DIANE KILGORE CONDON, Super Natural, Nov. 20 – Dec. 14, 2013.

if ART in BETWEEN October 2013

if ART in BETWEEN
Gallery Artists on View Between Exhibitions
October 8 – 15, 2013

KEES SALENTIJN @ ROSSO TRATTORIA ITALIA, presented by if ART Gallery

Rosso Trattoria Italia

&

if ART Gallery

present

KEES SALENTIJN: Paintings

@

ROSSO Trattoria Italia

Trenholm Plaza

4840 Forest Drive

Columbia, SC 29206

Reception: Monday, April 14, 5:30 – 7:00 pm

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

            One of Columbia’s finest restaurants, Rosso Trattoria Italia at Trenholm Plaza, presents with if ART Gallery a body of work by Dutch painter Kees Salentijn, who is represented by if ART. The reception for the exhibition, now on view, is Monday, April 14, 5:30 – 7:00 p.m.

        Amsterdam native and resident Salentijn (b. 1947) is among The Netherlands’ most prominent painters. The initial inspiration leading to his mature style came from post-war American art and from Spanish painters such as Tapies, Antonio Saura, and later Millares. Salentijn developed a personal style that combined the expressionist, painterly swath with smaller but equally expressionist marks that are quick and slightly nervous but sure. Combining vigorous painting with often-childlike imagery, Salentijn’s work eventually placed him in the Northern European, post-war CoBrA tradition of strongly expressionist, abstracted art that containes representational elements. Salentijn’s increased use of figuration in the 1990s confirmed this link. His work is in several European museums. In addition to the 1982 Chicago Art Fair, his work has been represented at major European art fairs, including Art Fair Basel, TEFAF Maastricht, Kunstmesse Cologne and KunstRAI Amsterdam.

Personajes con Bicicleta, 2004, mixed media on paper
10 x 13 in., $750

La Familia, 1995, acrylic on canvas,
13 3/4 x 11 3/4 in., $1,700

En la Costa, 1994, mixed media on paper, 11 x 15 in.,
$850

Dos Amigas, 2002, mixed media on paper, 11 x 15 in.
$850

Untitled, 1997, mixed media on paper
19 3/4 x 25 3/4 in., $1,675

Untitled, 1992, mixed media on paper
23x 15 in., $1,550

ASHLYNN BROWNING & PAUL YANKO SOLO EXHIBITIONS, Sept. 13 – Oct. 5, 2013

September 13 - October 5, 2013

Free Exhibition Brochures with Images & Essay available at if ART Gallery:

Ashlynn Browning: Macro

&

Paul Yanko: Micro

Two Simultaneous Solo Exhibitions

@ The New & Expanded if ART Gallery

Artists' Reception: Fri., Sept. 13, 5 - 9 pm

Gallery Talk Ashlynn Browning & Paul Yanko, Sat., Sept. 14, noon.


For a PREVIEW of Paul Yanko's work, CLICK HERE.
For a PREVIEW of Ashlynn Browning's work, CLICK HERE.

For additional views of the exhibition CLICK HERE

LEO TWIGGS & JERRY SHINN: A Conversation, Reading and Book Signing, Sunday, April 13, 2:00 pm

LEO TWIGGS & JERRY SHINN:

A Conversation, Reading & Book Signing     

      

When: Sunday, April 13, 2:00 pm

Where: if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St, Columbia, SC

Messages From Home: The Art of Leo Twiggs

was published in 2011 by Claflin University Press.

Jerry Shinn’s novel, Dixie Autumn,

was published in 2013 by Pinnacle Ridge Press

and features on its cover the painting

Commemoration Revisited by Leo Twiggs

PHIL GARRETT Acrylic Paint Workshop & Book Signing

PHIL GARRETT  

is coming to town for
a free workshop on painting with acrylics
@ S & S Art Supply
&
a book signing for his new book

INSIDE ACRYLICS: Studio Secrets From Today's Top Artists

@ if ART Gallery 

Phil Garrett FREE Golden Acrylic Workshop 

Sat., Sept. 14, 2 - 4 pm., S & S Art Supply, 1633 Main St. Columbia, SC
Limited Space. Sign Up at lily581@hotmail.com

==================

Phil Garrett Book Signing

Sun. Sept. 15, 2 pm, if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, SC

Phil Garrett's book Inside Acrylics features
South Carolina artists such as Mike Williams, Edward Rice, Philip Mullen, Jim Campbell
Patty Brady &amp Glen Miller.

Inside Acrylics: Studio Secrets From Today's Top Artists,

F&W Media, 2013 

$29.99 hardcover

Cover of Phil Garrett's new book.

  

if ART Gallery artist Phil Garrett did his undergraduate work at the University of South Carolina and the Honolulu Academy, studying with the late Gabor Peterdi. He received his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1974 and lived and worked in the Bay Area until 1979, when he returned to South Carolina, where he presently resides in Greenville.
Garrett founded King Snake Press in 1998 for the production and promotion of monotypes and has worked with numerous artists from the region and elsewhere.
His work, which includes works on paper and paintings, are in public collections including the South Carolina State Museum, State of Hawaii, Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, and corporate and private collections in the USA, Europe, and Japan. He is represented by if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC.
Garrett has completed numerous artist residences and taught painting and printmaking in venues across the USA, including The Penland School of Craft. He joined the Golden Acrylic Working Artists Program in 1999 and has lectured and taught acrylic painting in the USA, Japan, and Belgium. 

Leo Twiggs Shifting Symbols BIO & ESSAY: LEO TWIGGS DOES MORE WITH LESS by Wim Roefs

          LEO TWIGGS DOES MORE WITH LESS

            By Wim Roefs

            The X shape on its side – a horizontal cross of St. Andrew – first appeared prominently in Leo Twiggs’ work around 1970, with stars, in his depiction of the Confederate flag. The X reappeared in the same capacity in the mid-1990s, when a high-pitched hate-versus-heritage debate in Twiggs’ home state, South Carolina, focused on that flag flying on top of the capitol. Twiggs has continued to use the flag image in different contexts, forms, shapes and colors, including white, to trigger debates about Southern heritage. He is preparing a 2015 exhibition of flags for the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art.

            Twiggs’ X, however, evolved beyond that flag. When revisiting the flag theme, he also began to paint the cross without the stars. As he did, the shape reminded him of the railroad crossings of the rural South, which resulted, around 2000, in the start of a new series, Silent Crossing. Railroads split towns, with wrong and presumably right sides. They segregated towns figuratively and, when a slow freight train came through, literally, but also provided a way out for Southern blacks. The crossing became Twiggs’ symbol for the need “to cross over,” as he put it, perhaps at the intersection of different cultures and values, as people seek to overcome differences, including those involving race and that flag. 

            The cross took on yet another meaning when Twiggs began his Targeted Man series in the mid-2000s. X now marked the spot, typically on or near figures singled out as targets or already eliminated. It symbolized the shadow that has hovered over African Americans forever but after 9/11 also intimidated other Americans as the country at large felt targeted and stalked.

            Twiggs’ cross of St. Andrews is indicative of how he has used forms, shapes and symbols for years, even decades, but in the process has inserted them with new meaning, life and narrative roles. The Silent Crossing series also featured red dots as the red lights over the railroad crossing sign. But already within that series, the dots became, too, the bull’s eye of a target. In the Targeted Man series, even more so than the X mark, the dot and full target are the dominant visual element, along with the figure under assault.

Twiggs’ cows, also regulars, stand for rural living but also for “docile helplessness,” as he calls it, “the condition of most under-classes in a capitalist environment.” Two of Twiggs’ male figures – both bulky, with hat but few features, one en profile, the other frontal or from the back – populate many of his paintings, taking on a variety of roles. Between them, they depict black ancestral or father figures; a comforting or ominous presence; men of undetermined race leaving or going to the red house; targeted black men or targeted white men; men singing the blues or causing them.

            Repositioning similar shapes, forms, figures and objects physically, aesthetically, conceptually and in relation to each other is one way in which Twiggs creates consistency within in a varied body of work. The approach has resulted in a recognizable visual vocabulary that allows the work to remain familiar while staying fresh, creating a range of symbolic narratives much wider than Twiggs’ modest cast of characters would suggest. The approach also has contributed to the ambiguity that Twiggs inserts into his paintings, leaving meaning up for debate even as the issues in question are clear. And so Figure And Flag of 2014 shows that flag flying over a figure, black or white, saluting him or taunting him or leaving him wearily indifferent.

                                                            Wim Roefs is the owner of if ART Gallery

Orangeburg, S.C., resident Leo Twiggs (1934) is among South Carolina’s most revered and important artists, arts educators and arts administrators of the past 50 years. In 1980, he became the first visual artist to receive South Carolina’s Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts. His 2004 career retrospective, accompanied by a catalogue, opened at the Georgia Museum of Art and traveled to the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, S.C., the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Delta Fine Arts Center in Winston Salem, N.C., and the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia. Twiggs has had more than 70 solo exhibitions, the largest being Civil/Uncivil: The Art Of Leo Twiggs at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C., in 2011. His work was selected for the South Carolina State Museum’s 1999 millennium exhibition 100 Years, 100 Artists. Among the many other places where Twiggs has exhibited are New York City’s Studio Museum in Harlem; the Schenectady (N.Y.) Museum; the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, Italy; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, Ithaca N.Y.; the Mississippi Museum of Art; and the American Crafts Museum in New York. Twiggs’ 1997 exhibition, Commemoration Revisited, a return to paintings of tattered images of Confederate flags 25 years earlier, received national attention. Already during the 1970s, his work was included in several national exhibitions representing a who’s who of African-American art.

            Twiggs’ career and body of work is extensively documented in the 320-page, heavily illustrated, 2011 book Messages From Home: The Art Of Leo Twiggs (Orangeburg, SC: Claflin University Press). He is featured in dozens of books, articles and other publications, including Elton Fax’s 1977 book Black Artists of the New Generation; the Studio Museum’s 1978 catalogue Leo Twiggs: Down Home Landscape; Samella Lewis’ 1990 book African American Arts and Artists; Amalia K. Amaki’s A Century of African American Art, 2004; and the 2006 if ART catalogue Leo Twiggs: Toward Another Retrospective.

            Twiggs was born in 1934 in St. Stephen, S.C.  In 1956, he received his B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C. In 1961, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1964 earned his MA from New York University, and in 1971was the first African-American to receive a doctorate in art education from the University of Georgia. Formerly a distinguished professor of art and executive director of the I.P. Stanback Museum and Planetarium at South Carolina State University in Orangeburg, S.C., Twiggs is S.C. State professor emeritus and distinguished artist-in-residence at Claflin University.

QUITMAN MARSHALL: You Were Born One Time – Three Poems & Bio

Quitman Marshall
You Were Born One Time
Ninety-Six Press, Furman University (Greenville, S.C.)
2014
70 pages

WINNER of the 
2013 South Carolina Poetry Archives Book Prize 
(SCPA prize)









About Quitman Marshall

Born and raised in Columbia, SC, Quitman Marshall lived in Barcelona, Spain, then D.C., Amherst, and New York City, before returning to his home state in 1990. In Washington, where he received his M.A. in literature at American University, he studied with Henry Taylor, Howard Nemerov, and Doris Grumbach, in Amherst with James Tate, and in New York with David Ignatow and Charles Simic. For most of the 1990's he coordinated the Sundown Poetry Series at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, and then was the founding coordinator of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA. The latter presented renowned poets and writers to full houses in the Dock Street Theater. He's a former chair of the Board of Governors of the SC Academy of Authors and a founding board member of the SC Book Festival. His forthcoming book of poems, YOU WERE BORN ONE TIME (96 Press, 2014), won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize in 2013. His chapbooks include THE BIRTH GIFT, 14th STREET, and THE SLOW COMET. His manuscripts-in-process include WHEN THE BOAT MOVES (poems), SWAMPITUDE (narrative), and THE BLOODY POINT (novel). He has taught literature and writing to students at every level from elementary school to college. In 1996 he won the Writers Exchange Award sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. He moved to Paris in 1999, and since 2001 has lived in Beaufort, SC, with his wife, Martine, and their three children.

From You Were Born One Time:

Sliver 

They were walking on the moon

when we came of age.
Now look where we are.
The stars look awfully crowded
up there, but I’m no judge 
of distances. From this point
in my life everything, like the time
we had or have together, seems very far
from long enough. Tonight there is one
so thin it’s not even a sickle yet
I can see the full moon waiting 
in shadow round behind it.
What did we know when we exposed
that first sliver of ourselves?
What did we claim to be or call
the light we lived and were lit for?
It’s wide, what named and rounded us
before we turned out this way.


Civilization

The banks closed when I was a kid in Rome.
Today, through the balcony Romanesque windows,
into Carolina blue, as the preacher talked
about the Pentecost, I wondered what I did.
Somehow I paid my way into the Museo Vaticano
and touched a lot of marble I wasn’t supposed
to touch, looked up with the world at the Sistine ceiling,
watched black ants feed their tunnels under the Forum,
and even chased a recommended cake to a certain grand café.
Since then, in the piling up or vanishing of days,
I’ve kept money in my pocket,
been trusted by some to show up and failed
the trust of others. Sometimes I can’t believe
a moment like this until I taste the wine
in the glass you just gave me. It was all 
a gift, and, twenty-one, I took it. Today
I maybe want him back, the silent boy
who since has touched exquisite flesh,
but who really couldn’t tell me more
than the cardinal flaming there on the walk
that my daughter has just, with pride in her work, swept clean.


Torture

Her blood is on my hand
where I gripped her slender leg,
still warm, and dragged her from the road.
It was night and her eyes still shone
futilely bright for the passing cars. They
caught me, looking up as they were
from her reclining, her eyes too late
to see or be seen except by me,
who also gripped her other leg
not yet wet from the blood
flooding where the white
tail of warning had been, her red life
now painting the road behind.
A night class had me driving home
from students who’d fidgeted
at the word “torture,” knowing
one definition of the word,
but nothing of its reach.