A Dialogue in Black and White Artists
Nancy Basket
Nancy Basket gets her name from her work and from her paternal Cherokee grandmother, Margaret Basket. Ten years after learning the pine needle art form in 1979, Basket moved south to gather long leaf needles and learn Cherokee stories of respect, which she still passes on to her six children. Later, Nancy discovered that the invasive kudzu vine could grow 12 inches a day in South Carolina. She talked to the leaves, and they replied, “leave the trees alone and use us for paper instead.” Basket listened, makes kudzu paper in hundreds of designs, and continues to tell stories at powwows and other events. She enjoys creating large lamp shades, sculptures and paper in her kudzu bale barn in her Walhalla home and gallery. Basket became an artist in education in 1990, and in 2005, Nancy received the South Carolina Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award. Come visit, make a vessel and hear more.
Jennifer Battalin
Jennifer Battalin’s photography is known for depicting our natural environment in clean, uncluttered ways, allowing the viewer to appreciate the raw beauty of our wildlife, lands, waters, beaches, estuaries, and parks. By capturing moments which may otherwise have been overlooked, she hopes to inspire others to learn and appreciate the beauty of wildlife and the world around us. A Dialogue in Black and White is Jennifer’s first exhibit. She is extremely excited to connect with other artists, and looks forward to expanding her repertoire beyond nature, birds, and landscapes.
Katie Bishop
Originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Katie Bishop is a second-generation Dutch woman, living in a predominately conservative Dutch area. Bishop went to school at Michigan Technological University, where she majored in biology and minored in the humanities. Currently, Bishop works at an engineering firm and has two young daughters, who she strives to teach about empathy, equality, and compassionate listening each day. Bishop began teaching herself to quilt at the age of fifteen using her mom’s old sewing machine. Over time, she developed her own style and techniques. With a loose approach to quilting, Bishop’s designs are bold and emotional, and never caught up in perfection or rules. Bishop always aims to create functional pieces that bring people comfort, and soften over time with handling. For Bishop, quilting is like praying or meditating in that she uses the time it takes to create her pieces to truly reflect on either the person it is being made for or the underlying theme it is being created about.
Kelvin M Blufton (Brother Nizar)
Brother Nizar, born Kelvin M. Blufton, is a prolific painter of Gullah Interpretive Realism who was born in Hollywood, South Carolina in 1961. He is a disabled U.S. Army veteran with 20 years of service in law enforcement, with the Charleston police department and SCANA Corporation. He grew up in a Gullah community and experienced the Jim Crow laws of the South, as well as the deprivation of cultural identity and the Gullah language, and the legal dispossession of Gullah land. For Nizar, Gullah cultural preservation encompasses land, language, culture, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He tells the story in the paintings, illustrations and murals he paints throughout the southeast. Nizar’s work has been awarded “Best in Show,” first place and honorable mention in the North Charleston Arts Festival, Santee Canal Arts Festival, and MOJA Arts Festival. Nizar’s paintings are tributes to the anti-slavery collective resistance efforts of the Gullah people and early African Americans, focusing firmly on authentic Gullah cultural thought and behavior. Brother Nizar’s work seeks to preserve his cultural heritage and the history of battles fought from 1526 to the Civil Rights Movement. Collectively, he refers to them as “The Redemptive Struggle.”
Wendell G. Brown
Wendell George Brown received his BFA in Fibers & Crafts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and his MFA in Painting & Sculpture from Howard University in Washington, D.C. Described as “a risk taker in art ” by The New York Times, Brown’s work examines the ways in which African Americans have employed the practice of quilt making and Negro spirituals to prevail over depressed conditions, despite a complicated and consequential history in the United States. He is an Associate Professor of Art at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina. His works have been exhibited at the Virginia Quilt Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, Wheelock College in Boston, MA, and the International Quilt Show in Yokahama, Japan.
Kelly Burke
In her Reimagined American Flag series, Kelly Burke uses painting to examine the potential symbolism of stars and stripes. Each piece is an artistic attempt to shift the American psyche one flag, one person, and one conversation at a time. The nine pieces in her “States of Being” series visually express possible meanings of the U.S. flag on a national, state, and individual level. In addition to her political-conceptual artwork, she quilts animal portraits and experiments with oil and acrylics.
Donna Chambers
Donna Chambers was born, raised, and educated in New York, where she learned the magic of working with her hands and the power of creating. With the help of her mother, great aunt, and father, Chambers learned to sew, embroider, crochet, and do other types of handy work at a young age. Chambers is a Pratt Institute graduate with a degree in fashion art and design. In 1981, Chambers began building her award-winning jewelry design company, Donna Chambers Designs Inc. Since then, she has spent 35 years creating and manufacturing a line of gold and pearl jewelry, exhibiting at major jewelry trade shows and selling to stores from coast to coast. About 10 years ago, she returned to her sewing machine and learned to quilt. She teaches classes, enters quilt competitions, and has won many ribbons, including “Best in Show.” As Chambers continues to love creativity and working with her hands, she believes that there exists truth in the old saying that “idle hands are the devils workshop,” which motivates her to stay busy.
Jocelyn Châteauvert
Jocelyn Châteauvert (1960- ), raised and educated in Iowa City, is a paper artist who creates jewelry, lighting, sculpture, and installations from hand-made paper. After earning an MFA from the University of Iowa, she taught electro-forming at Middlesex Polytechnic in London, and then established her career in San Francisco. Since 1999, she has lived in Charleston, South Carolina, devoting herself to paper making. She is recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and the Craft Fellowship Award from the South Carolina Arts Commission. Her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, Mint Museum, South Carolina State Museum and the Medical University of South Carolina.
Portia Cobb, PhD
Portia Cobb is an associate professor in the Department of Film, Video, Animation & New Genres at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. As an interdisciplinary artist, her work draws from personal and collective histories, as well as reconstructed memory. It fuses ethnography, personal essay, and folklore. Her documentary work spans moving image, photography, audience participation, and performance. Performing Grace [2016] creates digital photographic essays, field sound recordings, and video to reflect Gullah-Geechee culture in the Low Country South Carolina barrier islands. Her work is inspired by place-bound/rooted identities and engages social justice issues emerging in the preservation of these historical places.
Marion Coleman
Marion Coleman, a Texas native and a self-taught textile artist, designs projects that explore community stories, African American history and culture, social justice, women and aging. She draws on her 20 years of experience as a social worker to enrich her creations. With the help of her grandmother, Coleman began sewing her own clothing at a young age. Although she comes from a family of quilters, Coleman received an M.S. in counseling and did not develop her passion for quilts and fiber collage until the 1990s. Since becoming a professional artist in 2003, Coleman has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her public art projects can be found in several San Francisco Bay area cities. Various publications, including Quilts and Health, have featured her work. Coleman has lived and worked in Castro Valley since 1984.
Arianne King Comer
Arianne King Comer, a BFA graduate of Howard University, resides in North Charleston, SC as an artist, teacher, art consultant and indigo advocate. Her passion for indigo manifested in 1992 when received the UN/USIS grant to study under renowned artist, Nike Olyani Davis, in Oshogbo, Nigeria. Since then, King Comer has participated in a number of group exhibitions, as well as her solo exhibition, Ibile, at Sisson’s Gallery at Henry Ford College in Dearborn, Michigan. In 2016, Arianne was commissioned to create a wearable art collection for the New Smithsonian African American Museum of History and Culture in Washington, D.C. Over the last two years, King Comer served as a resident artist for Charleston’s Sanders Clyde School of Creative Arts, where she worked with middle school children to design murals and hold indigo workshops. Currently, Arianne is a Board Member of the International Indigo Consortium, and she has joined a collective, GADA, that exhibits at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC.
Andrea Curtis-Foster (Monilola)
Born in 1957 in Paterson, NJ, Andrea Curtis-Foster fell in love with textiles and traditional dyeing techniques during her travels to East Africa. Following her graduation from Emerson College, where she studied theatrical design, Andrea traveled to Los Angeles, CA and worked for a hand-painted silk fabric manufacturer. Always involved with fiber work, she began to develop hand painted multimedia collections. Andrea—who by this time was using her Yoruba name, Monilola—traveled to Washington, D.C. to present Marketscapes, a collection of multimedia fiber works. In 1992, I U ME U US WE was launched, and in 1999 she was commissioned by the IFA-Yoruba Trust of London, England to participate in a group show which travelled internationally for five years. Wanting to sharpen her skills, Andrea attended Benedict College in Columbia, SC, where she created a fiber art installation titled What a Mermaid Dreams. Since graduating in 2013 with a visual design degree in studio fine arts, Andrea has been working on her new collection of multi-fiber works—titled I THINK I KNOW I SEE I GROW—and has exhibited in the historic Burlington, NJ Plein Air Art Show. In 2017, she exhibited in Charleston’s MOJA Arts Festival.
Natalie Daise
For more than 30 years, Natalie Daise has been a performing and visual artist, facilitating interactive learning experiences for educators, students, and audiences in schools, universities, theaters, and other venues. Her belief in the positive power of stories fuels all her work. As a self-taught, visionary artist, Natalie’s performances, painting and functional art pieces arise from the tradition of storytelling, and are an exploration of cultural and personal heritage. She has been married to Ron Daise, her cheerleader, supporter, and committed partner in creativity and in life, for 32 years. They have two children, Sara and Simeon, by birth, and one, Sabrina, by heart. She earned a B.A. from Vermont College in 1982 and an M.A. in Creativity Studies in 2014. Best known as “Ms. Natalie” on Nick Jr.’s award-winning television program, Gullah Gullah Island, Natalie is committed to making presentations that entertain, educate, empower and inspire. Some of her awards and nominations include the 1997 and 1998 IMAGE Award, a 1998 Daytime Emmy nomination, Silver and Gold Parent’s Choice Awards, The Order of the Palmetto, and South Carolina’s prestigious Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award.
Jenny Drum
Jenny Drum believes in “the more the merrier” to describe her practice of using different fabrics in each of her colorful quilts. She is a self-taught quilter whose passion for color and patterns was ignited by the works of Kaffe Fassett and Ruth B. McDowell. During her 40-year career, quilting became a hobby. Her friends and family know her work well, and her recent retirement has inspired her to add the art of quilting to her body of work. It is the magnificent colors of fabrics that inspire and speak to her as she creates. They send her a message: Pieces of color are anxiously waiting to become this quilt!
Lynn Dugan
With her drawing endeavors beginning in the mid-1960s, Lynn Dugan’s work ranges from acrylics to pen and ink and encaustic wax, highly textured to emphasize the fluidity of design and bold colors. Many of Dugan’s works are featured in private collections throughout the U.S. and Hawaii. Following a long sabbatical in the fall of 2014, she re-emerged as a spiritual artist. Dugan is thrilled by knowing that what comes from her heart and soul has inspired a strong enough response in another person to buy and live with her art.
Bert Easter & Ed Madden
B+E—Bert Easter and Ed Madden—are collaborators, activists, and longtime partners from Columbia, SC. A computer tech worker by day, Easter is a cultural creative and antiques dealer. Madden is a Professor of English and Director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. In 2015 he was named the poet laureate for the City of Columbia. Both have long been active in LGBT rights and other causes. Madden won the 2006 Legacy Award from the Human Rights Campaign of the Carolinas for his work “to improve the lives and visibility of LGBT people.” Easter and Madden’s most recent collaborations have included the design of Madden’s winning performance as the 2016 Vista Queen (the annual drag fundraiser at Columbia’s Trustus Theatre) and an interactive chapel to St. Sebastian for a collaborative art show on the iconography of the saint. In 2017, Madden performed Ark, a monologue performance based on his experience caring for his dying father, at the Outburst Queer Arts Festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Angela C. Ferguson
Angela C. Ferguson is a self-taught visual artist with over 50 years of experience in crafting and 20 years of experience in creating soft sculptures from cloth, polymer clay, and found objects. Blessed with a wild imagination and the ability to convey her thoughts through creative arts, she has won several local and national awards. Angela likes to add a tad bit of whimsy and lots of details to her artwork. She likes to capture that “one thought, one moment in time” feeling in each of her pieces. Angela is a die-hard entrepreneur and a U.S. Army veteran with a background in fashion merchandising, executive administration, and economic development. She is also a one-of-a-kind jewelry and quilt designer who has held positions as lead artist in various artistic groups, and has served two years as the president of African Americans for the Arts (AAFTA), a metro Atlanta non-profit organization of visual and performing artists. Angela was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio as the second of six siblings. She is now a mother and a grandmother living in the Atlanta metro area.
Paula Fleischer
Paula Fleischer quilts using political art as a form of resistance to the current administration and longtime injustices. Fleischer enjoys the sisterhood of quilting, the camaraderie, and the friendship that forms from gathering around fabric and thread to chat about current projects. Fleischer believes that honest moments grow out of spending time together, which builds trust and allows for sharing triumphs and challenges. As a modern quilter, she is eager to break the rules of pattern, color, topic and anything else ‘traditional’ or confining. In recent years, Fleischer’s life-long knack for embroidery has been showing up in her work, and so has the use of words as design elements. Fleischer leans unapologetically to the political left, and although she takes pride in the grand experiment that is democracy in the United States, she believes our country can do better.
Renee Fleuranges-Valdes
Renee Fleuranges-Valdes is best known for her use of brightly colored fabrics and intricate quilting designs that create texture and attract the viewer’s eye. Her work frequently includes crystals, yarns, ribbons and other tidbits to enhance the overall visual impact. Renee has enjoyed working with fiber for as long as she can remember. As a child, she enjoyed all types of needlework, including knitting, crochet, embroidery, and needlepoint. But it wasn’t until much later in life that she picked up quilting. Renee’s quilts have been displayed throughout the United States. She has won many awards for her work, including but not limited to “Best Machine Appliqué,” “Best Innovative Quilt Style,” “Best Wall Quilt” and “Viewer’s Choice Award.” Fleuranges-Valdes also teaches, lectures and judges, sharing her creative style with others. She resides in Mount Vernon, NY with her husband, Robert Valdes. They have two adult children.
Angela Franklin
James Baldwin once said, “artists are here to disturb the peace.” This statement resonates with Angela Franklin, an artist who is drawn to exploring global issues that impact people of the African Diaspora and their relation to other global communities. However painful, emotional, or sometimes divisive the topic, Franklin finds beauty in integrating the subtleties of textiles, paint and a variety of mixed media to tell this story. By producing this type of work, she offsets the initial human reaction of not wanting to address or acknowledge “difficult” issues. From a distance, her art seems merely like pretty things in fabric, but upon closer examination there are powerful narratives created with painstaking hand stitching, detailed use of paint, and juxtaposition of images with an overlay of text, color, etc. At that moment, the issue has been addressed and the story has been told.
Alvin Glen
Having experienced the end of the Jim Crow era as a child, Alvin Glen prefers to create images of the working class as experiencing similar, if not the same struggles as our fore parents. Glen explores emotional, social and spiritual concepts using a variety of media including pastels, pencils, dyes, and inks. His preferred media varies from collage to transfer, depending on the intent of each artwork. Often showing women as the central image, Glen captures the ability of average persons to withstand turmoil in an effort to encourage and or inform his audience. Glen’s work is often colorful and reminiscent of his childhood, during which he was raised by his aunt and other women who taught him and other children life lessons, while the men worked outside the community in available industrial jobs.
Katrina Gorman
Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Katrina Gorman showed a great interest in art at an early age. As her artistic abilities grew, Gorman discovered passions for both sewing and drawing. After receiving her first sewing machine at nine years old, sewing became an everyday expression for Gorman, which blossomed into a full-blown passion. Despite attending college on an art scholarship, Gorman studied early childhood education. After teaching children under five years old, Gorman built a decade-long career in the insurance industry. In 2009, the love of drawing and sewing merged into an exciting new expression for Gorman, called textile design art. Soon after her new discovery, she had her first fine art gallery showing and moved to San Antonio, TX, where she continues to pursue her artistic passion as a full-time endeavor. Various exhibitions and juried art events have showcased her work, including Solo Exhibition in 2015 at The Carver in San Antonio, TX, King William Fair in 2016, HGTV’s That’s Clever in 2008, and an international exhibition in Chite, Spain.
Leo Hansberry
Leo Hansberry was born in Summerville, SC, but spent his summers as a child in Maine. He graduated from Summerville High School in 1957, then earned his B.A. from Rollins College in 1961. He spent the summer of 1959 touring the great museums of Europe, then attended the Skowhegan School of Art in 1960. He served three years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer. He eventually returned to South Carolina, receiving his MFA from the University of South Carolina. He moved to Folly Beach in 1974, where he still resides today, working in his marsh-view studio. He has shown his work at the Gibbes Museum, the City Gallery at Waterfront Park, and many other Charleston galleries. His art has been through many phases over the years. Each day is like the first and he has never followed a “plan.” He prefers to be totally free, exploring what art really is, and it is not something you learn, but rather live.
Rhys Harper
Rhys Harper is a photographer, filmmaker, and most importantly, a storyteller. His work focuses on people and their lived experiences, and telling stories in a more collaborative and authentic way. His photographic work is often environmental, giving audiences a glimpse of the people whose stories he tells. Rhys was part of the Emmy-nominated team for Transgender: At War and In Love, produced by Fiona Dawson of TransMilitary. Harper’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, Mic.com, The Advocate, The Huffington Post, and also on TLC’s hit reality show, I Am Jazz.
Karyn Healey
An artist for many years, Karyn Healey works as a graphic designer, community art advocate and adjunct faculty member teaching design and typography. In 2010, Karyn shifted attention to oil painting and has been developing different styles for a variety of subjects ever since. Observing life and specifically social issues in the Lowcountry through perceptual painting and social realism has become her focus. She recently created a series called Women’s Work, which explores the female experience.
Sylvia Hernandez
Born on the Lower East Side and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Sylvia Hernandez’s love affair with art dates back to high school, when she discovered a talent for drawing and painting while attending the High School of Art & Design. Today, as a celebrated and self-taught master quilter, she is able to pinpoint how illustration brought her to a current fascination with fabric and sewing machines. Sylvia creates timeless, hand-crafted works that address community and human rights issues. She has exhibited locally, nationally and internationally as part of a number of high-profile art exhibitions including the Brooklyn All-Star Quilt Show and Made in New York Quilt Show, the Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza, the Fiber Arts Fiesta Quilt Show in New Mexico, and as part of the Journey of Hope in America: Quilts Inspired by President Barack Obama exhibition, which traveled as far as Japan. She teaches at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice and MS 50, and has worked with AgitArte, a social justice group that has led community educational and art programs in marginalized communities for almost 20 years. She works out of her home studio in Brooklyn, where she currently resides with her husband, Miguel.
Hank D. Herring
Hank D. Herring is best known for his versatility across mediums such as wood, metal, plastic, glass and composite materials, along with found objects he calls “rescued materials.” Herring studies under artisans he has met and learned from during his career, subsequently creating works that reflect life lessons and experiences. Growing up in an artistic family and traveling the globe for 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps has added to the diverse compositions he creates. Herring believes that using rescued materials in his work reminds him that the future can be built by using the past, whether it’s from advice or physical objects.
Betsey Hurd
As a painter and sculptor, Hurd has coined the concept of “polymorphic fabulism” to describe her work, which is about the confluence of human and animal worlds. Perhaps because she spends more time with animals than people, their stories are often more compelling to her. Hurd feels that when we mutually domesticate each other, we allow our inner wildness to flourish, transforming the conversation to one of listening to each other and to ourselves, which hopefully promotes a more cohesive world for all species.
Donna Cooper Hurt
Donna Cooper Hurt is a visual and community engaged artist living in Charleston, South Carolina. With an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cooper Hurt’s art covers many disciplines including sculpture, performance, photography, and fiber art. Cooper Hurt is drawn to concepts of home, place and the environment. Taking these concepts and exploring the intersection of human time, geological time, and mythical time are at the forefront of her work.
Susan Irish
Susan Irish uses the ancient method of melting beeswax and paint pigments to create her paintings. She is a feminist, educator, and lover of Mother Nature. Her inspiration flows from these attributes, which is evident in her work. She is a passionate teacher who uses intuition and exploration as her main method when working with children, adults, and occasionally some extraordinary young adults with special needs. Her earliest memory of anything related to voting occurred in 3rd grade during a mock election when she cast the lone vote for Shirley Chisholm. Childish chants of “you can’t vote for a woman” motivate her pursuit of social justice to this day.
Pat Jobe & Sarah Lebeck-Jobe
As a minister for 18 years, Pat Jobe served both the Greenville Unitarian Universalist Fellowship and Tanner’s Grove United Methodist Church. Jobe has received awards for newspaper editing, advocacy for victims of domestic violence, industrial sales, and pizza delivery. Not only has he written five books and contributed to Radio Free Bubba for 17 years, but he is also a singer-songwriter and previous host of The Connection Independent Television. Outside of his career, he has been arrested twice for protesting the refusal of the South Carolina General Assembly to accept expanded Medicaid funding. Jobe has six children, three daughters-in-law, and four grandchildren, to all of whom he spreads the value of healing and creating a better world.
Sarah Lebeck-Jobe’s work focuses on walking outdoors and using abandoned objects to create temporary, site-specific art installations. She investigates human impact on the environment, often classified as accidental, and observes how different cultures affect the way people live. Traveling to 25 countries and attending artist residencies in Morocco, New Zealand, and Japan have forced her to live a nomadic life over the past two years. Born in Virginia, Sarah now resides in Switzerland, and she invites viewers to collaboratively and creatively interpret her work.
Cheryl Johnson
Although Cheryl Johnson is always exploring various artistic mediums, acrylics and mixed media are where she is most comfortable. Although she is a graduate of the University of South Carolina with a BFA, Johnson joined the corporate world for many years before honing her artistic talent. Today, she is back in touch with her artistic side, focusing on creations that represent peace from within and the kindness of one another. Samples of her work include paintings, altered journals and boxes.
Oscar W. King IV
Oscar W. King, a resident of Port Huron, MI, is a multimedia artist who explores his creative expression in ink/color pencil drawings, oil painting, air brushing, ceramics, logo designs, and tattoo designs and application. In 2005, King was an artist assistant for a textile workshop at John C. Campbell Folk School (JCC), and in 2007, he participated in a traditional blacksmith workshop at JCC. In 2009, he joined Charleston Rhizome Collective as an artist for The Future Is On the Table, and as an activist for the ROOTS conference. Oscar is a third-generation artist who has been creating murals in cafes, night clubs, restaurants, barbershops and salons. In Port Huron, he has worked at Studio 1219, teaching ceramics to adults and special needs students. Oscar is completing his studies art education and barber certification at St. Clair Community College in Port Huron.
Dogon Krigga
Dogon Krigga began making digital art with a distinct purpose. As a self-trained artist, raised and currently operating in Columbia, SC, Dogon set out to provide unique and original designs for independent businesses and recording artists. Seeking an outlet to further express their ideas, Dogon launched their fine art career in 2012. The visionary aspect of their creations is an amalgamation of culture and esoteric reference through Afrofuturism that uses digital, cut and paste collage as a medium. They utilize their particular sense of synesthesia to transmute sound into an image that invokes a sense of wonder and reflection on the human being’s cosmic, aboriginal, and omni-dimensional nature.
Jennifer Kurzawa
While always taking a backseat to her career as an IT professional, Jennifer Kurzawa’s art has fed her soul for many years. She took her first painting class in college, where she used any surface she could get her hands on to release the myriad of thoughts and emotions that took up residence in the creative spaces of her busy mind. Her early works were primarily watercolor, and could be found on everything from doors to leftover scraps of drywall. As her experiences broadened, so did her mediums, although her favorite remains acrylic on canvas. Kurzawa has also been known to paint on top of photographs, and she has a passion for the intersection of nature and abandoned spaces. Her paintings continue to serve as her creative outlet, and give voice to the wandering of her free spirit.
Drew Lanham
Drew Lanham, PhD, is an author, award-nominated poet and a Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, where he holds an endowed chair as an Alumni Distinguished Professor, and was named an Alumni Master Teacher in 2012. His research focuses on wildlife ecology and the role of African Americans in natural-resources conservation. Dr. Lanham seeks to translate conservation science to a more evocative and understandable language that others can relate to. Dr. Lanham has written articles for Orion, The National Audubon Society and The New York Times, and his book, The Home Place – Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, was published in 2017. Dr. Lanham is an inaugural Fellow of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green initiative and is a member of the advisory board for the North American Association of Environmental Education. In addition, Lanham serves on several conservation boards, including The National Audubon Society, Audubon South Carolina, Aldo Leopold Foundation, BirdNote and the American Birding Association. Dr. Lanham, a native South Carolinian, is a lifelong birder, hunter, and naturalist. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in zoology and forest resources (wildlife ecology) at Clemson.
Aisha Lumumba
Aisha Lumumba is known for pushing the boundaries of fiber design and creating totally out-the-box, colorful textile art that ranges from landscapes to portraits and everything in between. “This exhibit is close to my heart,” says Ms. Lumumba. A Dialogue in Black and White gave her the opportunity to share her views on the effects of drug abuse in the African American community versus the effects in the European American community. Ms. Lumumba’s main influence is not only African heritage, but also the American influence on that heritage. She tries to represent images from her rural upbringing and her community in her artistic creations.
Gardner Cole Miller
Gardener Cole Miller is a multi-media artist who draws on his experiences growing up on an American naval base situated on a postcolonial Bahamian out-island. His works in fibers, ceramics, and mixed-media installation explore translations of culture and interactions among peoples across time and place by addressing the enduring aftermaths of historical circumstance, material history, and the fluid instability of meaning. Gardner Cole received his BFA in 2012 and his MFA in 2014 from Florida International University. Currently residing in Sumter, SC, Gardner Cole has exhibited widely across the Southern United States, as well as in San Francisco in 2016. In 2017, he was awarded the Installation Category Prize at ArtFields in Lake City, SC.
William Milroy (MEMO)
MEMO creates and displays his work in parks, on sidewalks and in vacant storefronts. Then he sleeps there. His studio, gallery and home is the street. Writers are taught to “write what they know.” MEMO tries to do the same in his art: to represent the people he knows or sees in his community with a bit of compassion, a shot of humor, maybe a little irony—but never at the expense of the dignity of his subjects. In MEMO’s words, “the street community is tight. We share. We watch each other’s backs. And the last thing we all say when we part ways for the night is ‘I love you. Stay safe.’ A postscript…This really happens. Often. A person will stop and compliment a particular piece (I am always grateful). But what is odd is that that same person just passed the subject of the painting without even noticing THEM.”
Kofi Moyo
Following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, chaos and passionate protests erupted across the city of Chicago. Amidst the violence, Kofi Moyo managed to capture gut-wrenching moments on camera as he explored particularly affected neighborhoods on Chicago’s West Side. Although Moyo’s photographs were not published until decades after the events of 1968, they represented a powerful argument against the mainstream media’s perception of black rebellion in America. In the past year, Moyo has exhibited his photographs at a small gallery in Chicago, in the same area where they were originally shot, and he is currently a contributing photographer for the University of Chicago Press. Despite his photographs never having been well known, Moyo’s work continues to be relevant in today’s political climate, and challenges the widely publicized media perception of African American protest in the U.S.
Hampton Olfus, Jr.
Hampton R. Olfus, Jr. creates works of art that are influenced by many artistic styles and varieties of media. He studied art at Prince George’s Community College, in Largo, Maryland. Following his college career, he immersed himself in the Washington, D.C. metro area’s art scene. Not only has Hampton exhibited his art nationally and internationally, but he has also been involved with many art organizations in the public and private sectors. Art is an integral part of his life. In the words of Olfus, “let art be art, fresh and new, no egos or selfish wants, just the artist’s pure spirit.”
Orisanmi Kehinde Odesanya (Joyce Morrow Jones)
Orisanmi, a multi-faceted artist who goes by the name “Onise,” creates unique multimedia art. Over the last ten years, Onise’s passion for doll making has explored influences from African American, African, Caribbean, and Pacific Island cultures. Often working from a “story” or “issues”, her small sculptures take on lives of their own, leading her powerful doll art to be featured in A Dialogue in Black and White. Her topic, political correctness, allows her to conjure up social and political images to inspire dialogue. Currently, Onise resides in Cleveland, Ohio as an artist, storyteller, and author. She graduated from the College of Wooster, with a double major in sociology and religion, and a focus in Black and African studies. Upon completing her college career, she worked at the Freedlander Theatre and the Ohio Light Opera Company as a costume designer and wardrobe assistant. Her artwork has appeared in Charleston, SC for two years in exhibitions at the City Gallery Waterfront Park, including Sixteen Crowns: Manifestations of Ase and Dance of the Ancestors: Egungun Masquerade. Onise was honored to be a juror for the 2017 MOJA Arts Festival exhibition, and to perform as a storyteller in several Charleston schools as well as being the featured artist for Enough Pie, demonstrating how to make corn husk dolls dyed with indigo.
Jean-David Parlier
A fascination with Oceanic and Totem art frequently infiltrate the primitive themes in Jean-David Parlier’s sculptural works. Having been heavily influenced by a family trip to the South Pacific at an early age, the challenge of layering meaningful context with an outwardly simplistic pile of wooden pieces dominates his desire to morph both favored forms of art into haunting, ethereal creations. With a degree in studio art and art history from the College of Charleston School of the Arts, and as a former student of stone carving at the Dallas School of the Arts, Parlier has gained a broad understanding of the sculptural form. The migration to create work utilizing the assemblage process so prevalent in “outsider art” influenced Parlier to undergo a departure from his more formal work in stone. Parlier believes that, like puzzle pieces, the “found objects” used in his work serve as self-imposed barriers and demand critical thinking in order to create a narrative. Jean-David Parlier resides in the Sarasota-Bradenton area of Florida, where he works full-time as a sculptor and avid bird photographer.
Cookie Keeling Patterson
Cookie Keeling Patterson is a doll maker and a quilter living in Decatur, Georgia. Born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, Patterson joined the United States Air Force soon after graduating high school. Upon returning to the U.S. from Wiesbaden, Germany, where she proudly served her country, Cookie moved to Atlanta, Georgia where she met and married Michael Patterson. Together, they raised three sons. Patterson majored in surface design at Georgia State University, obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts. For the past several years, Cookie has been the doll curator at the Atlanta Quilt Festival, and she occasionally teaches doll making for beginners at the Hammonds House in Southwest Atlanta. Her dolls have traveled throughout the United States and appeared in Soft Dolls, Animals Magazine, and Art Doll Quarterly. In 2016, Cookie retired, but plans on starting her own business. Cookie also enjoys gardening, and believes that there is nothing better than a little dirt under the fingernails, even if it ruins a perfectly good manicure. When Cookie is not making dolls, quilting, or gardening, you can find her curled up on the sofa with a good book.
Sarah “Scotti” Scott Holloway
Sarah Scott Holloway—better known as Scotti—ignited her artistic spark as a young girl in the seventies and eighties, which was cultivated by her family of artists, designers and architects. Individuality and creative expression were not only encouraged, but also highly celebrated, which encouraged Scotti’s love of the arts to last from childhood to present day. Seeking inspiration for her artwork, Scotti immerses herself in nature, listens to soulful music, and explores the rich history of different places that she has traveled to across the world. Scotti believes that we are all highly creative, and that our different modalities—when expressed—do not compete with one another, but rather add to the diversity of the collective whole. Scotti is a spiritual life coach who balances her time between the Low Country of South Carolina and the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Colin Quashie
With witty, scathing sarcasm intended to spark popular debate and discussion among his audience, Quashie’s art faces off against hard issues of culture, politics and race with a self-awareness that often offends (or disturbs) and discriminates with equality and equanimity. The issues are often camouflaged in pop-culture imagery and a form of flashiness that confounds as well as derides the spectator. Through manipulation of formal elements, Quashie examines how media and social structures impact our cultural mythology, using media-based methods to dissect and deconstruct stereotypical views of cultural relationships. This is precisely what makes his work so challenging not only to the average viewer, but also to many art insiders. The imagery is very accessible, and it lures the viewer into a dialogue that then turns their preconceptions upside down.
Drew Riley
Drew Riley is an award-winning artist based in Austin, TX who uses portraiture and storytelling to explore the complexities of gender. Her series, Gender Portraits, documents trans, intersex, and gender nonconforming people through vibrant acrylic paintings paired with written accounts of the subjects’ experiences. Riley received classical art training from the Gemini School of Visual Arts where she graduated with distinction in 2008. Riley left the commercial art world in late 2013, frustrated by having to hide that she was transgender in order to hold professional jobs. At the beginning of 2014, she announced the Gender Portraits project which is now a nonprofit sponsored project of the Austin Creative Alliance. As Executive Director of Gender Portraits, Riley creates affirming trans and intersex community events, makes validating artwork about gender diverse people, and speaks regularly on gender issues. In 2017, Riley was awarded “Best Artivist” (artist-activist) by the Austin Chronicle, and received the Houston Transgender Unity Committee’s Media Arts and Entertainment Award. Riley is also the creator of the annual Gender Unbound Art Fest which showcases trans and intersex artists across disciplines. Riley’s goal is to create in the world what she wished existed when she was growing up.
Sharon Robinson
Sharon is a mixed media artist and instructor specializing in collage and assemblage. Her work is driven by the desire to create a visual expression of the elements of life that connect human beings and illuminate the true self. She draws on themes addressing cultural integration and how we define ourselves and others, employing a mix of cultural motifs, symbols, text and representations of ethnic, religious and racial identity to blur the lines of “purity,” and reinforce the reality that we are only the latest version of many millennia of mixing, migrating and mingling. Layering materials in collage allows her to explore the richness of the fabric of life, and construct a personal interpretation of timeless themes. Sharon currently resides in Washington, D.C., where she maintains her studio and teaches at The Art League in Alexandria, VA, the Smithsonian Associates, and Howard Community College in Maryland.
Nancy Rodriguez
Nancy Rodriguez is an art therapist, artist, writer and flutist who explores the connections between creativity and her soul’s journey through drawing mandalas, creating soul collages, journaling, and music. Art is a healing journey that she has engaged in personally and with others through her work as an art therapist. She worked as both a counselor and an outreach program coordinator for many years, during which she used art therapy with all ages in psychiatric treatment settings. Rodriguez earned a bachelor’s degree in art and psychology from Wesleyan College in West Virginia, and a master’s degree in art therapy from the University of Louisville. For over thirty years, she has lived in Charleston, SC, where she and her husband, Pedro, raised three children and are now enjoying retirement. Currently, she is pursuing her creative path full time and enjoys spending time with her family, especially her four sweet grandchildren. Nancy is grateful to have the opportunity to devote more time to fulfilling her back-burnered dreams as an artist, which she does with an open heart and shares with those in search of healing from life’s challenges.
Pedro Rodriguez
Pedro Rodriguez has participated in many exhibitions in South Carolina, including the 1991 Statements of Heritage exhibition and the 1992 Triennial exhibition, both of which were held at the South Carolina State Museum. At the local level, he has participated in the Artists Who Teach exhibition, Piccolo Spoleto juried exhibition, Coastal Carolina Fair, and the North Charleston Arts Festival. In the early nineties, he had solo exhibitions at the Colony House, Cooper River Federal, City Gallery at Dock Street Theatre, and the Gaillard Auditorium. After years of juggling his work and his three children, Rodriguez took a long hiatus from exhibiting. Recently, he has renewed his interest in exhibitions with entries in the Church Street Gallery in 2004, 10 Storehouse Row opening, and the MOJA Arts Festival juried exhibition. Rodriguez’s return to exhibiting included a solo show at the Saul Alexander Gallery in 2008, and a display of works at the Meeting Place Art & Craft Gallery in North Charleston. Many of his recent paintings have leapt from the traditional canvas and landed on guitars, fusing his love of painting with music. He has also been making ceramic drums that he stretches with goatskins.
Georgette Wright Sanders
Georgette Wright Sanders is a spiritually inspired ceramicist and sweetgrass basket weaver. She pursues a spiritual path in which she leans on God our Creator to inspire all work created in her collection, By His Design: Legacies Tied by Nature. As an artist, Sanders has found clay to be one of the most resilient art forms, as the collaboration of clay and sweetgrass enhances, celebrates and inspires its own uniqueness.
Dee Shanti
Dee Shanti is originally from North Carolina, and has lived in Charleston for almost 20 years. She has worked with children and in the nonprofit world for all of her career, ranging from preschool director and therapeutic horseback riding instructor to applied behavior analysis therapist and Program Coordinator of The Sophia Institute. She is a survivor of domestic violence, and lives her life dedicated to the concept of justice and equity for all. She has one daughter, one golden retriever, and one Harley Davidson motorcycle. Dee has been painting for only a couple of years, and finds a deep soul connection to the universe as she creates.
Lisa Shimko
Lisa M. Shimko’s paintings reveal the influences of new research, old memories and daydreaming. Lisa enjoyed her childhood in York County, Pennsylvania collecting rocks and exploring the terrain of forests and farms. Colors, forms, textures from nature, and the simple designs of Pennsylvania German folk art infused the foundation of her artistic aesthetic. In 1994, she earned a BFA in Painting with a minor in art therapy from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The urban landscapes of the northeast supplied a different kind of nature for her to explore—from architecture and social issues to history and all the music in between. Hilton Head Island, South Carolina became Lisa’s home in 2000 and its sub-tropical estuaries added a new chapter to her aesthetic book. Childhood memories of hills, forests and fields, northeastern cities and the southern coast initiated an exploration of environmental issues. The beauty of surroundings intertwines with topics ranging from endangered animals and climate change to anthropology, all osmosing into her art. Lisa’s painting style ranges from multi-colored, painterly abstracts to honed animals imbued with an allegorical curiosity. Charleston, South Carolina has been Lisa’s home since 2006 and is where she creates in her c.1890 downtown studio. In 2016, she was named the Coastal Community Foundation’s Griffith Reyburn Lowcountry Artist of the Year.
Simran Singh (SIMRAN)
SIMRAN is the author of the Independent Publisher Book Award-winning Conversations With The Universe, Your Journey to Enlightenment and Your Journey to Love. SIMRAN also hosts 11:11 Talk Radio and 11:11 InnerViews, and publishes the award-winning 11:11 Magazine, both of which focus on areas of spirituality, meta-physics and sacred activism. In Love, Of Love, With Love, As Love…SIMRAN
Rosalind Spann
Connecticut artist Rosalind Spann is known for creating collages and mixed media fiber art influenced by artist Romare Bearden. Spann manipulates fabrics using dyes, embellishments, paints, decorative threads and yarns, and surface design to develop and enhance colors, patterns and textures. Her current works illustrate a passion for experimenting with these techniques. Rosalind has exhibited widely, and her art is displayed in private collections in the Hartford Public Library and the Windham Textile History Museum.
Chris Stephenson
Founder of Snap Out Loud Photography, Chris has photographed global figures in the political, entertainment, sports and corporate domains such as Prince Harry, Michelle Obama, Morgan Freeman, and Bryce Harper. A former litigation attorney advocating for legal reform, Chris took flight from law and followed his passion of capturing emotion and energy through photographs. Chris began professional photography by filming documentaries for fun in 2007 while he ran his legal practice. In 2012, a New York film producer and friend recruited him to be the director of photography for a feature-length independent film, The Piano: An Odyssey. The film won “Best Picture” at the Burbank Film Festival. Emotion and energy remain the central theme of Chris’s work. Photography is the only art form that freezes a moment of time, usually a tiny fraction of a second. For Chris, the goal of a photograph is to isolate the emotional or energetic apex within an interaction. That interaction is usually, although not always, displayed externally between two or more persons, although Chris is fascinated by capturing these moments within a solitary subject as well.
Kathleen T. Sullivan
Kathleen is a student of beauty and spirit who realized her love for photography at an early age. Since she was a teenager, her camera has always served as her creative muse. She has travelled thousands of miles with her lens as her companion, discovering cool places, meeting new friends, and exploring magical connections to life. She is in awe of nature, moments of simplicity and images of our diverse human spirit. Kathleen offers her “Soul Images” in deep appreciation for the beauty, inspiration and grace that is all around us. She hopes her reflections will serve to remind us that we are all connected in One Love. Kathleen is blessed to maintain homes both in Charleston, SC, and on the west coast of Ireland in Co. Clare.
Kenda Sweet
Kenda Sweet is a mixed media artist, a jack of all arts who is working toward mastery of many. Her forays into art include vivid colors, the written word, playing with fabric scraps, beads, buttons and ephemera, and found objects. Sweet is exploring new techniques for creative expression, and is excited to see how her topic, “Imagine,” will unfold. Seeking inspiration from nature motivates her to walk, explore and discover, and to find unique subjects for her “daily artsy photo.” She believes that living a creative life is her major work of art.
John Henry Tecklenburg
To John Henry Tecklenburg, painting is the silent place in which he can commune with the stillness and beauty of the world. It is a world of human experience, perception, craft, and history. His art typically consists of narratives or stories in the form of figures, still-life representations, and landscape, created by using oil paint. Tecklenburg’s work is largely rooted in the traditions of painting, with influences from El Greco, Vermeer, and Edwin Dickinson.
Carolyn Thiedke, MD
Carolyn Thiedke, MD comes from a long line of quilters who honed this craft out of necessity. Following her retirement as a family physician, Thiedke decided to pick up this family tradition. While she made her first quilt for her son’s high school graduation, she did not fully immerse herself in the art of quilting until she attended the International Quilt Festival in Houston in the mid ‘90s. Mainly self-taught, Thiedke is still experimenting with dyeing, raw edge applique, thread painting, beading, felting, and painting on fabric in order to find the media that most suit her. Although she has shown quilts in the Cobblestone Quilter’s biannual show, this is her first exhibition entry.
Heather Thornton
Heather Thornton’s recent collages piece together vibrant magazine clippings to create figures that represent her own interpersonal relationships. Formally trained as an oil painter, she started collaging in early 2017 using magazine pages that she had long been collecting. Having grown up in Myrtle Beach, Thornton’s work reflects the strong feminine influence of her grandmother, Marge, who inspired her creativity throughout her childhood. Heather moved to Charleston in 2013 to attend the College of Charleston, where she received her bachelor’s degree in studio art.
Taylor Wentworth
Much of Taylor Wentworth’s work has been conveyed through animated films and images, most of which include sequenced drawings in traditionally drawn animation, as well as stop motion involving miniature sets and animated characters. Because Wentworth’s work is funded by the South Carolina Film Commission, the need for writing, directing, design and construction developed. Most of his work, whether it is specific or abstract, is dense with objects competing with their textures or colors. Intense emotion tends to fuel visuals, which often leads to a long-awaited reveal.
Kris Westerson
Known primarily for handmade paper and hand-bound artist books, Kris Westerson is also a letterpress printer, calligrapher, poet, and photographer. Her work reflects what she sees and values in the world – curiosity, creativity, connectedness, joy, kindness, equality, and being present. Inspired by nature, Westerson blends memory, fragments of thought, and questions with color and pulp to create visual poetry. Westerson holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and has completed graduate work in museum education and art history, which provides an intellectual foundation for her technical and artistic study at the Southwest School of Art. Her work has earned awards, been displayed in group shows, published, and collected internationally. She also curates exhibitions, most recently as co-curator of On & Off the Page.
Tony Williams
Tony Williams is a Cleveland-based artist whose work has been shown in numerous local and national juried shows. His most recent display was as part of The Holy City: Art of Love, Unity & Resurrection in Charleston, SC. As a book artist, his works have been shown at the Cleveland Museum of Art Ingalls Library Show, the Art Books Cleveland Play Books as Toys as Books, the Morgan Art of Papermaking’s first annual juried show, Rags Make Paper, in Cleveland, OH, and Abecedaria VII at Notre Dame College, OH. Williams has also done considerable work as an art quilter, some of which was shown at the 9th & 10th Annual African American Fiber Arts exhibition in Charleston, SC. He has also worked on numerous public art projects including the Year of the Horse, Year of the Sheep sculptures of Asia Town in Cleveland, OH, and the 100 Leaves sculptures in Beachwood, OH. Tony is currently working with indigo on paper, and writing and illustrating children’s books.
Pam Woollis (Suji)
At the opportunity for a career change, Suji asked the Universe, God, Goddess, the Great Spirit or the Great Pumpkin, whatever you choose to call the ONE, “What is my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing?” and added rather boldly, “Please make it beneficial to the well-being of the world – and please make it something I can do at home!” The answer came after only a few months. The vision was immediate, fully formed and clearly defined. As beautiful as the wildflowers in her garden, as soothing as early morning birdsong, as singularly unique as a snowflake—peace angels! She began the series “…and all the angels pray for peace.” She believes each angel asks to be created for a specific person or place. She believes the tapestry is already woven for them to find their homes.
Recent Posts
