RECENT PRESS COVERAGE
Young Contemporaries highlights CofC’s star students | Fri. Apr. 5, 2013
Charleston City Paper
Walk into the this year’s Young Contemporaries exhibit at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and you’ll find plenty of faces looking back at you: a grinning man in front of rows of pocket knives, a pair of Baroque-era young ladies with tattoos and piercings, and a large, green tree with a pick comb sticking out of its branches. Each of these were created by College of Charleston students who made the cut for the annual juried student exhibition this year.
Reading series to blend poetry, ‘Visions’ | Mon. Jan. 28, 2013
Charleston Post & Courier
It’s not often that an art installation so perfectly embraces the written word. But Lesley Dill’s “Poetic Visions: From Shimmer to Sister Gertrude Morgan” exhibit not only embraces language but demands the words come alive. To go with the exhibit, there is a “Tongues Aflame” poetry series designed to be a response to Dill’s fusion of language, costume and image.
For four dates in February, poets will read some of their work standing in the midst of Dill’s creations. The readings are co-sponsored by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the College of Charleston Department of English, Poetry Society of South Carolina and the literary magazine Crazyhorse.
Lesley Dill’s Poetic Visions | Mon. Jan. 28, 2013
Charleston Post & Courier
Sometimes visual art is simply meant to dazzle, shock or fascinate. Sometimes its aesthetic is superficial: it’s the surface of the work, what’s clearly visible, that communicates a fundamental idea of beauty or brutality or intricacy. Art for art’s sake.
But sometimes, art is about ideas, and what’s visible is only the outward manifestation of something larger or more significant. This is art as symbol.
Lesley Dill’s Poetic Visions draws from poetry, revelation | Wed. Jan. 23, 2013
Charleston City Paper
I’ve been poring over the exhibit catalog for Lesley Dill’s Poetic Visions: From Shimmer to Sister Gertrude Morgan for days. The pages are filled with images of richly colored, dramatic mixed-media creations. A figure in a huge white wedding dress with a train that rises to meet the ceiling, its face shrouded in layers and layers of tulle. Colorful paper skeletons riding skeletal horses across a wall. Ambiguous, metallic human forms, some looking to the sky, some seeming to stare right back at the viewer. And most importantly, words. There are words everywhere, on the wedding dress, on the walls, in the skeletons’ hands.
Clemson Architecture Center’s Pulse Dome project hits a roadblock | Wed. Dec. 5, 2012
Charleston City Paper
Not to editorialize, but the Pulse Dome Project: Art and Design by Don ZanFagna exhibit at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is exceptional. If you haven’t seen it yet, do so before it closes on Dec. 8.
However, despite the gallery’s vivid collages of the artist’s dream of self-sustaining houses, we were most excited about a different aspect of the exhibition: the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston’s real-life pulse dome, which they were hoping to construct in Marion Square before the Thanksgiving break. As the City Paper detailed in its October cover story on ZanFagna, the Clemson students — led by professor and architect David Pastre — were hoping to build a bamboo dome and usable bridge over the park’s fountain. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned.
Don ZanFagna, visionary artist, reimagines way we live; ‘Pulse Dome’ series on display at Halsey Institute | Mon. Oct. 22, 2012
Charleston Post & Courier
Don ZanFagna is an adventurer, a climber of the mind’s mountain peaks, a man who skydives through the imagination. He is the inventor of the “Dome of Ultimate Possibilities,” the “Echo-Locator of Splendor,” the “Pillar of Life Retro-Erecto.” He is more than an artist, said Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. He’s a visionary whose work pushes boundaries and probes big questions. It’s not meant to serve as an explicit blueprint for a sane new world, Sloan said. It is ZanFagna’s way of channeling profound concerns.
Don ZanFagna wanted to grow houses: The Halsey and CAC are trying to make that happen | Wed. Oct. 17, 2012
Charleston City Paper
It’s late September in one of the white classrooms at the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston’s Franklin Street building, and 10 students are trying to grow a house.
As part of professor and architect David Pastre’s design-build studio class, the pupils have been split into three groups. Each has been tasked with creating a Pulse Dome, a self-sustaining structure originally devised in the 1960s and ’70s by current Mt. Pleasant resident Don ZanFagna. The construction is intended to be assembled in Marion Square, the city’s most public venue.
My Routine | Aggie Zed, artist | Wed. Oct. 10, 2012
The Courier-Journal
Artist Aggie Zed, whose paintings and sculptural work are on view at B. Deemer Gallery, grew up on Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. Although she now lives in a rural area outside Charlottesville, Va., her work is inspired by her childhood, and earlier this year it was part of an extensive exhibit of her work at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, S.C.
Htein Lin shares stories of activism and art at the Halsey | Wed. Oct. 3, 2012
Charleston City Paper
Htein Lin has six and a half years’ worth of art painted on white cotton prison uniforms. The paintings? His own. The uniforms? Also his own. Lin is a Burmese painter and performance artist who spent more than seven years as a political prisoner — seven months of that time on death row. And during all that time, he has never stopped creating art.
Review: ‘Paternal Suit’ at Halsey Institute combines history, theater, presenting Hess family narrative that might be true | Sun. Sep. 9, 2012
Charleston Post & Courier
Possibly it was his father, Eugene Nolan Jr., who punched the hole that artist F. Scott Hess would struggle to fill in myriad ways over time.
Nolan disappeared from his son’s life, then was found decades later with an inadequate ancestral memory. Hess, obsessed with genealogy and history, was left unsatisfied. But a solution soon presented itself.
He’s always been a storyteller of sorts, he said. Known primarily as a realist painter, his pictures include built-in narratives. He’s tried his hand at fiction writing, too. But Hess found his voice in 2005 when he established the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation and initiated his hunt for family artifacts in earnest.
