Charleston Airport

The little brick airport in Charleston, SC, years ago (they've since remodeled and done a nice job). Back in the day it looked a little like an Applebee's might if you removed all the "pieces of flair" from the walls, or maybe some sort of state-run laundromat.

Dog

A dog sketched at the Charleston Farmer's Market.

Sketch of a Copper Pitcher by Ciana Pullen

Sketch of a Copper Pitcher, by Ciana Pullen, 2013. Felt tip pen. Sketched from a shelf of pretty knick knacks at a coffee shop called Kudu in Charleston, SC.

Denmark Vesey (born Telemaque)

Update: In June 2015 Emanuel AME, the church discussed in this post, was attacked by a white supremacist who killed nine people in an act of terrorism, on the 193rd anniversary of Vesey's uprising.

This essay, written purely as an amateur hobby, has grown unexpectedly popular as an historical resource. So, I've continued to edit and add pertinent information over time for any who may find it useful. Countless real historians have written far better material than I have here; I wrote this instead as a response to the surprising lack of casual popular knowledge, especially in Charleston. Specifically, I felt important aspects of his legacy weren't often being linked or given crucial context in the blogs and newspapers that the everyday person is most likely to read. Most commonly misunderstood is this: because of the silence of 1820s press and vigorous erasure of Vesey's legacy by panicked authorities, one cannot find out much for sure about the man himself. One must shift one's thinking and approach official historic sources just as one might regard the state-run news in some totalitarian country far away-- because for many, that's just what Charleston was.

Black Charlestonian Denmark Vesey (born Telemaque) was hanged at dawn in 1822, accused of organizing and very nearly executing what would have been the largest slave revolt in US history. His story is still controversial today, and I've chosen him as my latest subject for a portrait drawing for Black History Month:

Denmark Vesey, by Ciana Pullen, 2014. Charcoal, 14 x 17." Drawn entirely from imagination. You may reproduce this image for noncommercial purposes only, and you must include easily visible accreditation (i.e. my name) and a link back to this site. [Image description follows at the end of this post.]

He was born in St. Thomas or possibly Africa in 1767 and spent his youth enslaved on the island until one day in 1781, at age 14, when he was pulled aside and marched at gunpoint with 300 other enslaved people to the slave ship of Captain Joseph Vesey.

Vesey sold Telemaque for hard labor on a sugar-cane plantation in French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), but his purchaser forced Vesey to take the boy back when they discovered his epilleptic fits (possibly faked, as they were never known to recur). Vesey, then 34 years old, enjoyed his company, and possibly because his own parents had died when he was the boy's age, he acted as both master and guardian for Telemaque (who was appropriately named for the son of seafaring explorer Odysseus). He made Telemaque his personal assistant and interpreter for the next three years on the ship, teaching him to read and write.

Captain Vesey, who was born in Bermuda, had previously purchased land in Charleston and fought with the rebelling Carolinian Patriots in the American Revolution. Recognized as a courageous fighter whose expertise of the coastline allowed for clandestine navigation, Capt. Vesey would likely have shared these stories with Telemaque. As shocking as Telemaque's 1822 trial for insurrection would later be, one must remember that in 1781-3 he was entering an American society where just a few short years before, ordinary men, women and children had openly engaged in guerrilla warfare to overthrow their colonial overlords, in which many Black people had participated.

Captain Vesey settled in Charleston, SC, in 1783, which was then a major port for the slave trade, to become a ship chandler and slave broker. By this time Telemaque was called Denmark Vesey.

Urban slave life in Charleston was nothing like plantation life or even slavery in other Southern cities. The 1820 Census listed only 11,654 White people in the City, outnumbered by 12,652 enslaved and 1,475 free Black people, and surrounded by many tens of thousands of rural plantation slaves. A mere 8-9% of those White people controlled Charleston's wealth and political power. By Vesey's arrival a state of fear and constant subjugation of Black people had gripped the city for nearly a century. Awareness of how tenuous their control really was, only grew in light of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, which resulted from a massive successful slave revolt. The ensuing Black rule in Haiti shook the slave-owning world. 

Enslaved Black people and White people lived in close quarters, as crowded narrow plots of land contained mansions or smaller rowhouses for "the Family" of White people with slave quarters standing separately in the back. Strict codes  of behavior for "house slaves" ensured the two never intermingled, and that a free neighborhood could double as a police state for Black people.

The exterior of the Aiken-Rhett House slave quarters, built 1820. An unusually "state of the art" building for the grand house, its arrangement is nonetheless customary for tightly packed, highly regimented urban slave dwellings. Living quarters were on the second floor; kitchen and washrooms were ground floor. [Image shows a long two-story grey stucco building with forest green windows and shutters lining it like a prison]. Photo via.

The interior of the bare-bones Aiken-Rhett House slave quarters (or barracks, really). People would have been cram-packed into these rooms. Privacy was scarce. Photo via.

For instance, regulations for enslaved Black people included strict curfews and laws against walking with a cane unless infirm, wearing nice clothes in public, playing an instrument, smoking, cursing, dancing without city council or owners' approval, or making any "joyful demonstration." Slaves were often sent out to workhouses for "corrections," where people were forced to work a treadmill, placed in irons or whipped, a service for which the slave-owner paid $0.25.

A man in a historic photograph reveals the scars on his back from whipping. Photo via.

Illustration of a slave auction in Charleston (I think I recognize this street corner as a modern day bus stop). [Historic illustration shows the turmoil of a crowded auction and a Black family and White auctioneer on a platform on the sidewalk].

Some owners "hired out" their enslaved skilled workers and craftsmen, who were either rented directly from their owners by other free people and allowed, sometimes, to live independently while working these jobs, or enslaved skilled workers who essentially paid to lease their own bodies or time from their "masters" and earned their own money temporarily. The second practice, called "self-hire," was swiftly outlawed as subversive, but widely practiced anyway. So convenient did slave owners find the practice, "badge laws" were enacted to regulate it by issuing heavily taxed metal tags to self-hirers. (Today the surviving metal badges are subject to a controversial high-priced private commodities trade, as local artist Ben Sivells stopped by to inform me while I drew Vesey's portrait at the Farmer's Market.) Other enslaved people ran the affairs of a part of their "master's" property or "trust," effectively living independently, though this was also illegal. This was sometimes practiced by free Black people who were forced to hold friends or family nominally as slaves, even husbands and wives, constituting a substantial minority of the enslaved people owned by wealthy free Black people.

Joseph Vesey allowed Denmark to practice self-hire as a carpenter until November 9, 1799, when Denmark won $1500 in a street lottery and bought his freedom. I repeat, he won $1500 in a street lottery and bought his freedom.

Map of Charleston, 1849. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Vesey set up his own business as a carpenter, which would become enormously successful with a large Black clientele, and moved to an area of the Charleston Peninsula called the Neck. In those days Boundary Street (modern day Calhoun) was the official City Limits, but people had begun settling north of Boundary anyway. With official police and patrol jurisdiction north of Boundary patchy and unsure, and with abundant cheap land in the reputedly lawless new area, working class White people, free Black people and some Native American people began settling there in large numbers. White citizens soon formed their own night patrol in parts of the Neck.

The Denmark Vesey House, 56 Bull Street (near the Coming Street neighborhood of free Black residents), was identified in the 1970s and is still listed as a historic landmark. However in the 1980s archivists found it was built in the 1830s-50s and likely five houses down from his rented home, which is probably demolished. Local real estate listings still call these types of houses, often 400-800 square feet, "freedman cottages." Image via Wikipedia. [Image description: Small white house on a tiny shaded lot with black shutters and a front porch with small Greek columns. Entire building is the shape of a giant clapboard Lego.]

By the late 1700s officials had complained of urban enslaved people "going myrtle berry picking" in the Neck, or trading rum and goods with nearby rural enslaved people. Enslaved people who escaped from the City would often go there to pass themselves off as free, particularly if they were literate or skilled. Hired out and self-hired slaves were usually forced to reside independently in the City wherever they could find spare space, above garages or in unused corners of sheds. But in the Neck they could build illicit (and illegal) tenements and shacks.

Agostino Brunias, "Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape," c.
1764-1796. Image via Wikipedia. Though this depicts a Caribbean scene, the wealthiest class of free Charlestonians of color in Vesey's time were generally slave-holding Mulatto people like the women depicted. Like the men shown above, male slaves of prominent White families wore distinctive "liveries" or uniforms, the perceived attractiveness of which were often recalled fondly by Confederate sympathizers after the Civil War as one of many super-fun privileges of being a slave (yes, really).

Free Black and Brown (as "mulatto" or biracial people were then called) people lived in nearly segregated pockets of the Neck, some near Coming Street and others on the blocks north of Meeting & Boundary. They sought both to distance themselves socially and legally from slaves (and independent slave tenement neighborhoods). They were also kept their distance from the White working class, who simultaneously resented slaves for undercutting their employment and wages, and resented free Black people. Many White Charlestonians complained that "Negro" meant "Slave," thus "free Negroes" were an offensive oxymoron. Since most manumissions resulted from children of interracial sex and rape, three fourths of all free colored people were Brown. They comprised the great majority of comparatively well-to-do free colored property owners. The wealthiest of them were slaveholders. Exclusively Brown societies were created to provide insurance, professional services, and support for widows similar to a 20th century union. Meanwhile the excluded free Black people generally struggled to make ends meet, forming their own societies in later decades.

Nancy Weston, a mulatta Charlestonian, was photographed a few decades after Vesey's lifetime but her story is nonetheless representative of the lives of free Brown Charlestonians in Vesey's community. Photo via MulattoDiaries, where a commenter identifying as a descendent of Nancy's owners fills in the details. She was the child of a female slave and the Weston plantation owner, and had a child with the Grimke plantation owner. Grimke willed her to be enslaved in name only to his son Montague, the white half-brother to Nancy's own Brown sons. Because of complicated and often difficult manumission laws, many Black and Brown people like Nancy were held in nominal slavery by friends, family and benevolent owners. They had no legal rights and could be seized and sold elsewhere, for instance, to pay their owner's debts. She had been the mistress of a plantation, but Montague sold it and bought Nancy a house on Coming Street in Vesey's neighborhood, where she lived in poverty taking in washing. Montague then attempted to enslave Nancy's sons, who resisted and were beaten in the workhouse while Nancy, a slave, had no legal recourse. Legal claims to freedom could be disputed, with some claims (certified born to a White woman or born to two free Black people) stronger than others, creating a constant threat of instability for free Black people. At some point, for instance, Vesey had children, and though fathered by a free man with various enslaved women, they had a weak claim to freedom and remained enslaved. When Nancy's son attempted to stay at her house to recuperate from an injury and Nancy refused to send him back to work, Montague sent Nancy to a workhouse for corrections. She went on hunger strike until his friends persuaded him to have her released. Though laws of her era forbade educating nonwhite people (I'll get to that later) she taught her boys at night in secret, as did many Black and mulatto people. Nancy's granddaughter was Angelina Weld Grimke, the famous writer and abolitionist.

A "free badge," kept by free Black and Brown Charlestonians just like self-hire slave badges. Like South African Apartheid, Charleston was a "papers, please" police state for all Black people; punishments for being stopped without one's badge were severe. Photo via.

African religions were often incorporated into Christian establishments, except conjurers / physicians. They practiced in secret, particularly in the Neck and rural areas, and were widely sought after by Black Charlestonians. Vesey's acquaintance (and later co-conspirator) "Gullah Jack," was an influential conjurer born in Angola who many believed had occult powers and immunity to white men's bullets. ("But," he would later say, "I am not immune to the treachery of my own race.") Vesey himself, however, was Presbyterian as late as 1816. Most religious Black people attended large white-run churches, which emphasized the heavenly rewards of obedience to their Black congregations. But by the late 1700s Christian racial tensions were growing.

In 1787 in Philadelphia, Black members of the local Methodist church had grown so resentful of their unkind treatment and special restrictions that they left to form the first Free African Society and African Methodist Episcopal denomination. Soon after, Black members of a Charleston Methodist church chafed under White leaders who revoked their privileges to oversee their own church trials, hold their own quarterly conference, and manage their own collections. When White leaders disputed rights to the Black burial grounds and built a hearse house there, it was the last straw.

Rev. Morris Brown. [Image shows a formal drawn or engraved portrait of a formally dressed balding Black man resembling Benjamin Franklin]. Image Credit: The Library Company of Philadelphia via PBS

Rev. Morris Brown and 1400 followers, both enslaved and free, founded a new African Methodist Episcopal church in 1791 near Hampstead (near Reid and Hanover Streets in the Neck). Two other Charlestonian churches arose under the Free African Society and the three were named the "Bethel Circuit". By 1817 Vessey had become involved as one of several founders and leaders of the Hampstead AME church. In the Free African Society people had a chance to study religion as a salvation from slavery rather than a reward for it and to conduct their own affairs as an independent community.

As free Black people gained a foothold in these various areas of society, White resentment turned to panic. Though free Black people were legally "denizens," not "citizens" Charleston's free Black codes were not as strict as in other states, attracting free Black immigrants from across the South. An 1800 law required only that a slave be able to support him/herself to be eligible for freedom (though I'm unsure how this worked in practice). But in 1820 a bill was passed that prohibited manumission (freeing of slaves) except by legislative decree (i.e. owners couldn't free slaves without the assembly's approval). Out-of-state free Black people were prohibited from immigrating on punishment of enslavement, and the crossing of state lines by free Black people was curtailed.

Fearful White people found an enemy in the Bethel Circuit. A law was passed forbidding any assembly or "mental instruction" of Black people, free or enslaved, without a White person present to supervise. In 1817, 469 Black people were arrested for "disorderly conduct" in one AME church, and in 1818 140 members of Vesey's church, including Rev. Brown and other ministers, were arrested for violating the supervision law. Authorities shut down his Hampstead church again in 1820. Vesey, long struggling with White brutality toward his community, was livid.

Though details are scant, over his years in Charleston Vesey had had several children with more than one wife, all of them enslaved. According to a NY Times article he attempted to purchase his wife from her "owner" at the time he won the lottery and purchased his own freedom, but the owner refused to sell. Following the harassment of his church, witnesses later alleged, Vesey said he wanted to "see them free." They alleged that starting December 1821 Vesey began planning the largest slave uprising in US history, which would take place Bastille Day (July 14) 1822.

[You'll want to click below to keep reading....]

Septima P. Clark

Happy Black History Month! Here is a portrait I drew from my Interesting South Carolinians series of Septima Poinsette Clark:

Ciana Pullen, Portrait of Septima Poinsette Clark, 1898 - 1987. Charcoal on paper, drawn from several different photographs and based around 1965. [Image description: realistic black and white charcoal bust portrait of an older black woman holding a pencil in mid-thought and looking abstractly outside of the left picture frame. She wears silver-tipped black cat-eye glasses, a white shirt with popped lapels, and a dark jacket or cardigan with a large fold-over collar. Her natural salt-and-pepper hair is brushed back from her large forhead and hangs in wisps at the nape of her neck. She sits leaning into the image frame from the right edge, with her head in the middle-right of the upper half of the drawing, her hand holding the pencil loosely with a bent wrist in the lower left corner. Diffused natural light illuminates her from the left, as if through a window.]

“I have a great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift.”



Civil rights legend Septima Poinsette Clark (1898 – 1987) began as a teacher in a small African American school on Johns Island near Charleston, SC. Because she was black she was not allowed to teach in Charleston, but while teaching in Johns Island she developed ways of using everyday materials such as Sears catalogs to teach literacy.


Across from Clark's school was a white school, where only three students attended and the teacher made $85 per week. Meanwhile Clark was teaching principal for a school of 132 black students; she made $35 per week while the other two teachers made only $25. Galvanized by this discrimination she returned to Charleston to teach at the Avery Normal Institute, helping to win a legal victory for black people to have the right to become principals at Charleston's public schools in 1920. Clark continued to fight for equality for educators and was eventually fired because of her refusal to renounce membership with the NAACP, lost her pension and was black-balled from every school in the Charleston area. So threatened were other black educators with losing their jobs that they would not even be photographed with her.

After studying with W. E. B. du Bois Clark earned a bachelor's degree in 1945 and became involved with the Highlander Folk School in rural Monteagle, TN. There she put her innovative Johns Island teaching techniques to use conducting literacy workshops across the South. Because Jim Crow laws prevented illiterate citizens from voting, Clark's short 1- and 2-week courses were designed to be taught with minimal resources, often hidden in back rooms of shops because of the threat of racial violence, with the goal of passing voting literacy tests and setting foundations for communities to further their own learning. By 1969 Clark's program helped to register over 700,000 people to vote, including Rosa Parks just months before the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Clark became the first woman appointed a leadership position in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but she would struggle with sexism from within the civil rights movement, speaking out against it and retiring from the organization in 1970. She then sued for back payment and pensions from her job with the Charleston Public School System and won, going on to serve two terms on the Charleston County School Board. She was awarded a Living Legacy Award by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

The Avery Normal Institute where Clark once taught, 19th century and today, 125 Bull Street, Charleston, near MUSC. The institute itself was a landmark historic Black learning institute and later a center of activism. Today the Avery Institute is owned by the College of Charleston and functions as a museum, archive and research center for African American history and culture. photo via.

The site of Clark's home, now demolished, on Henrietta Street in Downtown Charleston, SC., next to Francis Marion Square. Coincidentally, I park my car here in the vendor's lot for the Charleston Farmer's Market, which is where I drew the portrait of Clark and sell prints of it, and never noticed the placard until I saw it online researching this post. via perservationsociety.org.

Septima Clark, via Charron & Cline, Southern Cultures. [Image description: Black and white photo of an older-middle-aged Clark in three-quarter profile, her head bowed and looking out of frame.]

Septima Clark with students in a literacy / voting workshop, via The Self-Rescuing Princess Society. [Image description: black and white snapshot of a group of older Black men and women sitting at a table looking at booklets with Clark sitting in the center speaking. They're in a plain old-fashioned room.]

Civil Rights figures (from left to right): Ms. Towles (I Googled but could find no information on this person), Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Septima Poinsette Clark, and Annelle Ponder (a teacher at a Freedom School in Mississippi and local field secretary for the SCLC, via God's Long Summer by Charles Marsh). Photo from the Lowcountry Digital Library, via The Self-Rescuing Princess Society. [Image desciption: A black and white snapshot of the women described, all dressed in 1960s formal attire, standing in a line smiling.]

Portrait of Septima Clark, taken by Brian Lanker. The story of the photographer and this photo can be found via 37 Paddington. [Image description: Black and white artistic photo of Septima Clark's head and shoulders in profile. Her figure is lit brightly against a black background, her chin rests on the knuckle of the forefinger of her relaxed hand. She wears her white hair in three thin cornrow-type braids over her head stretching in U-shapes from ear to crown to ear, making for a clean-lined profile of her head. She appears serious with heavily lidded eyes peering down out of her upwardly tilted face, gazing straight ahead.]

A 2007 historical marker on Johns Island (a rural coastal island just outside Charleston, SC) about Clark and the Progressive Club, a civil rights era community center, via Gullah/Geechee Nation. Today you'll also see the Septima Clark Parkway running across Downtown Charleston from the bridge from West Ashley to the Ravenel Bridge to Mt. Pleasant. It's usually called "The Crosstown."

Anne Bonny

[This post has been edited for brevity].

From my Notable Charlestonians series, professional hellion Anne Bonny.
 

Anne Bonny, by Ciana Pullen. A charcoal drawing of what I imagine Bonny would have looked like circa 1720. Drawn completely from imagination. [Image: realistic, somewhat detailed black & white charcoal drawing on a sepia-grey background of a young white pregnant woman leaning insouciantly against a ship railing. She wears a dress and man's coat, as well as a sabre and pistol holster slung over her belly. She wears a slouchy hat over her loose stringy hair, which was purported to be red. The ocean stretches behind her to the horizon and meets some advancing drizzly nimbus clouds.]

Sometime Charlestonian Anne Bonny (8 March 1702 – 22 April 1782) was a pirate. As a girl she moved with her family from Ireland to Charleston, SC, where she was noted as a “good catch” in the marriage department (we know only that she had red hair). However her notorious temper became infamous; on one occasion she stabbed a family servant with a table knife. Over the objections of her family she married a sailor, whom she soon abandoned. Much of what we know of her time in the Caribbean is from an early 1700s Dutch book called A General History of the Pyrates, which includes the one and only contemporary portrait of of Bonny, likely idealized or imagined:

Image: An antique black & white full-length engraving of Bonny pointing a gun. Her hair blows in the wind, she wears a sword, an ax, another pistol, and another sabre. Some of these weapons are hard for me to identify, but there are a lot of them strapped to her. She wears a hat and men's clothes, including long loose pants, boots, a saggy jacket that reminds me of a revolutionary soldier, and a loose blouse that, for whatever reason, bares her breasts. In the style of the day, her head is very small and her breasts are positioned really oddly. Her features look neither particularly pretty nor distinctive, but rather stereotypically eighteenth-century-ish. Several pirate ships sail in the background.]

Bonny had affairs with several others engaged in illegal smuggling, most notably “Calico Jack” Rackham (with whom she had a child in Cuba), on whose ship she was a frequent crew member. But most interesting was her affair with another female pirate, allegedly disguised a as a man, named Mary Read, also in Calico Jack's crew.

Skilled in combat, Bonny, Mary Read and one unknown pirate were the only crew to fight and defend their ship against attack in 1720, as the remaining crew were simply too drunk to fight, including Calico Jack himself. The crew were tried as criminals, but Read and Bonny “pleaded their bellies” and were excused from execution because they were pregnant. Bonny visited Calico Jack in his cell and reportedly uttered that she was “sorry to see him there, but if he had fought like a Man, he need not have been hang'd like a Dog."

It is unknown what she did upon being released-- return to her husband, resume piracy under a new identity-- but most likely her well-connected father secured her release and she returned to Charleston to give birth, presumably to Rackham's child. In 1721 she married a local man named Joseph Burleigh, and they had 10 children. She died “a respectable woman,” at the age of eighty.

The portrait I drew above is purely imagined based off her description and how I imagine a habitually violent, unwashed pregnant woman living off hardtack biscuits and liquor might have looked. Prints of the drawing are for sale on my Etsy store.

Rain

It rained here Tuesday or Wednesday, quite a lot. By coincidence my brand new waterproof beach/running shoes had just arrived the day before. How convenient. I wrapped my camera in several sandwich bags and headed out into the torrential downpour; at its highest the water reached nearly to my knees, a disgusting melange the ingredients of which only those familiar with Charleston will infer. I showered immediately afterward. It was immensely satisfying.

A man walks through ankle-deep water with a pink umbrella.

A pickup truck up to its fender in flood water drives through a flooded street.

A man with an umbrella walks through a deserted tourist attraction.

A firetruck slugs through a flooded street.

A street sign in a flooded street wisely warns, "Do Not Enter."

A man in a hat walks through the rain in front of a historic building.

Eye Level Art is closing

I hear that Eye Level Art is closing its doors after December. Mike Elder, who owns the gallery, says he's not making any money so he's closing the place and moving to New York.

I interned at ELA when I first moved to Charleston, when they had a warehouse space on Heriot Street and gallery space on Queen. It was a good way to get a handle on a new art scene and meet some people. Back then Adrienne Antonson was the art director, and she had a gift for networking, creating an art/fashion community that formed one of several hubs or cliques that seem to make up the Charleston art scene. I guess REDUX will fill ELA's place? Or Scoop Gallery?

They're having an event tonight, Dec. 16 from 7-9 that will be their last show. I'd go but I have a million bajillion portraits to finish before Christmas.

Pecha Kucha 12

Time for another Pecha Kucha y'all. As you may recall (probably not) I went to Pecha Kucha #10 and had mixed feelings regarding anal beads, community sharing and Penicillin, though completely unrelated. Here is the lineup for this one:

The stage will be set and the lights will go on for Pecha Kucha 12 on Wednesday, December 14th.

Ethan Jackson, emcee for the night 

DJ's Cassidy & The Kid

Concessions: Westbrook Brewing Co.

Josef Kirk Myers & Will Willis – Visualive
Jay Fletcher - J. Fletcher Design
Chris McLernon - Two Heads Music
John Smith - SPARC
Ryan Eleuteri - Charleston Mix
Stephanie Barna  - Charleston City Paper
Bob & Kris Galmarini - Neve Inspired
Abigail Marie - Photographer
John Barnhardt - Barfly Productions

If you don't know what I'm talking about Pecha Kucha is a speed-lecture series held by Charleston Creative Parliament in which people take the stage for six minutes each and discuss anything remotely creative-- report on projects, discuss ideas, explain how stuff works, etc. You pay a ticket and go see it and become inspired, ideally.

I may sit this one out, sadly. Although I typically enjoy this type of self-betterment when forced to participate I just don't want to pay for a ticket to be surrounded by trendy optimists for two hours. You should go though, you trendy optimist you.

Tickets will go on sale mid-week next week.  Check the Parliament Facebook Page or Blog to get all of the latest information.

Liz Miller at REDUX: Picturesque Evacuation Ploy

You walk into REDUX to see Liz Miller's installation and you're hit with a shocking orange wall at the same time that a friendly front desk person greets you with brochures. Then you notice the title off to the side of the orange wall: "Picturesque Evacuation Ploy."

You walk timidly around the wall through the opening to the gallery and are hit with this:

The rhythmic part of the installation that greets the viewer when they walk in the door. This is the part that reminds me of the gym. Other people were reminded of dragons. [Image: A wall about ten feet long painted shocking tangerine orange. Seven or eight identical 3-D structures made of thin flat felt emerge from the wall, each about six or eight feet tall and reaching six or eight feet from the wall toward the viewer's walkway. The felt is black, robin's egg pale blue, tangerine orange and blood red. Each piece is cut into intricate decorative shapes made from silhouettes of pistols, rifles and other shapes I cannot make out assembled in a kaleidoscopic manner. The felt pieces are attached using brads with tiny orange heads. Together the structures give the effect of a giant 3-d crepe paper banner than has been made of folded cut paper. On the perpendicular wall the white under-paint is left visible in some spots. At the orange-white border little black shapes march like ants. They could be mice, birds or something else entirely.]

And you say, "Woooooowwwww!"

 You can see the scale of the sculpture in relation to this viewer and her stylin' blue-lined boots: probably fifteen feet tall, like the branches of a giant fir tree.

Then you wonder aloud how she did it, then you gingerly step in between some shapes and briefly fantasize about living in them.

My friend noticed the pistol and rifle shapes first, then I could see them everywhere. At that point I decided to read the Artist's Statement. Miller writes that her installations, "...recontextualize shapes, signs and symbols from disparate historical and contemporary imagery to create abstract fictions. Existing forms from a multitude of sources are co-opted, altered and spliced to create hybrid identities...." 

A small portion of one of Miller's felt shapes where you can see the revolver motif that is otherwise obscured through kaleidoscopic repetition (the revolver points to the left in the image). [Image: flat black revolver shape viewed from the side on a flat white wall]

Dear Readers, at this time I should also explain, as I see it, an art historical/theoretical concept involving deconstruction and post-structuralism generally called, "Death of the Author." The term comes from a 1967 essay of that title by Roland Barthes.

Let's say that Wile E. Coyote is about to fall off a cliff. He holds up a sign that reads, "HELP," drops the sign, and vanishes over the cliff. But a few minute later, along comes a hiker who sees the sign. What does it mean? Well, that depends on what the hiker and their culture brings to the table. "Help Wanted?" The Beatles' "Help?" An offer of help? A meaningless sign in a foreign language? A reminder of their job as a 911 dispatcher? Wile E. Coyote's intentions and psyche become irrelevant and the mesh of meanings and contexts to any given sign, symbol or word, along with the viewer's experience, provide legitimate sources of meaning and interpretation for the sign.

Culturally, for example, this is significant because this essay (and the work of Jacques Derrida, postmodern linguists and others) became popular in the academic world at a time when Western culture, previously seen generally though the lens of middle- and upper-class white male society, was experiencing movements for decolonization, civil rights, women's rights, and GL (later BTQ) rights, as well as foreign involvement in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America, and massive immigration from Southeast Asia, all of which persistently revealed myriad points of view. I can think of many times when someone has made an offensive cultural joke or comment and tried, unsuccessfully, to follow up with, "...but that's not what I meant!" Death of the Author, in action.

Artistically, this idea was central to the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism. Whereas objects of art had been viewed as distinct objects unaffected by a viewer, both physically and contextually, created by an artist whose psyche and intent is up for artistic interpretation, PoMo subverted this. Some artists, like the pristine minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, erased the expressive brushstrokes and fingerprints of the artist, so prized in Modernism, so that the object stood on its own in meditative coexistence with the viewer. Other artists took an interactive approach, such as Felix González-Torres, who made piles of candy in galleries that the viewers could take. Artists sought to make viewers aware of the act of interpretation. Other artists emphasized the power of the viewer in relation to the artistic intent by making themselves pawns in their own art: putting themselves through documented ordeals, for example, or using their own body as sculpture or artistic tool. Still others emphasized the shared physical space of a work of art and the viewer by making intrusive or interactive art or working with installation, which envelops rather than confronts a viewer, as a way of undermining the fixed fortress-like connotations of Modernist paintings and sculptures.

***

So now you can see why, when reading Miller's Artist's Statement, I immediately thought of Death of the Author.   Miller has chosen to literally deconstruct symbols by physically obscuring them and actually bending them. She has stripped the gun symbol down to its physical components and used those components to create a pretty, softly tactile modern fairy-tale environment which suspends disbelieve through sheer craftsmanship and scale. She has also made flat shapes emerge from the wall into the third dimension. Merging painting/2-D with sculpture has been a hallmark of Post-Modernism but is particularly relevant to Miller's physical manipulation of symbols. The lacework of shadows on the walls from the felt recalls Dan Flavin's neon sculptures and their emphasis on the immaterial interaction of artwork and environment. Because the installation is so large and you can step between some of the shapes it is also somewhat interactive. The viewer's space is sufficiently invaded. At this point I interpreted the title, Picturesque Evacuation Ploy, as yet another symbol that had been stripped of its meaning and context, and recontextualised in an abstract fictive manner by putting disparate words together in a nonsensical way. What, now, does "picturesque evacuation ploy" even mean besides the title of this specific show?

But I think there are other conflicting messages in this show that make it much more than an homage to the Death of the Author. For instance I mentioned that my friends and I immediately wondered how she created the installation. Hand-cut or laser-cut? How was it assembled, etc. Because of the level of in-your-face craftsmanship the viewer's attention is immediately diverted to the artist creating the piece. What was her process, what were her intentions? Moreover, even as I appreciate how Miller has stripped the symbols of their meanings, I still wonder, why those symbols? I revert back to the generally acknowledged meaning of "gun" as a weapon while I wonder why she chose that symbol to deconstruct. The repetition also poses a problem for me: making a marking into a symbol is supposed to add meaning rather than remove it. And repeating an image ad nauseam a la Warhol's "Marilyn" can make an image into a symbol. But repetition can also, like Warhol's repeated $ sign, strip a symbol of its meaning. The title is beginning to recover some, if not much, of the words' former meanings and becomes, like the show, attention-grabbing and complicated, evocative of a beautiful emergency.

The gun is in some ways an apt metaphor for the show: it's a visual assault in bright colors that creates a "Bam!" effect when you walk in. The shapes seem machine-like and, along one wall, rhythmically echo a military drumbeat. Walking through the gallery feels a little like walking through the interior world of any given addled person with a gun who makes tragic headlines: sort of crazy, poundingly rhythmic in some places, culminating in a frenzied upward spiral of jumbled shapes.

The irony is clear: fuzzy soft pretty gun shapes in felt. Pretty guns dominating an environment created by someone who, because of her gender, is more likely to be a victim of gun violence, and because of her nationality (I assume she is American) willingly or unwillingly, benefits from massive military violence perpetrated by the US.

A portion of the less structured side of the installation, showing how the shapes continue fluidly from 2-D wall images to a 3-D structure. Also shows the full height (fifteen feet?).

Miller's Artist's Statement goes on to read, "...Forged relationships between benign and malignant forms confuse the original implications of each while revealing the precariousness of perception and how easily it can be tampered with. Recent projects pit Baroque and Gothic pattern and ornament against forms derived from armor and weaponry. Seemingly oppositional pairings create duplicitous environments where conflicting messages are conveyed." 

My mind was already heading down the rabbit hole of military actions and public perception: the Iran-Contra Affair, the CIA, proxy wars, police actions, the military-industrial complex, war-time bans on free press, censorship of images of dead soldiers, the complicit media. At this time the meaningfulness and meaninglessness of repetition began to sink in. How Miller, like the media, has numbed the symbol of the gun and created something vibrant and attractive in its place. The small symbols that march ant-like around the orange/white borders suddenly leap off the wall-- or out of the distant space of our television sets-- and clash in three dimensions, in a way that invades our physical space. How it all takes place in an installation that looks fun and contemporary, like an anime future-world or Tord Boontje for Target. I reconsidered the title: "picturesque," attractive, staged; "evacuation," escapism, vacuousness; "ploy," conspiracy, coy persuasion. A misleading invitation to escape into attractive fictions. 

A portion of the less structured side of the exhibit showing the orange paint on the floor and the play of light and shadow cast by the felt.

I stupidly missed the Artist Lecture, so this whole post could be way off base, but the show will remain up at REDUX through November 26, 2011. Go see it!!

Event 2 at Tivoli

 If I weren't going to THE PIXIES tonight I'd be at Event 2 at Tivoli! So go, enjoy yourself, buy affordable art (holiday gifts!). It sounds extremely fun.

Halloween 2011

We started off w/ coffee at Kudu [Image: black & white quick pen sketch of people ordering coffee in a sketchbook held by my disembodied thumb with grotesque chipped purple sparkly nail polish on it]

Then people-watched on King. [Image: more quick pen sketches, with colored marker, of people in costume. Ninja kid, sleepy baby in a bear costume, dog in a tutu and fairy wings, guy in Alien mask scaring small children, a possible Daisy Duke walking through a cloud of Vomit Smell, a Playboy Bunny, witch, bearded hipster guy in fairy wings, antennae and tube top, matching couple as, possibly, Mr. and Mrs. Candyland, also in a sketchbook clutched by aforementioned thumb]

 

Happy Halloween, y'all.

Leo Osborne: Juxtapose at Martin Gallery

Leo Osborne. "Gathering of Owls," burled wood sculpture, 23x17x12." This sculpture isn't at Martin Gallery but is representative of what's there. [Image: a hunk of burled, or knotted, wood left dark and uncarved in some spots and carved and sanded in other spots to reveal owl heads and body parts in a smooth light maple color.]

If you are like me you have daydreams of the set of The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband and Whistler's "Peacock Room" in the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery. So if you're like me you should head to Martin Gallery to see Leo Osborne's animal paintings. You might have already seen his sculptures at Martin Gallery: gorgeous burled wood sanded down to a smooth buttery finish in most spots and left jagged in others, formed into swooping abstract shapes or somewhat abstracted animals, often stained with paint that works with the wood's natural pattern and color. You can see more of his work at his website.

Leo Osborne. "Rumi K," burled maple wood sculpture, 14x15x6."

But at the opening last night Osborne was showing paintings of animals that accompanied his sculptures. Most were acrylic and encaustic on gold leaf and very decorative. Each painting was accompanied by a handwritten short poem on lumpy handmade paper that was clearly meant to indicate the magical poetic meaning of each piece. But because I'm a weirdo who doesn't like most poetry (or maybe I just don't get it) I thought they were a little superfluous. The paintings themselves were already full of mystery and were deeply connected to storytelling.

Leo Osborne. "Silent Wisdom," acrylic painting. It's about 1.5 to 2 feet square, if I recall. The accompanying poem read, "In clutter and clamor/ our lives now entwined/ constant information/ no peace do we find/ / but sometimes/ between all that frazzled dumb noise/ a silent wisdom above/ speaks only to love." [Image: painting of an owl's head looking over its wing at the viewer like The Shadow peeking over his cape. Head takes up most of the frame. The background is a halo- or moon-like gold circle and the owl is thinly painted so you can see through the layers.]

His paintings and sculptures were much more complex in person so these photographs unfortunately don't pull you in in the same way (so go check them out in person!). The owl above, for instance, is on a gold leaf background with a negative circle incised in some sort of mystery material. The owl figure is painted on a crackled base where the crackles show through as brilliant red veins. The complimentary greenish brushstrokes on top are so thin that you can see the layers of paint but also fluffed up with some sort of medium so they literally create a texture.

Redux: Before I die...

I'm sure the event for the new "Before I Die..." mural at Redux was a lot of fun. Unfortunately I got there 5 minutes before it was supposed to end. I arrived to find some hushed stragglers finishing up their last requests in a nearly empty parking lot. They went inside and I read the mural, alone: "Before I Die... I want to visit my grandchildren. ...I want to live forever. ...I want to visit [somewhere, I forget]."

"Before I die..." mural at Redux. From Redux's website: "This project was organized by Nicole Diefenbach and inspired by Candy Chang’s Before I Die… project in New Orleans." [Image: the long low wall of the Redux building painted like a chalkboard. A large white stenciled heading reads, "Before I die...." Under that are around 20 columns each containing 8 repetitions in white stenciled text of the statement, "Before I die I want to" with a fill-in-the-blank line. People have written in all kinds of things in colored chalk but they're illegible in this photo.]

The sun was almost completely down and abandoned pieces of chalk were ground into the pavement. Rainwater was puddled on the ground and in the seats of empty folding chairs, the year was almost over and the mural had been abandoned only two-thirds complete. Everyone had left to go do Saturday night stuff-- probably not what they'd written on the mural, but fun stuff they probably won't regret.

To Catch a Sparrow or Net a Fox

I stopped by the opening of To Catch a Sparrow or Net a Fox, a show on view at Oak Barrel Tavern with the work of Lisa Shimko, Hirona Matsuda, Sara Boyts Yoder, and Lisa Abernathy. I'd already seen Lisa Shimko's work since we both rented studios at Tivoli, and I'd already seen Lisa Abernathy's stuff at another show at Oak Barrel Tavern a month or so ago.

Lisa Shimko does fantastic paintings that are sometimes a mix of abstract and figurative, with birds often, and sometimes purely abstract colors and shapes. The abstract stuff is my favorite because they are freely expressive and loose and her colors are phenomenal.  So I was surprised when she showed, instead, lots of index card-sized paintings of illustration-style animals on decorative backgrounds. She's very talented and they were priced very affordably, so... buy them now. While you can.


[Image: vertical rectangular layout on an index-card-sized burgundy paper with markings that has been painted over. Background is divided equally by horizon line, with sky a light dove grey with thick brushstrokes and ground a darker dove grey with little grey-green vertical marks creating a grass-like texture. In forground there's a yellow post silhouetted by the ground upon which a finch (??) is perched, silhouetted by the sky. It's a side view of a very realistically painted grey, black and white bird.]

I didn't get any photos of Lisa Abernathy's stuff because it was behind reflective glass, inside, at night, and I had a full beer in one hand. So, here's some photos from that older show that I'd intended to write about but never did.

[Image: greeting-card-sized collage behind glass with a thick black decorative frame. Background is covered with newspaper- or dictionary-like paper scattered and layered at odd angles. Foreground is a black paper cutout with a scalloped frame, as in a stage set, with a cartoonish or exaggerated female figure sitting at a crazy, unnatural angle, holding something-- a typerwriter?-- with a word bubble coming out of her mouth that I cannot read due to my own crap photography. Words are cut out of paper. Two more word bubbles float upward.]

[Image: collage behind glass, framed in thick wood frame. Background is vintage whitish-pastel print of a cottage, country land and flowers. Foreground is black paper cutout with scalloped frame. Puffy clouds "hang" down from the top like a stage set, three sparse trees with hanging-down leaves or Spanish moss and some flowers and grass grow from the bottom of the frame. A female figure in a dress "flies" across, also suspended by strings, blowing puffs of air that look like swirls.]

She had more paper cutouts but this time they were more stark black paper on white backgrounds. There was a tiger face baring its fangs and inside its mouth a small peaceful figure beckoning to the viewer. Others were classic storytelling devices with unexpected twists-- not overwrought irony, I mean *actually* unexpected twists-- and a jungle-like feeling. Once you get past the rich texture and the impressive technique of the work the content is dreamy and imaginative. She uses vintage textiles or papers and silhouettes to tell stories but somehow, somehow avoids preciousness. She also evoked a little of that Southern tradition of antebellum, often racist silhouette scenery in her last show-- again with unexpected twists-- but this work seemed more African- and Southeast Asian- influenced.

 I liked Sarah Boyts Yoder's paintings, so I'm glad she's got another show coming up that opens Oct. 8 on view right now at Flagship. She had big abstract blue, white and black paintings on canvas with some collage and sharpie involved. There's not much to write about, as this is the kind of art that it's best to just look at. The mark-making was fluid and confident, the colors were deep and bold, the compositions were dynamic and lively... good stuff. I didn't notice the nautical theme until I glanced at the titles, which were all about boats and the sea. But once I did the paintings could all be read loosely as illustrations of wave motion and the waterline that, like the other work at the show, told a story.

[Image: several of Yoder's paintings grouped on a wall, ranging from a 10 x 10 inch square canvas to a two-ish by three-ish foot canvas]

[Image: smaller square canvas with collage and abstract painting. Top is a large blue scallop shape, like clouds. Middle-top swath is thickly textured bright white "sky," and bottom half is a jumble of blue, black and white shapes on grey "waves." The literal reading as a seascape is very iffy.The waves are filled with patterned markmaking, collage-ed paper and two black upside-down "U" shapes.]

I was primed by the storytelling theme to see Hirona Matsuda's shallow, almost 2-D wall-hanging sculptures as narratives too, even though if I'd seen them isolated on some white wall somewhere I'd have immediately thought of Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson, Modernism, and Abstract Expressionism. When I see more of Hirona Matsuda's work around Charleston I'll probably write a post about it, b/c I need a little time to think it over.

[Image: several of Matsuda's sculptures hanging on a wall, one box long and vertical, about 1 x 3 feet, one smaller, maybe 8 x 10 inches, one maybe a foot square.]

[Image: shallow 12-inch-square sculpture, like a shadow-box or diorama in a black frame. Inside is grey concrete-like texture with two shelves on the upper right and two black wires run vertically in front of the shelves. Rusted found objects are placed on the shelves and there's a rusted porcelain doorknob standing at the left of the shelves with an old skeleton key dangling above it from the top of the piece.]

Go see the show, it's at Oak Barrel Tavern in Avondale, 825-B Savannah Highway, on view thru late October.