The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is pleased to announce a major gift of $50,000 to their endowment by The Joanna Foundation of Sullivan’s Island, SC. This is the Foundation’s second major gift to the Halsey Institute, donating $20,000 in 2015.

ABOUT THE GIFT

The $50,000 gift is presented as a naming gift for the Halsey Institute’s Video Cavern screening room of their gallery spaces. The Halsey Institute produces videos to accompany its exhibitions. Emmy award-winning videographers have created videos that document the artists’ creative processes and personal styles. These videos offer insights and allow visitors to deepen their understanding of the featured artist. In 2013, the Halsey Institute commissioned artist Michael James Moran to create a video viewing environment within the galleries. He chose to create a cavern, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, composed of stratified layers of wood. In addition to the video cavern, the videos can be viewed on the Halsey Institute’s website. The Joanna Foundation supports organizations and programs that strengthen community capacity and enhance individual involvement in achieving a better quality of life.

Joanna Foundation Board of Trustees Executive Vice President Peggy Schachte said, “The Joanna Foundation is proud to be a permanent part of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. We think this is a natural fit. Both organizations respect the past but look to the future and work to recognize the efforts of people who are making a meaningful difference in creative and sometimes unconventional ways.”

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is pleased to announce a major gift of $50,000 to its endowment by The Joanna Foundation of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. This is the Foundation’s second major gift to the Halsey Institute, having previously donated $20,000 in 2015.

The latest gift is presented as a naming gift for the Halsey Institute’s Video Cavern screening room of their gallery spaces. These videos offer insights and allow visitors to deepen their understanding of the featured artist. In 2013, the Halsey Institute commissioned artist Michael James Moran to create a video viewing environment within the galleries. He chose to create a cavern, complete with stalactites and stalagmites, composed of stratified layers of wood. In addition to the video cavern, the videos can be viewed on the Halsey Institute’s website.

“The Joanna Foundation is proud to be a permanent part of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art,” says Joanna Foundation Board of Trustees Executive Vice President Peggy Schachte. “We think this is a natural fit. Both organizations respect the past, but look to the future and work to recognize the efforts of people who are making a meaningful difference in creative and sometimes unconventional ways.”

The George Gallery, which is currently relocating from its spot on Bogard street to 54 Broad St., has added works on paper from both the William Halsey and Otto Neumann estates to its roster. In a press release the gallery says, “Given the focus of the gallery being on abstract and non-objective art that is inspired by the Abstract expressionist, we couldn’t pick two artists who hold up the historical importance of our mission more than these highly regarded and collected artists.”

Halsey, a native Charlestonian, was once described by the director of the Greenville County Museum of Art as “a pioneer of abstract painting in the South and a nationally recognized talent.” Neumann, a native of Heidelberg, Germany, was both an expressionist painter and printmaker, best known for his woodcuts and monotypes of human, animal, and abstract forms. 

Walking off Calhoun Street you could find yourself thinking you’ve stumbled upon a nomadic camp, inhabited by ghosts of species past.

Your body takes a moment to adjust to the darkness, noise, and vulnerability when you enter the latest exhibition at the Halsey Institute, The Carrion Cheer, A Faunistic Tragedy, depicting humanity’s dominating relationship with the natural world through a total sensory experience by German artists Böhler and Orendt.

Weaving your way through a series of looming tents, you’re greeted by animated apparitions on a mist screen—eerie but somehow endearing.

Silhouetted drawings tell the story of seven animals who became extinct between 1750 and this decade. As you take in the sounds of the lost creatures, their visual story is told on the walls of the tents:  a Carolina Parakeet erased because of humans’ need for pretty feathers—the Steller’s sea cow wiped out for their bodacious natural resources. Through a haunting chant, you are forgiven for causing the victim’s imminent death, but one can’t help but feel guilty next to the towering tents topped with busts of the deceased.

In a masterful attempt to create what seems like the world’s most impactful haunted house, Böhler and Orendt have given us a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

Sometimes the past should remain in the past, but for Dontre Major, embracing the past is the only way to move forward. This is the message of his Black AmeriKKKa series which explores black history from enslavement to the present day, and which earned him the title of best in show during The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Arts’ Young Contemporaries exhibit earlier this year. These portraits depicting nameless figures from across time have been cleverly manipulated in the darkroom utilizing photographic developing methods like Van Dyke Brown (a printing process) and liquid emulsion.

Major layers dramatic brush strokes and textures during the development process to contribute an emotional element to each image. He wants to spark conversation about racial inequality and to encourage social change; “I just hope that my images can really speak for themselves. I try to let the viewers come up with their own ideas.”

 The Mennello Museum of American Art is presenting the work of multi-media Korean-American artist Jiha Moon in an upcoming solo exhibition, Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here. The exhibition is on view from June 22 through August 12, 2018, with an Artist Talk and Opening Reception on June 29. 

Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Moon harvests cultural elements native to Korea, Japan, and China and then unites them with Western elements to investigate the multi‐faceted nature of our current global identity as influenced by popular culture, technology, racial perceptions, and folklore. Featuring over 50 works, Moon blurs the lines between Western and Eastern identified iconography such as the characters from the online game Angry Birds© and smart phone Emojis which float alongside Asian tigers and Indian gods, in compositions that appear simultaneously familiar and foreign. 

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This exhibition is organized by the Taubman Museum of Art in collaboration with the Halsey Institute and curated by Amy G. Moorefield, Deputy Director of Exhibition and Collections at the Taubman Museum of Art, and Mark Sloan, Director and Chief Curator of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art with special assistance from Andrea Pollan, Curator’s Office, Washington, D.C.; Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia; and Ryan Lee Gallery, New York, New York. 

Artist Christian Orendt talks with Jeanette Guinn about The Carrion Cheer: A Faunistic Tragedy an installation at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art on Calhoun Street as part of Piccolo Spoleto.

Orendt is half of the Germany-based duo Böhler & Orendt who have created a “makeshift transdimensional stopover camp,” the consisting of several interconnected tents through which viewers can walk. Each tent features an apparition of an extinct animal, such as a Steller’s Sea Cow, the Carolina Parakeet, and the Pinta Island Tortoise, which will appear as a projection on a screen of mist.

The extinct animals sing, in chorus, a song of forgiveness to humans for causing their ultimate extinction. The tents also feature cave painting-like drawings of the animals’ encounters with humans. While whimsical and imaginative, the installation comments on humans’ relationship with the world around us. Böhler & Orendt’s project confronts the notion that humans are thought as the most intelligent beings, as they suggest these animals are capable of traveling through time and dimensions to revisit us.

Dr. Anthony Greene will speak on stage with Fahamu Pecou at the College of Charleston’s School of Sciences and Mathematics, 202 Calhoun Street, on Saturday, June 9 at 4:00PM. Following the conversation, there will be a reception at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, 161 Calhoun Street. Admission for the conversation and reception is free and the event is open to the public.

Pecou will be signing copies of Visible Man, the catalogue published by the Halsey Institute for his 2016 exhibition DO or DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance organized in collaboration with the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University, during the reception at the Halsey Institute’s galleries. If interested, guests may bring their own copies of the catalogue to be signed and copies will be available for purchase ($34.95) at the event.

Published by the Halsey Institute, Visible Man provides an in depth look at the artist’s work from the past two decades. Pecou’s work investigates the concept of Black masculinity and provides new modes for the representation of Black bodies. Starting with his self-assumed persona, Fahamu Pecou is the Shit!, and his early NEOPOP works-in which he places himself on the covers of prestigious art and culture magazines-the catalogue shows the trajectory of his work, ending with the DO or DIE and #BLACKMATTERLIVES series.

The 174-page catalogue contains over 100 full-color images as well as scholarly essays by Amanda H. Hellman, Arturo Lindsay, Sean Meighoo, and Michael K. Wilson that critically examine Pecou’s work.

In August, 2016, I wrote about Atlanta-based artist, Fahamu Pecou, and his exhibit, Do or DIE: Affect, Ritual, Resistance, which was held at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. Pecou’s pop culture-inspired works address society’s representation of black males, while utilizing traditional themes of Yoruba and Ifa, West African religious practices. His paintings — raw and beautiful in their truth — felt necessary in 2016 Charleston, a year after a blood-stained Holy City saw the deaths of Walter Scott at the hands of a police officer, and of nine innocent Emanuel AME parishioners at the hands of a white supremacist. 

The Halsey put together a catalogue after that exhibit (this is something they do often, in case you ever want to get your hands on a book full of art), titled Visible Man. On Sat. June 9 at 4 p.m., join Pecou and Dr. Anthony Greene for a discussion of the catalogue at CofC’s School of Sciences and Mathematics (202 Calhoun St.), followed by a reception at the Halsey. The event is free to attend and catalogues can be purchased for $34.95.

Visible Man provides an in-depth look at Pecou’s work created over the past two decades. There’s the NEOPOP series, described as, “a host of visual responses to popular culture … Using the conventions of Pop Art, NEOPOP examines the current authority of popular culture, and challenges the notion of fine art’s position in its commodification.” Most of the images in this series are evocative of magazine covers, with titles like ‘Cream, The Arts Issue,’ ‘Flaunt,’ ‘metro.pop.’ The titles of the pieces read like a how-to guide on satirizing stereotypes of black culture: “Shut Yo Mouth,” “All This Without a Basketball,” “Immaculate Percep’shun,” “And I Ain’t Been Shot a Whole Buncha Times.”

Pops of Uber modernity peek out from Jiha Moon’s paintings. There’s the familiar if grimace-inducing lowercase “f” of the Facebook logo tucked into “Forever Couplehood” (2014), for example, or the Starbucks siren hiding behind a cloud in “Double Bless” (2012). Scores of icons compete for the surface of Moon’s paintings. Most of them hail from impossible realms. Picture the serenity of a late 19th-century Korean landscape painting invaded by a hostile force of 21st-century #brands and that might approach the level of manic fantasy that Moon sustains throughout her latest survey. 

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Moon’s work only has one volume, and it’s a roar. That works for this show (which was assembled by the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia, and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina). Humming with vibrational energy, Moon’s paintings scale down to the level of detail of Hieronymus Bosch. Her compositions scale up to the sweep of the Joseon Dynasty landscape painter Jang Seung-eop. Big and small, majestic and giggly, Moon’s work dwells there, between the two.