Artist Renée Stout chats with Floyd Hall in this WonderRoot podcast, produced in conjunction with the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. They discuss her use of alter egos in the creation of her work, the foundations of Hoodoo and conjuring, and how her work connects to and confronts established beliefs in the African American community.

The Halsey is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and they’re doing it up big with a summer exhibition of works by American art heavyweights Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns. When they announced the show last fall, we wondered how director Sloan was going to connect the two artists — Fairey began his career as a street artist and now works in the gray areas between fine, commercial, and street art, while Johns began his career as an abstract expressionist and developed a new style that rests on the idea of representing the familiar in new, unfamiliar ways.

Conjure: to manipulate supernatural forces, using charms, roots and inanimate and handmade articles.

Artist Renée Stout illuminates that tradition and makes it her own in Tales of the Conjure Woman, a carnival of conjuration at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art through May 17.

The artist, who won the High Museum’s David C. Driskell Prize in 2010, explores contemporary hoodoo (also known as hexing and spell-casting), an amalgam of African folkloric practices and the folk magic of the African Diaspora, by means of an alter-ego named Fatima Mayfield.

I was in awe again at the Charleston Music Hall Saturday night as Bill Carson led us into a wonderland of aural bliss.  He and a mind-boggling group of minstrels played hours of music that was carefully curated, composed, and polished to perfection, in honor of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art‘s 30^th anniversary.

After a “micro-documentary” about the Halsey’s significance in the art world, featuring native son Shepard Fairey, Carson’s core band stayed on stage most of the night.  Singers rotated in, performing their original music with the most savagely beautiful treatment.  Two major highlights were Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent singing the bejeezus out of “Hard Times” and Joel Hamilton‘s brilliant “Tourniquet” that featured some incredible percussion from Ron Wiltrout.  Michael Flynn, Rachel Kate, Stephanie Underhill, and Lindsay Holler were all mesmerizing to watch and listen to, a true testament to the state of music here and now.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, in collaboration with the Charleston Music Hall, will present an intimate evening of music featuring Charleston’s finest locally and nationally recognized musical acts on Groundhog Day. Come celebrate Groundhog Day with Charleston’s very own Bill Carson, Ron Wiltrout, Rachel Kate, Cary Anne Hearst, Michael Trent, Michael Flynn, Joel Hamilton, Charlton Singleton, Nathan Koci, Lindsay Holler, Kevin Hamilton, Wilton Elder, John Cobb, Stephanie Underhill, and Clint Fore, collaborating together for a night of incredible music.

Ask many of the artists involved in Saturday’s Groundhog Day Concert at the Charleston Music Hall what day in their musical history they’d most like to relive ad infinitum, and they often hark back to the first time they came together for the same purpose, back in 2010.

For the 15 musicians involved, the opportunity to share a stage doesn’t come often, and requires a magnetic personality like Mark Sloan, director of the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, to pull them together.

Local songwriter Bill Carson helped plant the seed after scoring the music for a short film about one of the Halsey’s exhibits in 2009. The relationship blossomed into the idea to celebrate and raise money for the Halsey with a collaborative concert, led by Opposite of a Train, Carson’s band with multi-instrumentalist Nathan Koci and percussionist Ron Wiltrout. For the trio, the goal when recruiting fellow musicians was to put together their dream concert.

It’s a big year for the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, and they’re kicking it off with a big 30th anniversary party on Groundhog Day (that’s Sat. Feb. 1, in case you were wondering).

To raise money and celebrate the Halsey’s place in the local art culture, Charleston’s finest musicians will take the stage for an evening concert at the Charleston Music Hall. In a statement, Bill Carson said, “”This concert is a way for the local music community to show its support for the fantastic contemporary arts programming that the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art provides year-round, and year after year.”

Don ZanFagna, the man behind the ultra-eco-houses, or Pulse Domes, that filled the Halsey Institute last September, passed away last week at the age of 84, according to the Post and Courier.

ZanFagna was an artist and teacher who became obsessed with the idea for a Pulse Dome, a self-sustaining structure that was more akin to animal architecture — warrens, beaver mounds, etc. — than human. Built with organic materials, the Pulse Domes were intended to be sustainable in the most extreme sense. They would produce their own energy, grow crops, and be in perfect harmony with its environment.

His ideas don’t sound so crazy nowadays, with architects around the world creating homes that heat and cool themselves and have eco-touches like green roofs and rainwater capture systems. But no one yet has gone as far as ZanFagna did when he was creating his drawings and models back in the 1960s and ’70s. As the Halsey’s Mark Sloan said in our cover story on ZanFagna last year, “I honestly think that this material, once it’s out in the world and in circulation, I think it can actually have an effect … My hope would be that once this material is released into the world, people will say ‘Well, you know, here was a guy that was really onto something.'”

When you go to a Renée Stout exhibit, be prepared to encounter two people. First there’s Stout, the artist. Then there’s Fatima Mayfield, Stout’s hoodoo-practicing healer alter-ego and the subject of an upcoming exhibit at the Halsey Institute, Tales of the Conjure Woman. Looking at the work that makes up Tales of the Conjure Woman, you’ll see Mayfield’s handwritten notes on seduction, her collection of roots and herbs in bottles and jars, models of hearts in torso-shaped wire cages, and paintings of various characters who people Mayfield’s world. The experience is one of looking through somebody’s else’s things — always a guilty pleasure — with an added spookiness that comes not only from the mystical nature of those mysterious objects, but from the ghostly presence of Mayfield herself.