli to Tintoretto: Italian Renaissance Art from the Tobey and Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University
Richardson Family Art Museum, Feb. 4 – May 17, 2020
This exhibition charts the dizzying speed with which Italian Renaissance art developed between the late 15th and late 16th century. Mixtures of Christian subjects and humanist imagery drawn from antiquity are what one would expect from Renaissance art during this era. However, the style shifts rapidly, and artistic daring encouraged by artists, their patrons, and audiences manifest spatial and figural complexities well-represented in these works, as well as varieties in their format and media.
Thanks to generous loans from David and Julie Tobey in New York and the Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University in Greenville, Art History students in Karen Goodchild’s Renaissance Art class will undertake research on actual Renaissance works, and their semester-long projects will be presented in late April and early May.
Quilted Stories
Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts, Feb. 3 – March 21, 2020
This exhibition features quilts of Wofford faculty and staff, displaying storytelling and shared cultural connections. Quilts are curated by Laurel Horton, an internationally acclaimed quilt researcher, author, editor, and lecturer. A catalog of the quilts will also feature each quilt and its story.
This interdisciplinary humanities project celebrates the many uses and meanings of quilts: as a work of art, an individual’s expression, a keeper of history, a healing comforter, an instrument of means, a generational teaching tool, a bonding experience, an accomplishment, a gift, a keepsake, a hobby, and a true craft. It can represent tangible pieces of memories, life and death, grief and joy, and all that lies between. Quilts span centuries and cultures, weaving humanity at every level of social class and race in America.
This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Wofford Cultural Affairs Committee and South Carolina Humanities, a not-for-profit organization; inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture, and heritage.
Gummy Labyrinth by Micah Tiffin
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Jan. 21 – Mar. 6, 2020
Gummy Labyrinth features works by Micah Tiffin, senior in Studio Art and Humanities and a 2019 Whetsell Memorial Fellowship recipient.
Artist’s statement: I remember writing the same sentence hundreds of times over and over on paper. Ironically, I don’t remember what the sentence said. It was probably three lines long, about something I did or said that I shouldn’t have said or done. I was implanted on a park bench, facing away from where the others dug holes to China and chased one another up the slide. Luckily, by now I had learned how to escape into my own space. I daydreamed about playing games and my stuffed animal penguins that waited for me at home. I became an artist early, creating spaces that served as distractions. My installation is an ode to this temporary refuge. My paintings and sculptures exemplify the struggle of reentering the “real world.”
Siendo mujer: a short study of the female experience in South America
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Oct. 17 – Dec. 20, 2019
As the 35th Presidential International Scholar, Lydia Estes attempted to uncover the visual representation of “la mujer,” or “the woman,” in the South American countries of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Peru. Siendo mujer means “being a woman,” and Estes’ exhibition, Siendo mujer: a short study of the female experience in South America represents the conversations she shared with resilient, creative women for whom art plays a significant role in their female experiences, and vice versa--for whom the female experience plays a significant role in their art. It is further a collection of their artwork, also including her own photographs of them, their spaces, and moments which contribute to the story each is trying to tell through her work.
LaToya Ruby Frazier and “The Notion of Family”
Richardson Family Art Museum (lower level), Sept. 3 - Dec. 14, 2019
“I see myself as an artist and a citizen that’s documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that’s happening, because it has to be documented.”
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier was looking at a history of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and noticed that the book omitted African-Americans entirely. Her 2014 series of photographs “The Notion of Family,” from which the three works in this show are taken, is her resistance to the “continued omission, erasure, invisibility and silence surrounding African-American sacrifices to Braddock and the American grand narrative.” The images, taken over 12 years, chronicle her own family in Braddock, especially focusing on herself and her mother and grandmother. Braddock is a town that has struggled for decades due to the loss of steel industry jobs, the high incidence of pollution–borne illnesses, population loss, and redlining. Although race may have initially inspired her series, Frazier says her work points to societal issues beyond race: “This is a race and class issue that is affecting everyone. It is not a black problem, it is an American problem, it is a global problem. Braddock is everywhere.”
By including herself in the photographs, Frazier moves the work beyond traditional social documentary photography, in which, generally, an outsider records the concerns of another. Instead, in these images, Frazier and her family work together to document their history, and that interaction seems to offer some hope, showing that even as governments may turn aside, families provide support for each other. But Frazier’s series is titled in a way that problematizes that idea. Its title refers to Edward Steichen’s “The Family of Man,” a huge exhibition organized in 1955 at the Museum of Modern Art. In that earlier show, 500 images from 68 countries emphasized those things that bind all humanity together in one family, an idealistic notion, and one that flattened cultural difference, but one that also has been lost as gaps between poor and rich increase and as social welfare programs diminish. Frazier’s photography points out the way America has scaled back the understanding of family to apply only to biological connectedness, to the detriment of us all. Wielding her camera, as she says, as “a weapon” of change, performing and collaborating with her family and her community, Frazier resets a narrative and retells a history, actively.
Frazier has her MFA from Syracuse University, and is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a MacArthur fellowship in 2015. She has exhibited widely, including in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in a solo show A Haunted Capital at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013. In 2014, Frazier’s book The Notion of Family received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. Recently, Frazier has chronicled the Flint Water Crisis and contributed images to the New York Times project, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crisis.”
The three photographs by Frazier are on loan from the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Ga.
Southern Gothic: Literary Intersections with Art from the Johnson Collection
Richardson Family Art Museum (upper level) | Sept. 3 – Dec. 14, 2019
From the haunting novels of William Faulkner to the gritty short stories of Flannery O’Connor, the Southern Gothic literary tradition has exhumed and examined the American South’s unique mystery, contradictions, and dark humor. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, American writers, epitomized by Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, sought to reinterpret the Gothic imagination of their European counterparts, dramatizing the cultures and characters of a region in the midst of civil war and its tumultuous aftermath. Decades later, a new generation of authors—including Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Toni Morrison—wove Gothic elements into their own narratives, exploring the complexities of a changing social terrain and the ancient spirits that linger in its corners.
With works drawn exclusively from the Johnson Collection, Southern Gothic illuminates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists employed a potent visual language to transcribe the tensions between the South’s idyllic aura and its historical realities. Often described as a mood or sensibility rather than a strict set of thematic or technical conventions, features of the Southern Gothic can include horror, romance, and the supernatural. While academic painters such as Charles Fraser and Thomas Noble conveyed the genre’s gloomy tonalities in their canvases, Aaron Douglas and Harry Hoffman grappled with the injustices of a modern world. Other artists, including Alexander Brook and Eugene Thomason, investigated prevailing stereotypes of rural Southerners—a trope often accentuated in Southern Gothic literature. Collectively, these images demonstrate that definitions of the Gothic are neither monolithic nor momentary, inviting us, instead to contemplate how the Southern Gothic legacy continues to inform our understanding of the American South.
Props: Personal identities in the Portrait Photography of Richard Samuel Roberts
Richardson Family Art Museum (lower level) | Sept. 3 – Dec. 14, 2019
Richard Samuel Roberts was an African-American artist who opened a photography studio in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1922. For the next 14 years, he took portraits of Columbia’s citizens, writing that “no other gift causes so much real and lasting joy as the gift of your photograph.”
In the works exhibited here, as with most portrait images, the subjects wear carefully-chosen clothes and often hold or appear beside objects or props. The term “props” brings to mind those things used in the theater to establish the identity and even the meaning of a particular scene. But such objects may also be used to convey the “properties” of a character, supplementing the appearance of an actor-- or a portrait sitter-- with additional layers of information and meaning. This exhibition invites us to consider the ways that the props included, presumably items or garb chosen by the sitters themselves, tell us something about the subjects’ self-identities, their community standing, their connections to social groups, or their aspirations. “Props” is sometimes used as a contemporary slang term to mean “proper respect,” and the objects and outfits seen in these photographs frequently highlight the respect the subjects are due for their professional and social attainments. Sometimes, however, the props reveal more personal desires and interests, things outside the conventions of portraiture that are related to the sitter’s inner self rather than their outer achievements.
The photographs in the exhibit are on loan from the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, S.C.
A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Celebrating Spartanburg’s History
Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts | July 30 – Oct. 12, 2019
A Tale of Two Cemeteries: Celebrating Spartanburg’s History is an exhibition based on the semester-long project of Dr. Helen Dixon and her students collaborating with the Spartanburg County Historical Association. Through the lens of two historical cemeteries of Walnut Grove and Fredonia Plantations, Spartanburg’s local and regional history and culture will be better understood. The exhibition runs through Saturday, Oct. 12.
Exhibited digitized materials are provided by the Spartanburg County Historical Association and the project has been generously funded by Council of Independent Colleges (CIC).
Otherness²: Hiding in Plain Sight by Lee Ann Harrison-Houser
Richardson Family Art Gallery, Sept. 10- Oct. 12, 2019
Otherness²: Hiding in Plain Sight explores the outsider’s perspectives and the impact of “Othering.” During the creative process, Harrison-Houser pursues authenticity and begins to reveal untold stories in her work. However, she instinctively hides within the mark-making with her use of symbolism, sgraffito, and abstraction. Layer after layer of gesso and paint erase her disclosures. Subsequently, the art installation shares these stories only in a type of Hide-and-Seek game for the viewer. For deeper connections, the viewer physically moves to a separate space to match the conceptual titles back to the abstract squares. Through this physical movement and mindfulness, the storyteller role shifts away from the artist and moves to the viewer to create awareness, conversation, and the momentum for change.
Clouds - A study of light and dark in moving form
Richardson Family Art Gallery | June 11 - Aug. 31
The Richardson Family Art Gallery features Clouds – A study of light and dark in moving form until Aug. 31, featuring the recent works by Josh Holt. Nine charcoal drawings started out as basic studies as Holt wanted to test the level of his technique by mastering (to a degree) the ever-exchanging forms of clouds and their striking spectrum of light and dark.
Recent Acquisitions 2017-2019
Richardson Family Art Museum | June 11 - Aug. 3
The Richardson Family Art Museum has acquired objects of cultural import to better serve as a valuable educational resource that strengthens, supports, and contributes to academic research on campus in different pedagogical disciplines. Since 2017, the museum has acquired more than 100 works of art through gifts, purchase or bequest, some of which are featured in this exhibition. Spanning classical Mayan ceramics to the early twentieth-century portrait of a South Carolinian Congressman, this exhibition features objects of different cultural and social contexts, which were created for devotional, social, aesthetic, or practical purposes.
Sacred and Secular: Netherlandish Baroque Paintings from Regional Collections
Richardson Family Art Museum, lower level | Feb. 5 - May 19, 2019
Dynamic and theatrical, but also down-to-earth, moralizing and sometimes comic. Triumphant, grandiose and propagandistic, and yet also intimate and inward. All of these terms are applicable to the art of the European Baroque, the cultural epoch of the 17th and 18th centuries, which produced an unprecedented richness and variety in creative expression. Complex and conflicting forces across the political, religious, economic and social spheres of life account for this artistic abundance. The Netherlands, a major center of artistic production during the Baroque period, was home to many of these contrasts and conflicts within its relatively small geographic boundaries along the northern coast of Europe. These diverse cultural forces are evident, in varying ways and degrees, in a selection of paintings generously loaned to Wofford College by the Museum and Gallery at Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.; the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, S.C.; and the Robicsek Family Collection in Charlotte, N.C.
Graphic Solidarity: The Internationalist Outlook of the Cuban Revolution
Richardson Family Art Museum, upper level | Feb 5. - May 19, 2019
This exhibition features posters produced in Cuba during the period following the revolution through the 1980s. The highlighted posters focus on Cuba’s efforts to spread the messages of its revolution worldwide and to inspire others in the fight against oppression stemming from the legacy of imperialism and colonialism. Primarily published by the OSPAAAL organization based in Havana, these works helped to facilitate the internationalist outlook and message of the Cuban revolution through their inclusion in the Tricontinental magazine, which reached people in more than 60 countries worldwide. The works in the exhibition are on loan from the collection of Lindsay Webster of Spartanburg, S.C. Curated by Katie McCorkle, class of 2019, this exhibition is a culmination of her yearlong honors project for art history and government. A Curator’s Talk will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in the Richardson Family Art Museum.
There Was Always Tomorrow: The 2019 Senior Capstone Exhibition
Richardson Family Art Gallery | May 1 – May 19, 2019
The Wofford College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to present “There Was Always Tomorrow: The 2019 Senior Capstone Exhibition,” which features works from five senior Studio Art Minors in the Wofford College Department of Art and Art History. The work included in “There Was Always Tomorrow” expands on conversations of preservation and collection. Themes within the exhibition include the alteration of material ephemera and the dissection of past experiences through the creation of visual artifacts.
The Ninth Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition
Richardson Family Art Gallery | Feb. 5 – March 30, 2019
The Department of Art and Art History is pleased to host the ninth Annual Juried Student Art Exhibition in the Richardson Family Art Museum. This exhibition brings together works of visual art created by Wofford students over the past three semesters. The works on view were selected from approximately 150 submissions in a wide variety of media. Though the exhibition was open to all Wofford students, whether enrolled in art courses at the college or not, the works submitted and chosen reflect, in large part, the courses that have been offered recently in the media of drawing, painting, printmaking, pottery, photography and three-dimensional design and the projects undertaken in those courses.
This year’s jurors were Ambrin Ling and Marisa Adesman, Hub-City artists-in-residence.
Stoppages by Michael Webster
Richardson Family Art Gallery | Feb 5. - March 30, 2019
Sculptures in this exhibition are a collection of fragments, contradictions and run-on thoughts about the physical world. They emerge from a fascination with systems of the built environment and objects that occupy our space. When Michael Webster, assistant professor of art and art history, collects found things, he often lives with them for years before incorporating them into a sculpture, adding something to their long-established history. A faded, peeled-up yellow road line is the material embodiment of the syntax that organizes movement, but can we also imagine what could exist beneath the road line, and allow an absurd moment to unravel the margins of the system?