I was recently commiserating with my friend Erin Bennett Banks, local illustrator and creative director at the Gibbes Museum of Art, about the fact that there’s never enough time outside of work and family to spend on our own creative endeavors. I need more time to finish my book — she needs more time to work on her design projects. We fantasized about how great it would be to participate in a residency program. “Just imagine,” I said, ‘what could be accomplished with endless, uninterrupted hours to submerge ourselves in art.’

Thankfully, some lucky souls actually get that chance, thanks to the handful of artist-in-residence programs in town.

If you’re a visual artist in Charleston, you have at least five opportunities. Residencies are available through the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Redux Contemporary Art Center, Robert Lange Studios, and The Vendue, and when the Gibbes Museum reopens this spring, it will have both short- and long-term artists in residence in their studio space on the first floor.

For John McWilliams, the act of creating woodblock prints is monastic. “One mark leads to another and the piece just evolves. You never know where it will take you. I work under the premise that there’s no such thing as a mistake.”

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, located in Charleston, S.C., received a South Carolina Arts Commission Arts Education Project grant to help support this exhibition.

“You’ve got mail” has different meanings, depending upon one’s age and current communications style.  The Halsey Institute’s exhibition, Correspondence Art: Words, Objects, and Images by Ray Johnson, Richard C., and Bob Ray, will appeal to those nostalgic for a time when keeping in touch could mean waiting a day or more for letter delivery, while also introducing the concept of creating and mailing art to young people accustomed to reaching their friends instantly via text.

Despite the fact that December marks the middle of the year for the arts world — if we were going to get all technical, we’d do this article in June, once Spoleto closed — the approach of New Year’s Eve tends to make us think back on the cool things we saw, heard, and experienced in our local art spaces this year. So without further ado, here’s our biased, unscientific list of the greatest developments in Charleston’s art scene, in no particular order.

We know, talking about 2017 is about as taboo as talking about New Year’s Eve plans (we’re scrambling for some, too). But when we glimpsed some of the images set to be used in a huge multi-media project, Southbound, co-curated by Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey, and Mark Long, professor of Political Science at CofC, we knew we had to share the project with y’all.

We love NYC and LA and all the art they have to offer, but we know they’re only two towns of many across the country mounting great exhibitions large and small. So we tried to travel and see a lot of shows this year, even though it’s next to impossible to be comprehensive with a list like this (and we surely missed a lot). From Nick Cave’s Detroit takeover to a retrospective of the artist known as Mr. Imagination, here are our picks for the best exhibitions of 2015 across the United States.

There are multiple magics at work in the art of Renée Stout. As the subject of her current solo exhibition at the Wellin Museum, Stout has chosen hoodoo, or conjure, a set of African American spiritual practices often referred to as folk magic. She’s also created a worker of this magic, a conjurer named Fatima Mayfield who is Stout’s alter ego. And in her objects themselves, Stout has embedded the magic of art — a bewitching artifice — which is to say that her paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs are so carefully constructed and so authentically felt they conjure and sustain their own reality.

Spoiler alert: The three daughters of the Fail family, Nelly, Jenny June, and Gertie all die in PURE Theatre’s play, Failure: A Love Story. Well, actually, it’s not a spoiler because they announce this fact in the beginning refrain, even including the cause of deaths: “blunt object, disappearance, and consumption,” respectively. Surely this cannot make for an uplifting love story. On the contrary, this latest PURE production is entirely heartwarming, largely due to a splendid cast, innovative choreography, and scintillating set design.

Simply stated, Lonnie Holley’s exhibition at the Halsey soared. The approximately 40 sculptures were selected from the collection of William S. Arnett and the Atlanta-based Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which Arnett founded, as well as the African-American artist’s own collection. Elegantly curated by Halsey director Mark Sloan, “Something to Take My Place,” titled after a 2008 sculpture of nearly the same name, focused on discrete objects—solos rather than a choir, dazzling though the artist’s environments can be.

A brilliantly resourceful artist’s timely exhibition at Charleston, South Carolina’s Halsey Gallery is the latest development in a remarkable career

Like most solo exhibitions by widely known contemporary artists, Lonnie Holley’s “Something to Take My Place” was scheduled more than two years before it opened. But its timing and location turned out to be more appropriate than anyone could have predicted. The compelling show of Holley’s raggedly assertive, socially engaged sculptures was on view in the Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, from late August into early October 2015. This placed it chronologically between two events destined to cast a long historical shadow in South Carolina and the rest of the nation–the massacre in one of Charleston’s oldest black churches on June 17, and a millennial flood that struck that city and much of the state in early October.