Katrina Andry is a visual artist with an unexpected request.

Known for her colorful, life-sized woodblock prints and immersive multimedia wallpaper installations, the New Orleans native makes art that pulls you in by the pupils and doesn’t easily let go. So it came as a surprise when she told me calmly and without hesitation that she wants visitors to her exhibition at the Halsey to look at something else on the walls.

“If people go and only have five minutes to go to the show,” she says, “I hope they read the wall text. Yes, I hope they read.”

“Artificial American Culture Shock,” “The Unfit Mommy and Her Spawn Will Wreck Your Comfortable Suburban Existence,” and “Mammy Complex: Unfit Mommies Make for Fit Nannies” — the titles of Andry’s bright prints — are unequivocal. These are works meant to make you think, and think hard, about what’s going on inside the thick printed lines and saturated swaths of color.

When you peer behind the metaphorical curtain of the Charleston Gaillard Center, you may notice something even more than its state-of-the-art acoustics and luxe decor. Those with an eye on the local arts scene will also admire it as a feat of philanthropy.

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Other Charleston arts organizations have also benefited from such generosity. In 2017, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston received an anonymous $1 million gift from a member of its advisory council. There is also the rare and dear 1638 Guarneri violin, which was provided to Charleston Symphony by an anonymous symphony patron so that concertmaster Yuriy Bekker can perform with it.

Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, a 2018 publication by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, has been chosen as the winner of the 2019 Alice Award.

The Alice Award is granted by Furthermore grants in publishing, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, with a top prize of $25,000. Southbound was chosen as the winner out of over 120 submissions received in 2019.

The Southbound book was published in 2018 to accompany the Halsey’s exhibition of the same name, a collection of 56 photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the 21st century. Stories accompany the photos to provide the reader with a sense of place.

A 2018 book of photographs of the South by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston has won the 2019 Alice Award, a $25,000 prize given annually by Furthermore to a richly-illustrated book that “makes a valuable contribution to its field and demonstrates high standards of production.”

The book, Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, accompanied the Halsey Institute’s 2018 exhibition of the same name. The book was edited and included an introduction by the exhibition curators, Mark Sloan and Mark Long, and designed by Gil Shuler Graphic Design. The catalogue contains contributions by Nikky Finney, Eleanor Heartney, William Ferris, John T. Edge and Rick Bunch. The Southbound project comprises 56 photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the 21st century. The photographs are accompanied by stories that provide the reader with a sense of place.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston has won the 2019 Alice Award for its book “Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South,” published in conjunction with a sprawling and landmark exhibition that opened in October last year.

The volume was one of three finalists, and 120 total submissions, for the award and accompanying $25,000 prize from Furthermore Grants in Publishing, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Shortlisted titles win $5,000.

Artist Fahamu Pecou has been wrestling with stereotypes of black masculinity for his entire life. No matter how many degrees he earned or what job he had, he had the sense that he was only seen as a black body.

He has always used art as a way to push back, but for a long time he did not touch one particularly charged topic: police-involved shootings of black men. That changed in 2015, after a police officer shot and killed Walter Scott, a black man in Charleston. Pecou started work on a series called “Do or Die: Affect, Ritual, Resistance.” It debuted in 2016, and since then it has traveled around the country. Pecou incorporates the rituals of the West African Yoruba religion of Ifa into his work, like the ancestor honoring ceremony known as the egungun tradition.

The Alice Award, a financial award of twenty-five thousand dollars to a richly illustrated book that “makes a valuable contribution to its field and demonstrates a high standards of production” will be presented this October to Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South, published in 2019 to accompany the exhibition of the same namethat opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina, last year. The award is given annually by Furthermore, a program of the J.M Kaplan Fund.

This year’s winner of the Alice Award has been announced: Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South. Southbound contains fifty-six photographers’ visions of the South over the first decades of the twenty-first century.  It was published to accompany an exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, South Carolina, which is currently traveling to several art museums around the country. (Check here for current venues.)

For several years now we’ve been covering the Alice Award, an annual $25,000 prize for superior illustrated books sponsored by Futhermore grants in publishing, a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. We also published a profile of the president of Furthermore, philanthropist Joan K. Davidson. The Alice Award is a worthy endeavor that deserves celebration each and every time.  

The Halsey Institute hosts an evening focusing on the history of American folk art buildings. Guests will watch a short film and listen to two “avid” collectors, W. Steven Burke and Randy Campbell. They’ll share their handmade world, featuring diminutive churches, movie theaters, houses, schools, factories, bowling alleys, and more, made during the 19th and early 20th centuries out of materials like tin and wood — and even cigar and Velveeta boxes. There will be some examples from the collection present so you can get up close and personal with the buildings.

In our monthly feature Take Five, Burnaway highlights five artists we’re excited about who are working in the South or are from the region. The second edition of this series focuses on artists working in a medium with strong historical and material ties to Southern culture and craft: textiles. From the generations-long tradition of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, to the contributions of indigenous and South American people to textile design, textiles have long been associated with gendered forms of so-called “women’s work” and folk traditions—an interpretative gesture that has often worked to exclude such artworks from the realms of museums and galleries. Contemporary Southern artists draw upon and recontextualize these complicated histories while also incorporating the influences of photography, abstract painting, and sculpture into their quilts and other textile works.

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Born and raised in the textile town of Columbus, Georgia, artist Coulter Fussell attributes her approach to artmaking to the dual influences of her mother, a lifelong quilter, and her father, who worked as a museum curator throughout her childhood. Incorporating appropriated graphic elements amid abstract compositions, Fussell employs a visual language that owes as much to contemporary painting as it does quilt-making conventions. While working as a server in Oxford, Mississippi—a job she’s held for most of her life—Fussell also operates her studio and a store, Yalorun Textiles, in the nearby town of Water Valley. A 2019 United States Artists fellow, Fussell is set to open at a solo exhibition, The Raw Materials of Escape, at the Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina, in early 2020.