The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, an unprecedented photography project co-curated by Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mark Long, professor of political science, both of whom are on the faculty of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina.
The exhibition will be on view simultaneously at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the City Gallery at Waterfront Park. A brunch reception on Saturday, October 20 will celebrate the exhibition’s opening at the City Gallery.
Tthhe Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, an unprecedented project co-curated by Mark Sloan, director and chief curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and Mark Long, professor of political science, both of whom are on the faculty of the College of Charleston, in South Carolina.
The exhibition will be on view simultaneously at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the City Gallery at Waterfront Park.
Lecture Hall, School of Science and Math Building, 202 Calhoun Street
One of the distinctive characteristics of photography is that most analogue photographs are positive prints that have been made from a negative. Nevertheless, the negative is almost always regarded as a secondary entity in discussions of photography, if it is discussed at all. Looking at work by a range of practitioners, including William Henry Fox Talbot, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Richard Avedon and Andreas Gursky, this talk will offer a little history of the negative, tracing some of the ways that history complicates our understanding of the photograph.
A renowned photo-historian, Geoffrey Batchen teaches art history at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. His books include Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (1997); Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History (2001); Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (2004); William Henry Fox Talbot(2008); Suspending Time: Life, Photography, Death (2010); and Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph (2016). Batchen has also curated exhibitions for the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK; the International Center of Photography in New York; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne; the Izu Photo Museum in Shizuoka, Japan; the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik; the Adam Art Gallery in Wellington, NZ; the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, NZ; and the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne. After teaching for many years in the United States, most recently at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Batchen has returned to speak at an international symposium in that city about vernacular photography.
Image credit: Tintype of Geoffrey Batchen taken by Kari Wehr, 2016
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Join us for a reading by poetry students studying with Nikky Finney at the University of South Carolina. The group will read ekphrastic poems inspired by photographs included in the exhibition Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South.
Nikky Finney, Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and 2011 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, contributed four new poems to the Southbound catalogue. She will read her work in a separate event, An Evening with Nikky Finney, on February 12, 2019.
Join us for a lecture by Southbound photographer Jeff Rich, a South Carolina-based photographer and educator who explores water-related issues via long-term documentary projects about specific regions of the United States. He earned his BA in film and video and MFA in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia and serves as assistant professor of photography at Coastal Carolina University in Conway, South Carolina.
Rich’s project Watershed: A Survey of The French Broad River Basin was awarded the 2010 Critical Mass Book Award and was published as a monograph in 2012. The second installment of the project, Watershed: The Tennessee River, was published in 2017. His work is housed in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; and The Do Good Fund, Columbus, Georgia.
Watershed takes as its subject The French Broad River basin and The Tennessee River basin. These two waterways play important roles in the economic vitality, recreation, and quality of life of their regions, though they have also been beset by serious pollution problems. Both have been strongly impacted by industrial and governmental projects and Rich’s photographs document the effects of this history on the landscape and the people who inhabit it.
Presented with support from the Geography Minor program. Rich’s presentation is the Fall Geography Lecture for 2018.
For members at the Conceptualist level + Enjoy the party before the big crowd, or stay all night! Early access to the Moon photo booth, specialty food and drink, and music.
7:00 – 9:00 PM: All members
Enjoy a delightful, art-filled evening of live music by Sweet Potato featuring Aisha Kenyetta with guest appearances by Jake Xerxes Fussell and Southbound photographer Bill Steber, drinks and creative fare, magical entertainment, the famous Moon photo booth with Kip Bulwinkle of Karson Photography, and the opportunity to win fun and creative experiences in our raffle!
Membership levels begin at $40 for individuals; $17.70 for CofC students.
All members are welcome. Our members support the Halsey Institute’s innovative exhibition and educational programming, which has become a vital part of the Charleston community.
Sounds of the South is a symposium focused on the evolving historical and contemporary music of the American South. The symposium features lectures by renowned folklorists, historians, ethnomusicologists, musicians, and Southbound photographers, with presentations on subjects ranging from praise-house history to songwriting to photographing traditional musicians in Appalachia.
Dr. Karen Chandler |Bin Yah: Jazz Influences in Gullah Culture | 10:00 AM
Rachel Boillot | Silent Ballad: Time Sings in the Cumberland Plateau | 10:30 AM
Jake Xerxes Fussell | Out of this World: Hearing & Reconsidering Southern Soundscapes | 11:00 AM
Bill Carson | Moving Star Hall: A Personal Journey | 11:30 AM
The Sit a Spell Conversation Series aims to encourage thoughtful conversation on a variety of topics and issues faced by today’s New South.
In a series of four installments, participants who represent the diverse facets of the Lowcountry community and the South will be available in the Southbound exhibition space and hold free-form conversations during your lunch break, from 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM.
Check back soon for participant and topic information.
Wednesday, November 14 at the Halsey Institute
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Join us for a free film screening of Southern Rites and a Q&A with the director and Southbound photographer Gillian Laub.
Laub spent over a decade working in Montgomery County, Georgia after first learning of the high school’s segregated prom and homecoming dances in 2002. In 2010, after the community had received national attention from Laub’s photographs, the school elected to integrate the prom. Although Montgomery County had seen social progress with the integration of the dance, the community was divided once more when one of the school’s former students, twenty-two-year-old African American Justin Patterson, was killed in January of 2011 by a white father who found him in their home with his daughter. In light of this event, Laub began exploring this story and the broader issues of racial violence in the community. Her work resulted not only in a 2015 monograph of photographs, Southern Rites but also in an HBO documentary film by the same name, as well as a traveling exhibition organized by the International Center of Photography. Photographs from Southern Rites are featured in Southbound.
Gillian Laub is a photographer and filmmaker based in New York. Her work has been widely exhibited and is included in several prominent public collections, including the High Museum, Atlanta; the International Center of Photography, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
This lecture is part of our Meet the Maker series for Postmodernist members and above. To join our membership program, please visit here or call (843) 953-5652.
After graduating from SF Art Institute as a painting major Boatwright spent several years making short experimental films which he showed at many of the cinematheques in Europe. He returned to his home state of South Carolina in 1977, and received a National Endowment for the Arts individual artist grant to make documentary films in Charleston. He later became a graduate fellow at AFI film school in Los Angeles, co-founded a film production company, directed over 100 commercials, and made several documentaries.
While working as a filmmaker, he maintained an interest in studio painting and was fortunate to return to Charleston in 1984, as it began to expand culturally and demographically. David soon found that he could support himself and a growing family by working as a designer, painter, filmmaker, and musician.
Working under the mantle of Lucky Boy Art, Boatwright’s painting evolved into a specialty as he began creating large murals and hand-painted signs on many exterior façades around Charleston. In addition to the signs, he was also being commissioned to make murals and paintings for the interiors of restaurants, and was able to sell studio pieces to collectors and commercial establishments.
Producing public murals for clients with a rigorous city approval process—all while maintaining artistic integrity—has, at times, been elusive and difficult. Over time, his clients began to give him a wider latitude, and he has been able to merge personal expression with the specific needs of a project in a balanced way, growing as a painter through the experience. Find out more on his website: luckyboyart.com
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
The Sit a Spell Conversation Series aims to encourage thoughtful conversation on a variety of topics and issues faced by today’s New South.
In a series of four installments, participants who represent the diverse facets of the Lowcountry community will be available in the Southbound exhibition space and available for free-form conversation during lunch hour, from 12:00 – 2:00 PM.
Check back soon for participant and topic information.
Wednesday, November 14 at the Halsey Institute
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Sheila Pree Bright is a photographer based in Atlanta. She has been recognized with multiple awards, including the Santa Fe Fellowship, and her photographs are in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress, both in Washington, D.C., and the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta, among many others.
Bright’s sustained focus on the African American experience in the South has entailed projects that range from the most apparently banal, suburban living, to the most charged, the Black Lives Matter protests in the region and beyond over recent years. Bright’s work also showcases a profound historical sensitivity, as seen for example in her 1960Who series, in which she wheat-pasted on buildings across Atlanta her portraits of locally significant but nationally unsung heroes of the civil rights movement in the mid- twentieth century, afterwards making photographs of those public art installations.
Bright’s photographs found in Southbound are drawn from her #1960Now series, which examines race, gender, and generational divides to raise awareness of millennial perspectives on civil and human rights. With a focus on capturing the efforts of emerging young leaders affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, Bright has made photographs on the front lines of demonstrations in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Atlanta, among many other places.
Bright is a keynote speaker for the Public Memory in the New South Symposium, which takes place the following day, Saturday, January 12 from 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM.
College of Charleston School of Sciences and Math Building, Auditorium
Over recent months and years, as white southerners’ hold over southern history and memory is called into question, landscapes in the South are experiencing profound change. Monuments to the region’s charged past continue to be contested and removed from statehouse grounds, college campuses and the heart of the region’s downtowns. Meanwhile, galvanizing new markers speak to places and memories long forgotten by many, notably in Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Charleston’s planned International African American Museum.
The Southbound symposium on Public Memory in the New South is concerned with what we remember and forget, and how we choose to frame our recollections to arrive at a collective sense of who we are in today’s South. It brings together exhibiting artists whose photographic projects document sites of memory ranging from the almost invisible to the forgotten, the ephemeral, the performed, and the, sometimes, hidden in plain sight. It also features scholars, curators and activists who are challenging taken for granted memorialization of one vision for southern history, synonymous with the region itself for many here and further afield. Public Memory in the New South advocates for more complex readings of the region to be central to public memory here.
The symposium’s purpose is to arrive at new understandings of how our collective memories ultimately reflect and inform how we experience this place and to take stock of ways in which our sense of ourselves is changing in the New South.
College of Charleston School of Sciences and Math Building, Auditorium
Michael Arad is an architect most notable for his design of the World Trade Center Memorial in New York City. He is also the designer of the forthcoming Mother Emanuel AME Church Memorial in Charleston.
Arad will speak about memorials and public memory, including a presentation on the design of the Mother Emanuel AME Church Memorial project.
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
The Sit a Spell Conversation Series aims to encourage thoughtful conversation on a variety of topics and issues faced by today’s New South.
In a series of four installments, participants who represent the diverse facets of the Lowcountry community will be available in the Southbound exhibition space and available for free-form conversation during lunch hour, from 12:00 – 2:00 PM.
Check back soon for participant and topic information.
Wednesday, November 14 at the Halsey Institute
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
All members are invited to join the Halsey Institute staff and tour guides for a fun-filled family-friendly celebration of Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South. Enjoy guided tours, art activities, and refreshments. This event is open to all levels of Halsey membership.
To join the Halsey Institute family, please visit halsey.cofc.edu/sustain/ or call (843) 953-5652.
The Halsey Institute commissioned Dr. Rick Bunch, a geographic information science (GIS) and spatial cognition specialist, to design an interactive map of the South, representing everything from street name maps to data collected on prison populations and churchgoers, among other topics. Available on interactive technology inside the exhibition space and on the project website (southboundproject.org), this Index of Southerness allows viewers to switch on- and-off indicators and arrive at their own maps of the South.
Rick Bunch is a Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, & Sustainability at UNC Greensboro. He has more than twenty years of experience in GIS and the conceptualization, modeling, and analysis of geographically referenced data. Bunch has conducted research that examines patterns in human behavior through cognitive maps, geographic space, and the processes associated with how people learn and synthesize geographic information. He has been the project leader on more than fifty projects over the past decade, and has published twenty-five academic articles, reports, and manuals. He currently serves on the editorial board for the journals Cartography and Geographic Information Science and the International Journal of Applied Geospatial Research.
The Sit a Spell Conversation Series aims to encourage thoughtful conversation on a variety of topics and issues faced by today’s New South.
In a series of four installments, participants who represent the diverse facets of the Lowcountry community will be present in the Southbound exhibition space and available for free-form conversation during lunch hour, from 12:00 – 2:00 PM.
Check back soon for participant and topic information.
Wednesday, November 14 at the Halsey Institute
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Nikky Finney, Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina and 2011 winner of the National Book Award for Poetry, was commissioned to create new work in response to photographs from the Southbound project. Finney wrote four new poems that she will read, along with readings of other work.
Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011), The World Is Round (2003), Rice (1995), and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Finney also authored Heartwood (1997), edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets.
City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street
Join the Halsey Institute staff for a fun and exclusive evening tour. Beginning at 6:00 PM, curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long will lead Halsey Institute members on a guided tour of Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South at City Gallery at Waterfront Park. The City Gallery is located at 34 Prioleau Street.
Explore the exhibitions, get insider knowledge, meet other Halsey Institute lovers! This tour is for Halsey Institute members only.
To join the Halsey Institute family, please visit halsey.cofc.edu/sustain/ or call (843) 953-5652.
This dynamic panel exploring photographers’ privileged access to communities that we might otherwise never have the chance to see. Featuring Southbound artists Deborah Luster, who photographs prisoners in Louisiana’s Angola Prison; Susana Raab, who photographs migrant workers in Florida; Sofia Valiente, who documents a transitional community of registered sex offenders, and Rob Amberg, who photographs intentional communities and those who live off the land in rural North Carolina.
Join the Halsey Institute staff for a fun and exclusive evening tour. Beginning at 6:00 PM, curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long will lead Halsey Institute members on a guided tour of Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South in the Halsey Institute galleries.
Explore the exhibitions, get insider knowledge, meet other Halsey Institute lovers! This tour is for Halsey Institute members only.
To join the Halsey Institute family, please visit halsey.cofc.edu/sustain/ or call (843) 953-5652.
