For more than three decades, budding artists have proudly displayed their work across a variety of mediums from photography and sculpture to painting and prints at the annual Young Contemporaries exhibition at the College of Charleston’s Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art.

Now in its 35th year, the Young Contemporaries competition faced a new challenge ahead of the exhibit’s opening on March 27, 2020: How to share the students’ work in a virtual space instead of a traditional art gallery. The Halsey was forced to make the shift amid the College’s move to online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new South is now on display, thanks to 200 images taken by more than 56 photographers, at The Hunter Museum of American Art as part of Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South

Organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina, the exhibit showcases the history of the American South on film. The region is among the most culturally diverse and storied, and, therefore, photographed in the world.

These photographs, though relatively small in number, capture that diversity and vitality.

If someone asked you to come up with a mental picture of the South, it’d probably be pretty easy; I mean, we live in the South. However, if you really think about it, the South is an incredibly diverse place. There are the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, the hustle and bustle of Atlanta, the bayous of Louisiana, the Mississippi deltas, and so much more in the states between.

Thinking even further, the South has changed substantially over the years, especially since the turn of the 21st century. The Hunter Museum will be showcasing the New South since the year 2000 in their newest photography exhibit, titled “Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South”.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is presenting an exhibition of all large assemblage pieces by Butch Anthony titled Inside/Out. Anthony is an artist and contributor to Auburn’s Rural Studio program. The exhibition is on view from Jan. 17–Feb. 29 at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art. 

As a multi-faceted self-taught artist, Anthony creates works that investigate and appropriate images from the American vernacular. His practice includes painting X-ray like skeletons on top of antique portraits in elaborate, often gilded frames. Though Anthony’s work emanates from the folk art or vernacular idiom, his works are unmistakably original in concept and execution.

If treasured possessions carry any residue from their long-departed owners, Charleston’s art halls this month are chock-a-block with the denizens of yesteryear. Three exhibitions now up at the Gibbes Museum of Art and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art feature works that reinvent, reframe and utterly reimagine antiquities in ways that alternately glorify and give new meaning to them.

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Over at the Halsey, tourists of an altogether different stripe have informed the oeuvre of Butch Anthony, an artist whose work started the folk-art vein, populating his Museum of Wonder in the tiny hometown of Seale, Ala., and filling it with all sorts of antique oddities, from dust-covered curiosities to taxidermy critters.

It’s interesting how there’s always an “and” between “arts” and “crafts.” It suggests that they are, while related, separate from one another. But in the work of artist Coulter Fussell, whose new exhibition The Raw Materials of Escape is now open at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the two become one.

Fussell began her artistic endeavors as a painter, but after her first child was born, she followed in her mother Cathy’s footsteps and began making quilts. But she never quite left painting behind.

Take in the best of the city’s arts scene, from tiny portraits to public murals to a new spot for jazz

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And near the downtown landmark Marion Square, the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is known to mount some of the most adventurous and experiential work in the region—Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto once spent a couple of weeks creating an intricate  temporary labyrinth of sea salt across the gallery floor. 

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston will present a new exhibit of two modern American artists redefining the folk genre. Inside/Out is an exhibition of works by Butch Anthony and The Raw Materials of Escape is an exhibition of quilts by Coulter Fussell. The pieces will be on view from Jan. 17 to Feb. 29, 2020.

Inside/Out will consist of new images, assemblages and installations created specifically for the Halsey. As a multifaceted, self-taught artist, Anthony creates works that investigate and appropriate images from the American vernacular. Anthony’s work often has a charming immediacy because of the familiarity of the selected materials, yet this surface appeal is often undermined by the conceptual premise. Some images evince a biting sarcasm or ironic wit, while others poke fun at our consumerist society. This is the largest show of Anthony’s work to date. Singular portraits, assemblage objects and installations combine to create a working model of the inside of Anthony’s mind.

Coulter Fussell is a painter first, but adding quilting to her skillset has paid off as she prepares to exhibit her work in South Carolina next week.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston is presenting an exhibition of Fussell’s work, titled “The Raw Materials of Escape.” The exhibit begins on Jan. 17 and runs through Feb. 29.

Making quilts was not something Fussell said she was interested in as child, but she learned the art by watching her mother, as most all girls did in the South in generations past.

“My mom is a like a prolific, really good quilter and has been my entire life,” Fussell said. “When I was in my late teenage years, college, she and I made some quilts together. That was the point in which I really figured out the method in doing it.”

After being a painter “for years,” Fussell then returned to quilt making after the birth of her first son, when she made him a quilt 12 years ago. Since then, all Fussell has done is make quilts and sew.

As is the case with many Southern summer road trips, the winding route between Atlanta and Water Valley, Mississippi, is a swath of verdant farm land creased by state highways. Heavy, sluggish heat seeps under your clothes as you travel. By 10 AM, a roadside thermometer reads “101 F” in a smirking, digital glare. Continuing due west, signs that you’re moving into Water Valley—which by name seems to promise a miraculously cool spring that will save you from the heat of high summer—begin to crop up. Rather than offering any such aquatic feature, Water Valley has the air of most small, former-railroad-towns you’ll find throughout the South. On Main Street, the town’s central artery, there’s a meat-and-three restaurant, a post office, a Methodist church, a Shriner’s meeting house, and a hair salon called Hair Trendz. And then, a jewel box: in a modestly shaded, shotgun-style storefront, you’ll find the cloth-plumed studio of artist Coulter Fussell.