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.
The first installment on November 14 kicks off with Drs. Dale and Ted Rosengarten. Dale Rosengarten is an expert on Southern Jewish life and founded the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston Library. She is also an expert in Lowcountry sweetgrass basket traditions. Ted Rosengarten is an expert in Southern African American history. Ted is the author of All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, for which he won the National Book Award in 1975.
Check back soon for participant and topic information.
Wednesday, November 14 at the Halsey Institute – Drs. Dale and Ted Rosengarten
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, February 6 at the Halsey Institute – TBD
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.
For many, including some of the artists in the current Southbound exhibition, photographs are a way of preserving memories, especially of one’s life story, family, and home. After photography was invented in 1839, how did people first begin to use photographs as record keepers for personal memories? In this talk, we’ll look at the historical development of family portraits, the family photo album, and the snapshot. We’ll relate this history to the photographs of Maude Schuyler Clay, Kathleen Robbins, McNair Evans, and Jessica Ingram from the Southbound exhibition. And, we’ll attempt to answer the question together: Do photographs improve or distort memory?
This edition of Halsey Talks will be led by Dr. Mary Shelley Trent, Adjunct Professor of Art History at the College of Charleston and Special Projects Associate at the Halsey Institute.
Halsey Talks are an ongoing series of roundtable discussions on intriguing concepts in art. While they may take advantage of exhibitions on view at the Halsey Institute, they are open-ended in nature. As a platform for a deeper understanding and discussion of fascinating ideas in art, Halsey Talks are open to all.
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 – Drs. Dale and Ted Rosengarten
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, February 6 at the Halsey Institute – TBD
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 – Drs. Dale and Ted Rosengarten
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, February 6 at the Halsey Institute – TBD
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 – Drs. Dale and Ted Rosengarten
Wednesday, December 5 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, January 16 at City Gallery at Waterfront Park, 34 Prioleau Street – TBD
Wednesday, February 6 at the Halsey Institute – TBD
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.
