Rich with stunning scenery and historical attractions, Charleston – South Carolina’s largest city – is a must-visit US destination.

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Charleston is home to a massive number of iconic buildings and public spaces. These include the Dock Street Theatre (135 Church St, Charleston, SC 29401, charlestonstage.com), the first documented theatre in America, and an integral part of the nation’s history of playwriting and performance. On the other hand, sites like Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the American Civil War were fired, or Calhoun Mansion (16 Meeting St, Charleston, SC 29401, calhounmansion.net) – home of Patrick Calhoun, grandson of the famously cruel American politician John C. Calhoun – are must-visits for anyone interested in American history.

Some regard The Charleston Museum (360 Meeting St, Charleston, SC 29403 charlestonmuseum.org) as America’s very first museum, making it a fascinating place for those interested in learning more about the city. Centres like the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (161 Calhoun St, Charleston, SC 29424, halsey.cofc.edu), meanwhile, maintain the region’s impressive artistic legacy.

Cry Joy Park, by artist Jennifer Wen Ma blends stirring art installations with community involvement at the Halsey until July 6 2019.

Beauty amid pain. Wealth against poverty. Lavishness alongside austere living. Those are the juxtapositions inherent to the Holy City that “Cry Joy Park — Gardens of Light and Dark,” the new exhibition at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, aspires to unravel.

Charleston’s complex history of wealth, power and majestic buildings alongside racial and socioeconomic inequality inspired artist Jennifer Wen Ma to create “Cry Joy Park,” an investigation of the city’s history and social landscape. On view from May 17, 2019, to July 6, 2019, “Cry Joy Park” is an official visual arts offering of the City of Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival USA 2019.

William Halsey is a name in the Charleston arts scene that has held a lasting legacy.

And it’s being revived next week with a new never-before-seen exhibit at George Gallery. The exhibit is “Paint on Paper,” a series of 17 pieces by Halsey that were created later in his life, during the last decade before his death in 1999. 

The College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art was named for the pioneer of avant-garde abstract artwork at a time when his local contemporaries were reveling in realism. 

“It’s funny because when Halsey was alive and working in Charleston, he felt like he was on his own — and he was,” says George Gallery owner Anne Siegfried. “Traditional, representational work has always been a thing in Charleston because it fits with the aesthetic of the city, and Halsey was lonely in his pursuit of non-objective work. But now I feel like he’s so of-the-moment.”

When internationally renowned artist Jennifer Wen Ma was in Charleston developing Paradise Interrupted, her opera that saw its world premiere at Spoleto Festival 2015, her mind was already on her next project. She saw something hiding in the genteel, charming Southern culture of Charleston that she knew she wanted to investigate and use as inspiration for a new series of work.

That work, Cry Joy Park — Gardens of Dark and Light, opens at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary art on Thursday, May 17th, as part of the 2019 Piccolo Spoleto Festival. Cry Joy Park is an interdisciplinary artistic installation that blurs the lines between art, community organizing, and social activism. It features two Eden-esque gardens made of cut paper foliage, one light and airy, and the other dark and oppressive, through which Ma explores the concept of paradise and utopia and how those concepts overlap with the social and political dynamics of Charleston.

Within any garden there are dualities at play. Day balances night. Winter’s decay leads to spring’s fertility. And blooms above ground mirror a dark labyrinth of roots beneath. In Charleston’s case, roots thread through layers of Antebellum and Colonial soil, past shards of discarded Chinese porcelain and metal slave tags. Light and darkness, utopia and dystopia, yin and yang: this eternal dance of opposites intrigues artist Jennifer Wen Ma, who debuts her installation Cry Joy Park: Gardens of Dark and Light at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston on May 17th.

You might remember Ma’s work from the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics if you were among the billions of viewers watching a massive scroll unfurl on Beijing’s Olympic Green, revealing dancers tracing patterns in Chinese ink (she was one of seven members of the core creative team, and received an Emmy Award for her role). Seven years later, Ma premiered her installation opera Paradise Interrupted here in Charleston, fabricating a dream garden that quite literally “grew” onstage as the opera unfolded. The performance inspired Ma to conceive Cry Joy Park which has become a worldwide tour customized to specific cities.

Saturday morning at 8am on WCLK’s The Local Take I will talk with Dr. Fahamu Pecou about his exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum taking place now through April 28th.  

Dr. Pecou explains his background and how he went from a student who was focused on being an animator to becoming a renowned fine artist.  He speaks about the differences in being a fine artist as opposed to a graphic artist. 

I ask him to share his advice for young people who desire to follow their art, but who receive push back due to a lack of knowledge in our community about the “business” of art.  He mentions the School of Art at Grambling State where students have been persuaded not to pursue art due to our community’s lack of understanding about careers in the art world. He talks about curators, museum directors, collectors and other professions around the world of art. 

The Halsey Institute presents a double feature of films by director Olympia Stone, Double Take: The Art of Elizabeth King and The Original Richard McMahan. Double Take engages the viewer in the work of sculptor and stop-action filmmaker Elizabeth King, who embarks on each new project by posing a single question to herself: “Can this physically be done?” The other film focuses on the multitalented outsider artist Richard McMahan and his quest to painstakingly re-create thousands of famous and not-so-famous paintings and artifacts in miniature.

“I had been trying to write about the Emanuel Church murders for two  years, but I didn’t want to come in through the front door,” said Finney, 61, speaking from the sunny confines of the Agnes Scott College campus.

 A National Book Award-winner, Finney is one of three notables appearing this week at Agnes Scott as part of the school’s Writers’ Festival.

The shootings at the black church had been “talked about and talked about,” she said. “I wanted to come in through a window.”

That opportunity came when she was commissioned by the Southbound Project to respond to some of the project’s photographs of the “new South.”

(The Southbound enterprise, a photography collection and exhibit, is curated by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston.)

Organizing “the largest exhibition of photographs of and about the American South in the 21st century” is no small objective. The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art’s sizeable ambition is nearly matched by the physical heft of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Southbound. Fifty-six contemporary photographers are represented, each with five, full-page reproductions. Additional images are then shared on a companion website. 

In their Introduction, curators Mark Sloan and Mark Long seek to delineate how their chosen artists challenge, reframe, and move beyond entrenched and often problematic ways of depicting the South. While emphasizing the necessarily incomplete, open-ended nature of their project, they do nonetheless provide some conceptual frameworks.