The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston will open its 2019-20 season with two exhibitions: Katrina Andry: Over There and Here is Me and Me and Colin Quashie: Linked. The exhibitions will be on view from Aug. 23 to Dec. 7, 2019.

In her exhibit, New Orleans-based artist Katrina Andry probes the power structures of race-based stereotypes. For her exhibition at the Halsey Institute, Andry will explore the stereotypes that engender gentrification. Using printmaking and installation, she creates visceral images that beckon viewers to examine their own preconceived notions of society. As Charleston’s neighborhoods are rapidly changing in multifarious ways, this exhibition provides a springboard for community-wide conversations on gentrification.

In a city with its own contentious history of racism (like many others), two artists are grappling with the past and how it continues to shape the present. In two new fall exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston, artists Katrina Andry and Colin Quashie explore how slavery and institutional racism impact the world around them.

For Over There and Here is Me and Me, Katrina Andry explores how racial stereotypes play out in the neighborhoods of her native New Orleans, where gentrification is having a major impact on housing prices and equity. Charleston faces similar challenges, and organizers hope the exhibition will open a dialogue about the issue. 

Do you love a good Saturday yard sale? If so, then you’re going to love the fact that the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is hosting one this Saturday, July 27, 2019, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Original artwork, prints, posters, books, fragments of larger works, curiosities and other objects of interest collected over 30 years of producing exhibitions will be available for purchase. Prices for these one-of-a-kind items will range from $5 to $5,000, and there will be a chance to grab some freebies while they last.

Affordable art awaits. 

The fourth annual Charleston Zine Fest is returning to the Halsey Institute for Contemporary Art from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday, July 20.

The event, organized by printmaker and bookbinder Leigh Sabisch, showcases a variety of vendors around Charleston who create “zines” or DIY magazinesfeaturing illustrations, photography, comic book stories or other artistic media. Many of the featured booths will include copies of those zines, in addition to other items for sale, from buttons and stickers to handmade crafts and jewelry. 

Sabisch, who worked at Pulp Gallery on King Street, started programming events there. One of her ideas was to bring local zine creators together and give the more off-beat makers a platform to show the city what they’re working on. 

The state of blessedness has been long mythologized as a garden, an enclosure that protects verdure and growth. Not to be confused with the state of nature, where plants grow as they will, but a design, something chosen and created, precious because it can be lost. Jennifer Wen Ma’s Cry Joy Park draws on operatic references to such gardens and paradise lost––in Paradise Interrupted and Peony Pavilion––and regained. Ma’s traveling and evolving installation deliberately directs attention to nested frameworks of semiotic content that might fit into this notion of the ideal state of being, and to the ebbs and flows, the ongoing adjustments that express developing ideas of civilization.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston will present an exhibit of work by Katrina Andry, a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on printmaking, from August 23 – December 7, 2019. The exhibit titled “Over There and Here is Me and Me” will explore the social construction of stereotypes associated with African Americans and gentrification in the Charleston community. SC Humanities supported this project with a Major Grant.

The work of Katrina Andry probes the power structures of race-based stereotypes. Using printmaking and installation, she creates images that invite viewers to examine their own preconceived notions of society. In this exhibit for the Halsey Institute, she will specifically explore issues related to gentrification, an important topic in Charleston, where neighborhoods downtown are rapidly changing in many ways, often pushing out black families and landowners.

Jennifer Wen Ma’s exhibit, Cry Joy Park-Gardens of Dark and Light was the backdrop for a site-specific dance piece on July 2, 2019 the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. 

Imagine kicking around the city peninsula over the holiday weekend to find yourself suddenly in a fantastical garden graced by five ethereal sprites beckoning you onward.

After a trim, transcendent 20 minutes, you may well emerge in utter serenity, as I did when I caught “Dancing in the Gardens of ‘Cry Joy Park’” earlier this week.

Beguiling, organic and otherworldly, the work is an altogether inspired convergence of contemporary art and dance that beautifully illustrates how mutually elevating crossing those streams can be. A site-specific collaboration between the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Annex Dance Company, the elegant piece gently wends and ripples around the Halsey’s current exhibition, “Cry Joy Park — Gardens of Dark and Light,” by Chinese-American artist Jennifer Wen Ma.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, at the College of Charleston, is a non-profit gallery space on Calhoun Street in downtown Charleston that hosts contemporary art exhibitions by emerging and mid-career artists including the Chinese artist Jennifer Wen Ma working in cut paper for her exhibition (pictured) “Cry Joy Park: Gardens of Dark and Light.” Entrance to the institute is free and there are often exhibitions of student artwork also on view in the bright, airy rooms adjacent to the Halsey which make for a nice respite from the Charleston heat.

For Pam Longobardi, art is a form of reparation.

“I travel all over the world to high-impact beaches and I collect ocean plastic from those beaches,” she said. “We are haunted by the ghosts of our consumption, especially when we see them coming back from the dead.”

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The exhibit features 45 works by six artists: Longobardi, Dianna Cohen, Alejandro Duran, Sayaka Ganz, Aurora Robson and Kirkland Smith. All use post-consumer plastic debris to make two-dimensional and three-dimensional artworks.

Cohen makes tapestries from plastic bags. Duran arranges waste and photographs colorful “landscapes.” Ganz creates impressionistic animals in motion using plastic and metal waste. Robson makes large abstract sculptures and medium-size assemblages from plastics. (Her work was featured by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in the fall of 2017; one piece was acquired by the S.C. Aquarium and is on display on the first floor.)