Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, SC

Charleston has a complicated history, one rooted in plantations and enslavement. It’s hard to address those in the context of a “fine arts” museum, but the curatorial team at Gibbes Museum has handled it well. This is a place of old and new, with nods to both the recent and centuries-old past as well as introducing the visitor to artists on their way up. I really enjoyed my visit, learning about new eras in American art as well as how blended and yet separated our experiences are throughout history.

Collaborating with AI

The featured exhibition was Ruminations, by Damian Stamer. Particularly timely, considering his use of AI to generate source imagery, which he then paints over parts of, in an interesting collaboration of human and machine. He had several pieces on display, most of them large canvases with wild colors and shapes that invited the viewer to see what they wanted in each work.

Miniature Portrait Gallery

I’d never thought much about miniature portraits, to be honest, but after viewing this exhibit, I know a whole lot more than I did going in. In the days before cameras and selfies, a miniature was a way to remember someone, whether because of a happy event like a marriage or a more somber one, the death of a loved one. The largest of these would still fit in the palm of your hand. The smallest ones in this image below were an inch or so high. The patience and skill of the painter was so obvious, given the level of detail in each portrait.

Miniature portraits were first painted in Charleston, and now the museum has a collection of more than 600 pieces, spanning nearly two hundred years and including more than a hundred artists. As you might have guessed, after the invention of the camera, photography eventually displaced the miniature portrait. It’s a sad thing, because these are beautifully done, and I think they’d put most selfies to shame, side by side.

Multimedia Art

In a 21st century take on portraits, Raheleh Filsoofi, an Iranian-American artist, created this multimedia piece entitled Imagined Boundaries (2017 to present). Over time, different boxes display different people looking back at the visitor.

The art asks a person to look into the video camera and project themselves beyond that lens, to communicate by face and body with a person they will never meet, who will at some point see that video. She uses a wide variety of people and I found it fascinating to spot the active boxes and look at the people.

Charleston-affiliated Artists

Fully half of the second floor is a series of smaller galleries that feature Charleston-based artists, both older and contemporary. I loved this one by the Charleston-born, African-American painter Merton Daniel Simpson. As a teenager, he was unable to study art at city-run Gibbes Gallery because of segregation. He persisted, though, and in 1952, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sponsored his first exhibit. It wasn’t until 1983, more three decades later, that his hometown sponsored an exhibit of his work at the Charleston County Library. (You can read more about Simpson’s amazing life on Wikipedia).

One gallery focused on the Social Realism style of the 1930s and 1940s, when the country was struggling through the Great Depression and entry into World War II. These artists, many of them sponsored by FDR’s Federal Art Project, which was part of the Works Progress Adminstration (WPA), focused on showing the harsh realities of both urban and rural life. Walking through this gallery was like viewing snapshots of a country not seen in our history books but one witnessed by those who lived it at the time. The WPA and the New Deal gave voice to those who otherwise would have remained hidden in the shadows of history, and this gallery amplifies their voices so that we don’t forget the history some would prefer not to face.

Charleston was not a large city by any means, with many painters during the 1930s and 1940s sharing connections. For example, Simpson and Zerbe are connected through William Halsey, another Charleston-born painter. As a youth, Simpson was tutored by Halsey, who later studied under Zerbe, when the latter was head of the Painting Department at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston Zerbe probably understood the racism and segregation of Charleston all too well when he visited there for the first time in 1940, having fled Germany in 1934 to escape the Nazi regime.

An earlier work, Wild Rice Fields, done in the 1920s, caught my eye for the color palette and the composition. The artist is Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958), one of the leading figures in the Charleston Renaissance in the period between the two world wars. Largely self-taught, Smith preferred the low country over the urban scenery of Charleston, and her watercolors are beautiful. She contributed 28 watercolors to the book, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the Fifties (Herbert Sass) in the 1950s; I would love to see that after viewing this painting. (Learn more about Smith on Wikipedia)

Pelicans!

One of my favorite things was the corridor leading to the first-floor restrooms. It featured four HUGE paintings of pelicans, and I was instantly in love with this one. Look at all those pelicans! The moral of this little story is always check out the restrooms, you never know what you’ll find on the way.

So, if you’re in Charleston, and it’s hot and swampy humid there, dip into the Gibbes Museum and see what you like. There’s so much to explore, and it’s all beautifully displayed and very informative.

Related Link: Gibbes Museum of Art website

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Charleston is an extraordinary place. There is a deep connection between the residents and nearly three hundred and fifty years of history, and those ties between daily life and the distant past are strengthened by the occasional glimpse beyond the veil.

James Caskey