This summer I had the great opportunity to be involved with PR and marketing at the Gibbes Museum of Art. I’ve known for time that my interest in art would lead me to the art management realm. However, up until I started this internship, this was based more on theory than experience. I had no idea what was involved in the promotion, preservation, and upkeep of an art collection and a museum. As a student of art history with no formal studies in management, it is easy to focus solely on the interpretation and understanding of art and somewhat forget about the homes in which these objects are housed. And that is what the Gibbes feels like for the Charleston and Lowcountry area—a home for art that celebrates, preserves, and cultivates an understanding in the artistic identity of the south. The Gibbes’ Beaux-Arts building is a work of art itself, and it was fascinating to learn about the roles of the people who are responsible for the smooth operation of this museum.

Gibbes Museum of Art Twitter feed.

During the summer, one of my main duties included managing and creating some of the social outreach efforts—namely on Facebook and Twitter. These sites are excellent tools to get information out to the public in a quick and provocative way. I researched and developed short posts to connect the art or history of the Gibbes to current events or interests. Through this process I have become very familiar with the museum and its collection in a multidimensional way—not only is a post about highlighting information about a work of art or an event, it is also about creating conversations around Charleston’s cultural community, past and present. It’s always great to see responses to these posts and know that there are others out there who find these connections just as intriguing as I do!

B.B. King, Newport, 1968, by Dick Waterman (b. 1935), pigment print on watercolor paper, © Dick Waterman.

Another large project that I had this summer was the creation of promotional ideas for social media for the upcoming fall exhibits, Sound and Vision: Monumental Rock and Roll Photography and Willard Hirsch: Charleston’s Sculptor. For Sound and Vision, I researched not only the famous musicians who are featured in the pictures, but also the photographers who captured the unforgettable images of these stars. In many cases, these photographers were partly responsible for the artist’s fame. Dick Waterman (b. 1935)—who photographed Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and B.B. King—also worked to revitalize the blues movement by seeking these artists out, recording them, and becoming a lifelong friend. Other times, photographers were hired for a shoot or two and ultimately captured the iconic photo that immediately comes to mind when thinking of a musician. Who can think of The Doors and Jim Morrison without picturing the black and white image by Joel Brodsky (1939–2007) of Morrison with arms outstretched, staring out at the viewer? Interestingly, some of the photographers describe these as dumb-luck shots, and were surprised by the monumental responses to them.

Though learning about the musicians featured in the photos was interesting, I was more fascinated with the accounts of the photographers. We usually don’t hear the stories from behind the camera when looking at portraiture. Gered Mankowitz (b. 1946), who photographed Jimi Hendrix in 1967, describes the relationship between photographer and musician as one that relies heavily on trust. These photographers were tasked not only with the capturing the likeness of their subjects, but also with conveying a sense of the musician’s personality and persona. I can’t wait to see the photographs in person and I’m sure it will be an incredibly impressive exhibition! Make sure to keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter for fun facts about the works of art on view this fall, and the related programs and events. Please join in the conversation!

—Alice Van Arsdale, museum relations intern and guest blogger

adminlasley :: Sep.08.2012 :: Behind the scenes, Exhibitions, Programs :: No Comments »

Cover of Alice Ravenel Huger Smith's sketchbook, ca. 1920s.

An artist’s sketchbook can offer intimate glimpses into his or her creative process. These graphic experiments and doodles reveal interesting aspects of an artist’s training, travels, and sources of inspiration. Currently three artists’ sketchbooks are on view in the Gibbes galleries alongside their finished works including those of Charles Fraser (1782–1860), Prentiss Taylor (1907–1991), and Mary Whyte (b.1953; sketchbook on loan with the exhibition Mary Whyte: Working South). Sketchbooks are as varied as the artists who create them and the Gibbes Archives is fortunate to have a broad selection representing key artists in the permanent collection.

A View of the Church in Saint Andrew's Parish, from untitled sketchbook, 1796–1805, by Charles Fraser

The Gibbes owns several of Charles Fraser’s sketchbooks. Known primarily for his compelling miniature portraits these sketchbooks—begun when Fraser was just fourteen years old—are mostly comprised of watercolor or pen and ink landscape sketches depicting the plantation homes of friends and family, and rural parish churches.

Sketches of sitters, ca. 1847, by Joseph Jackson (American, 1796–1850)

A bound scrapbook, in which miniature painter Joseph Jackson (1796–1850) collected sketches of his sitters, provides important information about Jackson’s working methods. Some sketches appear as the initial sketch in pencil and concentrate primarily on the facial features. Others, on cards and occasionally on ivory, are more fully worked up. Jackson may have used this latter group to entice prospective clients, as he stated in an announcement in the Courier, “. . . he will be happy to exhibit specimens of his painting, to those Ladies and Gentlemen who may favor him with their calls. Miniature likenesses highly finished on ivory of the smallest sizes, suitable for lockets, breast pins, etc.”

A page from a sketchbook, ca. 1765–1769, by Henry Benbridge (American, 1743–1812)

The drawings found in Henry Benbridge’s (1743–1812) sketchbook were made between 1765 and 1769 while the artist traveled through Italy. They reveal his interest in antiquity and depict images he took from antique cameos, vases, statuary, and architecture. Meanwhile, Prentiss Taylor’s sketchbook contains numerous pencil drawings he made during his first trip to Charleston in 1933. He later claimed in a letter, “I arrived on the Clyde-Mallory Line Steamer about the end of May 1933… I was lent the Pink House on Chalmers Street & I was able to stay until Labor Day. I spent most of my time sketching, up one side of the street & down the other.” Many of the sketches seen in his book are reflected in his final lithographs.

Magnolia Leaves from an Alice Ravenel Huger Smith sketchbook, ca. 1920s

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876–1958) kept numerous sketchbooks that she carried on long walks through the countryside to record different topics and locations. She closely studied all aspects of nature from leaves and grasses to birds in flight, and made drawings of each from various perspectives.

A gallery view of Whyte's tools and sketchbooks on display in Mary Whyte: Working South.

For art historians these sketchbooks are a window to an artist’s inspirations and processes. I am personally fascinated by the artist’s notes to themselves that accompany many of the drawings, as well as their steadfast focus on capturing certain elements of a subject through repeated sketching attempts. Sketching is integral to an artist’s development and I love walking through our galleries seeing young artists with their own sketchbooks finding inspiration in the paintings on view. Do you carry a sketchbook or journal to capture ideas or occurrences in your day-to-day life?

—Sara Arnold, curator of collections, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributesara :: Aug.16.2012 :: Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: No Comments »

Experience Meeting, Macedonia A.M.E., 1934

This summer a small exhibition of works by the fascinating American Scene lithographer, Prentiss Taylor, will be featured in Gallery H at the Gibbes. Born in Washington, D.C., Prentiss Taylor (1907–1991) began his art studies at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, followed by painting classes under Charles Hawthorne in Provincetown, Rhode Island, and training at the Art Students League in New York. In 1931, Taylor joined a lithography class at the League and quickly discovered great satisfaction working in this graphic medium, later recalling, “with the first magic feeling of the crayon on the fine grain of the stone, I knew that I was at home in lithography.” He produced 142 lithographs over the course of his career.

Carpet Bagger’s Grandeur, Sullivan’s Island, 1937

In addition to his interest in the visual arts, Taylor interacted and collaborated with many writers and musicians. His time in New York during the late 1920s and early 1930s coincided with the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance and Taylor was one of a few white artists active in this literary and artistic movement. Among his close friends and collaborators during this period were photographer and writer Carl Van Vecthen, and poet Langston Hughes.

   
Charleston Battery, 1934                                     Prentiss Taylor, 1933, by Carl Van Vecthen

At age twenty, Taylor met Charleston novelist, Josephine Pinckney, at the MacDowell artists’ colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Their ensuing friendship prompted Taylor to visit Charleston in 1933; “I arrived on the Clyde-Mallory Line Steamer about the end of May 1933…I was lent the Pink House on Chalmers Street & I was able to stay until Labor Day. I spent most of my time sketching, up one side of the street & down the other.” Taylor returned to the city in 1934 under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) a predecessor to the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. He executed numerous prints and several watercolors of Charleston and the surrounding Lowcountry—some for the PWAP and some for himself. He maintained close ties to the city for the remainder of his life.

This exhibition featuring several of Taylors lithographs and watercolors of Charleston will be on view until September 1, 2012.

—Sara Arnold, curator of collections, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributesara :: Jun.07.2012 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: No Comments »

By now you have probably heard about our current Main Gallery exhibition, Mary Whyte: Working South. The exhibition has been written up in magazines, newspapers, online newsletters, and even has a billboard on I-26. And if you have seen the exhibition, you know that all of the attention is merited. Working South includes fifty watercolor paintings and sketches that depict blue-collar workers across the American South. The portraits are astonishingly beautiful, capturing weathered hands and timeworn faces with incredible detail and sensitivity.

As our curatorial team unpacked the paintings for installation, I knew the works would be beautiful, but was overwhelmed to see them in person. The scale, the color, the sharp detail contrasted with delicate washes—I couldn’t stop staring at the paintings. And the works are made all the more stunning by the exquisite frames, handcrafted by Whyte’s husband and master gilder, Smith Coleman. Each frame is unique to the painting, picking up on a subtle nuance of the work. The frame surrounding a portrait of a tobacco farmer has the rough hewn feel of an old barn, and the frame for a portrait of a waterman is embedded with fishing net, layered with silver leaf. This exhibition has so many wonderful details to absorb, down to Whyte’s sketchbook, brushes, and palette used to create the paintings.

Handcrafted by Whyte’s husband and master gilder, Smith Coleman, the frame for a portrait of a waterman is embedded with fishing net, layered with silver leaf.

So if you haven’t been to the Gibbes in a few weeks, make sure you get here before Working South closes on September 9. Join us on July 8 for Working South Sunday, when the museum will be open free of charge from 1 to 5pm. And you never know, you may see the artist herself wandering through the gallery!

—Pam Wall, curator of exhibitions, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributepam :: May.31.2012 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions :: No Comments »

As an intern reporting to Sara Arnold, Curator of Collections, I spent the fall at the Gibbes adapting text from the book The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty: Woodstock to Charleston for the exhibit The Art of Alfred Hutty: Woodstock in Charleston. Below are my seven reasons this show is one not to miss:

1. Numbers don’t lie! A banner number—over 400—Gibbes members who came out for the opening of the retrospective cannot be wrong…

2. Alfred Hutty was a foremost figure of the Charleston Renaissance. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, a period with more than it’s share of cataclysmic activity around the world, the Holy City was a hotbed of artistic activity, both home-grown and migrant.

Jenkins Band (no. 2), ca. 1933, by Alfred Hutty. Drypoint on paper, 10.5 x 9.75 in. Gibbes Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Alfred Hutty (1955.07.24)

3. Yet, Hutty is UNLIKE many Charleston Renaissance artists. Non-native Alfred Hutty (American, 1877–1954) drew attention to scenes and subjects that his local contemporaries did not. One such subject… the Jenkins Orphanage Band.

4. Hutty was prolific! In his lifetime Hutty produced over 230 works in print, and countless watercolors and oil paintings.

5. The artist’s technical acuity won him high acclaim. Hutty co-founded the Charleston Etcher’s Club and was the first American inducted into the prestigious British Society of the Graphic Arts, amongst other high praise.

Day

6. Genius use of tonality. “Day’s End,” with its exemplary use of dark and light is a must see painting.

adminlasley :: Feb.22.2012 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: 1 Comment »

Portraits have always played a significant role in the art of Charleston, and the Gibbes collection. The very first work of art accessioned into the collection was a portrait of Benjamin Smith by Jeremiah Theus, an important artist working during the mid eighteenth century. Fast forward some 250 years, and the portrait tradition remains very much alive in Charleston, thanks in part to another artist in our collection, Jill Hooper.

This winter, the Gibbes is showcasing Hooper’s extraordinary talent with the solo exhibition Jill Hooper: Contemporary Realist. On view in the Rotunda through April 22, the show includes landscape and still-life paintings, but primarily focuses on portraiture. Each likeness is beautifully painted, and conveys powerful emotion. A number of the paintings are paired with preparatory drawings that reveal Hooper’s working process, and her mastery of charcoal. The drawings are simply breathtaking. Another highlight is the group of five self-portraits included in the exhibition. Painted over a span of eleven years, they shed light on her development as an artist and tackle her own struggles and insecurities. Hooper’s work is honest and full of life and beautifully expresses what it means to be human.

If you want to learn more about Hooper’s work, please join me for a tour of the exhibition on February 16 or March 15 at 2:30pm.

—Pam Wall, curator of exhibitions, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributepam :: Jan.27.2012 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: No Comments »

Our current exhibition, Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art, features over 30 groundbreaking women artists, each with their own compelling story and artistic vision. Included among this group is Charleston’s own Corrie McCallum. Throughout her long and productive career, McCallum was a fixture in the Charleston art community. As a result, the Gibbes collection includes many of her works, a selection of which are featured above.

McCallum was born in Sumter, South Carolina in 1914. She attended the University of South Carolina and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Following an extended period of study in Mexico with her husband, fellow artist William Halsey (American, 1915–1999), McCallum and her family settled in Charleston in 1942. Though she chose to live in Charleston, McCallum stayed current with the New York art scene. She followed the development of Abstract Expressionism and incorporated the style into her work, as demonstrated by paintings such as View of Toledo and Boats of Nazare that feature gestural brushwork and reduction of forms.

Under the guidance of Corrie McCallum, the Gibbes created and conducted the first comprehensive art appreciation program for Charleston County public school students.

In addition to her vast body of work, McCallum made significant contributions to the Charleston art community as an educator. She held education positions at several institutions, including the Telfair Museum of Art, Gibbes Museum of Art, College of Charleston, and Newberry College, and throughout her life remained an outspoken advocate for the visual arts.

McCallum’s painting View of Toledo will remain on view in Breaking Down Barriers through January 8, 2012—don’t miss this great exhibition! Have you already seen Breaking Down Barriers? Leave a comment here to share your experience with us.

—Pam Wall, curator of exhibitions, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributepam :: Dec.02.2011 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: No Comments »

Today, the Gibbes opened a new exhibition called Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art. The exhibition takes a hard look at the history of art, exploring why there were so few early female artists, and how the tide has changed over the past century. The subject matter is compelling, and every object in the show is from the Gibbes collection. The fact that the Gibbes can tell the story of 300 years of women in art is noteworthy. Our collection is vast and includes many treasures of American art, including the largest public collection of portraits by Henrietta Johnston, the first female professional artist in America. The Johnston portraits are a real point of pride for the Gibbes, and five of her beautiful pastels will be included in this exhibition—a rare treat for our museum visitors! But this exhibition offers so much more. From miniature portraits to photography, sculpture, and abstract paintings, the exhibition highlights a wide variety of work, culminating with the stellar contributions of female artists working in Charleston today.

Want to hear more about these groundbreaking women? Join me on November 3 or December 1 at 2:30pm for an exhibition tour, free with museum admission.

—Pam Wall, curator of exhibitions, Gibbes Museum of Art

Check the Gibbes calendar for related events.

Read more about the exhibition in Pam Wall’s article in the Autumn/Winter 2011 issue of Antiques & Fine Art Magazine.

Join in the fun with Women in Art Wednesdays on the Gibbes’ Facebook page. Test your knowledge of women in art with our weekly trivia questions. Hint: you might find some answers in this post and related article.

contributepam :: Oct.28.2011 :: Exhibitions :: No Comments »

Since Margaret Bourke-White’s iconic images will be featured in both of the Gibbes’ upcoming exhibitions—Breaking Down Barriers: 300 Years of Women in Art and Camera Works: Masters in Photography—we thought her groundbreaking career worthy of the spotlight!

Margaret Bourke-White studied photography at Columbia University under renowned photographer Clarence H. White. She opened her own studio in Cleveland in the 1920s and found early artistic success creating images in factories and other industrial environments. She was conscious of modernist compositional techniques, and had a unique ability to find beauty in the raw materials associated with machinery—as is exemplified in her 1927 image, Piston Rods. However, from the outset of her career, Bourke-White was interested in using photography to examine social issues and she quickly broke into the male-dominated field of photojournalism.

She was a woman of many firsts. In 1929, Bourke-White was hired as the first staff photographer for Fortune magazine. She was also one of the first of four photojournalist hired by Life magazine and one of her photographs appeared on the magazine’s first cover in 1936. Bourke-White traveled throughout the world and was the first-ever Western photographer allowed in the Soviet Union. She photographed some of the twentieth century’s most notable moments, including the liberation of German concentration camps in 1945, and the release of Mahatma Gandhi from prison in 1946.

Bourke-White traveled through the American south in the 1930s. Like many of the famed photographers of the era—such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Peter Sekaer—she worked to capture the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Many of her images from this experience were included in the publication, You Have Seen Their Faces, a collaborative project with her future husband, author Erskine Caldwell.

—Sara Arnold, curator of collections, Gibbes Museum of Art

Breaking Down Barrier: 300 Years of Women in Art and Camera Works: Masters in Photography both open on October 28, 2011

contributesara :: Oct.21.2011 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: 4 Comments »

The Gibbes has an amazing collection of 10,000 objects. With so many objects and only so much gallery space, at any given time, the vast majority of our collection remains safely tucked away in storage. But that doesn’t mean we can’t share it online! This post is one in what will be a series of artist spotlights, highlighting a variety of treasures from the Gibbes collection.

In honor of this summer’s focus on vernacular art (see my last post from July), I have chosen to spotlight South Carolina artist Sam Doyle (1906–1985). Doyle was an African-American vernacular artist from St. Helena Island, near Beaufort, and he found artistic inspiration within his community. Settled by the descendants of African American slaves after the Civil War, the residents of St. Helena Island remained largely secluded from the mainland through the mid-twentieth century. This isolation allowed residents to preserve many of the folk traditions rooted in their African heritage. Elements of Gullah culture, oral histories of Southern slavery, and Christian iconography greatly influence Doyle’s work. He is best known for his portraits which most frequently portray significant figures living on St. Helena Island. Using found objects, such as sheets of tin roofing or wood paneling as his canvas, Doyle created full-body portraits that often include text describing the subject’s importance to local culture. The Gibbes owns four paintings by Doyle, three of which you can see above.

And if you like Sam Doyle’s work, you should also check out our current exhibition in the Main Gallery, The Creative Spirit: Vernacular Art from the Gadsden Arts Center. It features work by artists who, like Doyle, are self-taught and live in the rural south. The exhibition closes on October 16, so you have a few more weeks to get here. Godzilla will be waiting!

—Pam Wall, Curator of Exhibitions, Gibbes Museum of Art

contributepam :: Sep.22.2011 :: Artist Spotlight, Exhibitions, Permanent Collection :: 1 Comment »