Arts: Local View

With photography, watercolors, sculpture, oils, and drawings, the Greenville County Museum of Art is celebrating twenty-five years of commissioned pieces with its exhibit, A Portrait of Greenville. Numbering more than fifty, the works range from realistic paintings by Edward Rice depicting the architecture of the four historical downtown churches built on land donated by one of the city’s founding fathers to a large-scale work by Andy Lenaghan featuring a bright panorama of the renovated West End area viewed from a Reedy River-side hotel room.

Museum director Tom Styron says the museum has been bringing artists to Greenville for inspiration for more than two decades, but A Portrait of Greenville is the first major exhibition to feature Greenville as its subject. Six John Ahearn sculptures of local residents, including Arthur Magill, Claude Davis, and Dereck Locke, were the first pieces commissioned in the 1980s by the museum to depict Greenville and its residents. The commission of the Ahearn sculptures was followed by a series of approximately fifty watercolors and studies by then-rising artist Stephen Scott Young.

Commissions have continued sporadically through the decades and have increased in the last year, bringing work by William McCullough and photographer Tim Barnwell who documented outside city-limits spots in Pelham, Fountain Inn, Piedmont, and Greer.

Though most of the work originates from out-of-town artists, several are local, including work by Mark Mulfinger, longtime Greenville News photographer Owen Riley’s Greenville Landscape #1, and a series of drawings from the 1950s and 1980s by former Furman art department head Charles Blackwood.

Styron says in addition to giving residents a fresh look at their town, the museum hopes to inspire talented natives: “We hope to motivate our own artists to make Greenville a primary theme in their work and reflect the character and charisma of our community to a larger audience.”

A Portrait of Greenville, 25 years of commissioned pieces
Greenville County Museum of Art, 420 College Street
Free of charge, donations accepted