if ART
Gallery
PRESENTS
@
Gallery 80808/Vista Studios
808 Lady St.
Columbia, SC 29201
CONTEMPORARY
CAROLINA ABSTRACTION I:
Carl Blair
Ashlynn
Browning
Laura Spong
Katie Walker
&
Don Zurlo
February 17 – 28, 2012
Artist’s Reception: Friday, February 17, 2011, 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Gallery Hours:
Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m. –
5 p.m.; Sun., 1 – 5 p.m.
& by appointment
For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:
At
Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, 808 Lady Street, Columbia, S.C., if ART Gallery
presents Contemporary Carolina
Abstraction I: Carl Blair, Ashlynn Browning, Laura Spong, Katie Walker &
Don Zurlo. The exhibition opens February 17 with an artists’ reception from
5:00 – 9:00 p.m. and runs through February 28. The exhibition is the first of
two and will be followed in March by Contemporary
Carolina Abstraction II: Michael Brodeur, Anna Redwine, Tom Stanley, H. Brown
Thornton, Enid Williams & Paul Yanko, also at Gallery 80808/Vista
Studios.
Both
exhibitions run alongside but independently of the large exhibition at the
South Carolina State Museum Abstract Art
In South Carolina: 1949 – 2012, which will open February 24. if ART Gallery
artists in both exhibitions are Blair, Spong, Walker, Stanley, Thornton,
Williams and Yanko. The if ART exhibitions will present all South Carolina
artists except Browning, who is from Raleigh, N.C., showing that abstract
painting is alive and well in the Carolinas.
Kansas
native and Greenville, S.C., resident Carl Blair (b. 1932) in 2005 received
South Carolina’s Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts for
Lifetime Achievement. He has been as an artist, administrator, educator and a
driving force in South Carolina arts since 1957, when he began teaching at Bob
Jones University, from which he retired in 1998. He has shown in galleries and
museums along the East Coast as well as abroad. He has had several museum
retrospectives since 1995. In 1999, he was included in “100 Years/100 Artists:
Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Arts,” the South
Carolina State Museum’s look back at the 20th century.
Ashlynn
Browning (b. 1977), who joined if ART Gallery in 2010 is a
recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and has exhibited at
New York’s CUE Foundation and Lincoln Center. Other recent exhibitions include those
at Hallway Projects in San Francisco, Artspace, Galway, Ireland and the
University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Browning has received grants and
residency fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the United Arts Council
and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her work was featured in the 2009
Southern edition of New American Paintings. Browning was born in
Charlotte, N.C.
Laura
Spong (b. 1926) is among South Carolina’s most prominent abstract artists. Since
her 80th-birthday exhibition in 2006, the Columbia artist’s career
has taken off with multiple solo exhibitions throughout the state, brisk sales,
and the acquisition of her work by the South Carolina State Art Collection, the
South Carolina State Museum and the Greenville County Museum of Art. Spong
currently has a solo exhibition at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art and
will open another solo show in march at Young Harris College in Young Harris,
Ga. Also in March, she will be in a two-person exhibition with Carl Blair at
the Florence (S.C.) Museum of Art.
Greenville
artist Katie Walker (b. 1970) has exhibited in the Greenville County Museum of
Art; the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art; the Pickens County (S.C.) Museum of
Art and History; the Columbia (S.C.) Museum of Art; and the Georgia Museum of
Art in Athens. Her work was included in the 2005 Florence Biennale in Italy,
where she was an award winner. Since 1991, Walker’s work has been in more than
70 exhibitions throughout the Southeast and beyond. Her work appeared in New American Paintings, Vol. 40, 2002,
and the publication’s 2010 anniversary edition.
Lexington,
S.C., artist Don Zurlo (b. 1934) has exhibited at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis, MN, the Newark Museum of Art in Newark, NJ, Trenton’s New Jersey
State Museum, the Flint Institute of Art in Flint, MI, the McKissick Museum at
the University of South Carolina and the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia,
the Howard Wise Gallery in New York City and elsewhere. His most recent solo
exhibition was in October 2010 at if ART Gallery. Zurlo has taught art at South
Carolina State University in Orangeburg and Allen University in Columbia.
