Patron Print Program
Each year we offer a new set of limited editions prints to our patrons. Artists who have been a part of the Halsey Institute's programming have specially created these prints for us. Beginning at the POSTMODERNIST level ($300), you may choose from one of the new prints, or any prints we still have available from past years. Gradually, you can build your art collection while supporting adventurous contemporary art in Charleston!
Vance Gellert - Minneapolis, MN - [New for 2008-2009]
Vance Gellert is a pharmacologist who expanded his research horizons and ways of knowing through photography. Always being convinced that use of plant medicines by traditional communities was the best resource for discovery of new medicines, he went to Mexico on a quest of understanding after postdoctoral research in pharmacology. Realizing he needed special tools to understand traditional healing he returned to pursue an MFA in photography. His work earned her numerous fellowships and grants including an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been shown and published nationally and internationally. In 2003 he began devoting his time to studying traditional healing rituals and medicines in South America through photography and field research. This work has earned him recognition in the world of art with a recent exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as well as collaborations with the Integrative Medicine program at the Mayo Clinic, and other medical institutions.His work is dedicated to finding ways to use photography to help understand the healing processes of indigenous and traditional medicine and incorporate it into western clinical practice.
Image Information:
Mercado de las Brujas (Witches Market), La Paz, Bolivia, 2006
Approximately 10 x 13 inches
Type C Print
In Bolivia, 80 percent of the population receives it healing through traditional medicines. Its traditional healers are known as the Ipaje in the jungle lowlands, the Yatiri of the midlands and Kallawaya of the Andean highlands. Healing knowledge comes through years of apprenticeship, and new healing discovery through experimentation with new plant medicines inspired by dreams and spiritual visions induced by the master plants. While the healers are capable of healing most of the maladies of their patients, they are well aware of where Western biomedicine is effective and readily recommend these medicines or refer their patients to Western trained doctors. The photograph dramatically illustrates this duality of healing practice in third world countries - up the stairs past the traditionally dressed healers is a modern pharmacy.
Ruth Marten - New York, NY - [New for 2008-2009]
Over four decades, Ruth Marten has created art seen in galleries, museums, on book covers, and in fashion magazines. A native of New York City and a graduate of the High School of Art & Design and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Marten has made personal and imaginative images that some have called surreal, others, satirical. After 16 years deeply involved with depicting Hair, she is engaged in the task of remaking Natural History along her own demented lines. An example of her book art can be seen on the covers of Peter Mayle's Provence opus. Her work has been included in shows at the Aldrich Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the Tang Museum and at the 10th Biennale de Paris. Currently, Marten is represented by Isis Gallery in London, Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York, and Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco.
Image Information:
Colored Birds, 2007
Approximately 11 x 7 inches
Ink on found print
Exhibited in the spring of 2008 at the Isis Gallery in London, Colored Birds is part of a series entitled Histoire un-Naturelle (after the original French study by Buffon) and is the name of her book. Working directly on the original 18th century prints, the artist has added her own finely painted details to transform the image into something humorous and contemporary. Modern graphic sensibility is present in the way that the plumage breaks out of the pre-ordained margins.
John McWilliams - McClellanville, SC - [New for 2008-2009]
John McWilliams was born in 1941 and currently resides in McClellanville. He received his the B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Rhode Island School of Design and is Professor/Director Emeritus of Georgia State University School of Art and Design. McWilliams has received numerous awards, including the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in photography.
In 1988, McWilliams published Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South with the Aperture Foundation and the High Museum. He continues to work as a photographer but primarily his work is in relief printmaking and drawing.
Image Information:
Wolf in the Creek, 2008
5 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches
Woodcut printed on Rives lightweight cream color
As McWilliams watched the tide suck out of the creek near his home, the surface of the water suggested shapes. This predictable daily occurrence became the inspiration for Wolf in the Creek. McWilliams has been making woodcuts for about ten years. He comments, "I am drawn to them because the cut in wood has the expressive potential of a drawn line. A woodcut can be printed many times, compiled in a book, distributed easily and even left in unsuspected places to be discovered. At its best a woodcut is a distillation of an idea controlling the page that it sits on, an enigma."
He is able to work everyday from idea to idea, letting one lead to the next. When a theme emerges McWilliams is eager to put a group of prints into a cohesive form. McWilliams says, "My work centers me and puzzles me which sounds like a contradiction. It makes me feel alive."
Kendall Messick - New York
A native of Delaware, multi-media artist Kendall Messick is now based in New York City. He studied photography at both the School of Visual Arts and the International Center of Photography in New York. Messick divides his time between documentary filmmaking and extended still photography projects. In early 2001 Messick completed his first feature length, multi-media documentary project, "Corapeake". "The Projectionist" is Messick's second 
film and exhibition, which was launched in 2007. This project has already garnered critical acclaim and is currently scheduled to travel to several major institutions through 2009. Messick's works are in numerous public collections including the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Image Information:
The Vaudevillian, 2003
10 x 10 inches
Color-coupler photograph
This photograph of Gordon Brinckle, the subject of The Projectionist, shows the theatre palace creator beaming on the stage of his own Shalimar Theatre as an homage to vaudevillian performers. Brinckle was a projectionist in the US Army during World War II, and later in the Everette Theatre in Middletown, Delaware. He created his own personal rendition of a movie palace in the basement of his modest home over a forty-five year span. The Shalimar Theatre was disassembled from Brinckle's basement and reassembled on the first floor of the Halsey Institute. Kendall Messick grew up across the street from Brinckle. At age 92, Brinckle is thrilled that his beloved Shalimar Theatre is now traveling around the country with this exhibition.
artist website
Rikuo Ueda - Osaka, Japan
Force of Nature artist Rikuo Ueda sets into motion elaborately engineered mechanical devices that are designed to harness the wind to create his "wind drawings." A writing instrument mounted on a flexible arm records both subtle and dramatic variations in the wind by transferring the energy onto paper, canvas, or another surface. The "machines" are constructed of natural materials such as bamboo and hemp rope, making the structures themselves beautiful and sophisticated in design.
Ueda says whenever people stop and ask what he is doing, they break into a smile when they hear "wind drawing." He says he has learned that if one wants to work with nature, one has to be imperfect or "loose."
Rigid attempts to overcome nature are doomed from the start. He collaborates with nature in order to provide a model for how we might coexist with our surroundings.
Image information:
Wind Drawing
Approximately 9 x 11 inches
Arches paper with ink
We are offering fifteen original wind drawings, in a special arrangement with the artist. These are not prints! Each image is a unique interaction between the artist, the wind, a pen, and a piece of paper, along with some unexpected elements such as raindrops or insect tracks. The artist creates a set of conditions wherein a drawing is made over a 24 hour period. He returns to the site after this time, only to replace one sheet of paper with another. Because these are unique, there will be some variation in lines and markings.
Renee Stout - Washington, DC
Renee Stout grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980. In 1985 she moved to Washington, D.C. and began to explore the roots of her African American heritage. She looks to the belief systems of African peoples and their descendants throughout the African Diaspora, as well as to the world and her immediate environment, for the inspiration to create works that encourage self-examination, self-empowerment and self-healing.
The lives of Stout's imaginary characters unfold in a variety of media, including painting, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation. The recipient of awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Stout has shown her work in solo and group shows throughout the United States, and in England, Russia and the Netherlands.
Colin Quashie - Charleston, SC
By exploring the reservoir of possibilities offered by popular cultural imagery, media-based communication and satire, Colin Quashie investigates serious cultural, social and political ideas and issues, with sometimes raucous, sometimes genial, tongue-in-cheek humor. On occasion, his wry, ironic, and irreverent art works disturb and/or offend the audience, the intent; to spark popular debate and discussion by forcing them to consider issues they may prefer to avoid.
About Sweet Jesus, on the “cover” of his faux ‘CQ’ magazine, he states that “it’s simply a witness to a historic collision. Since both sides (religion and gay rights) believe they have the right of way and refuse to yield, they’ll have to sort it out in the courts.” This painting is the first of a planned 10 part series of collisions. In between paintings, Quashie continues to finance his art as a writer.
artist website
Kreg Yingst - Pensacola, FL
Kreg Yingst received his MA from Eastern Illinois University and his BA from Trinity University in San Antonio. After teaching art for thirteen years, he became a full-time working artist in 2003, and maintains a balance between his painting and printmaking. Recent group exhibitions include Sleight of Mind: Magic Realism in Contemporary Art, Flushing Meadows Town Hall; The Cinco Banderas Collection, Pensacola, Museum of Art; and Combined Talents – Florida International Competition, Florida State University. A book of his work, The Magic Show in 52 Linocuts, was recently published in December of 2005. He was also a featured artist in the Halsey Institute’s Alive Inside: The Lure and Lore of the Sideshow exhibition.
Popeye reflects a by-gone era of the intriguing and bizarre. Yingst comments, “The print is based on Popeye Perry, a sideshow character who had the amazing ability to thrust his eyeballs clean out of their sockets. It was my intention to capture the feel and nostalgia of the sideshow banner without adhering to its compositional formula.
artist website
Tanja Softic´ - Richmond, VA
Tanja Softic´ works in drawing, printmaking and book media. She is recipient of the 1996 National Endowment for the Arts/ Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship, and a Soros Foundation–Open Society Institute Exhibition Support Grant. Her work is shown internationally and included in numerous collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the New York Public Library and the New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia. Tanja Softic´ is associate professor of art at the University of Richmond in Virginia.
In Notes on Space, perspective lines of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci are superimposed over the outline of a lush and leafy landscape. The inserts are a fragment of the microscopic image of a cross-section of the orchid stem and an image of a satellite dish. The print represents a compressed view of diverse ways of comprehending the space around us and the space of drawing.
artist website
Juan Logan - Chapel Hill, NC
Since the 1960s, Juan Logan has been making provocative works that explore the psychological and social impact of racism, social change, injustice, and ignorance, using imagery derived from the specialized iconography and rituals of African-American life in the rural South. Logan's sculptures, paintings and drawings turn on both historical and linguistic codes, as he employs various leitmotifs of history, race, and gender morphing "Mammy," lawn jockeys, reliquary forms-as vehicles for an encounter with the viewer. The Third Place of the exhibition's title refers to the psychological space of those encounters, where we come to recognize ourselves, the other, and another possible self-one of understanding, empathy and compromise.
artist website
Rosamond Purcell - Boston, MA
Rosamond Purcell is best known for her hauntingly beautiful photographs in the back rooms of natural history museums. She is the author of Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, three collaborative works with the late paleontologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould, and, Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (Quantuck Lane 2002) with Ricky Jay, who refers to her as the “doyenne of decaying objects.” Purcell has recently authored a book entitled Owl’s Head, about a derelict antique and scrap metal business (and its owner) in Owl’s Head, Maine. She was also the subject of a major traveling exhibition/installation entitled Two Rooms, originated by the Santa Monica Museum of Art. This exhibition featured a full-sized recreation of seventeenth century Danish naturalist Olaus Worm’s “Wunderkammer,” a cabinet of curiosity including over 400 objects from around the world, set in relation to the contents of Purcell’s longtime studio, meticulously recreated.
The print The Book Nest offers a glimpse of what happened when a family of rodents decided to inhabit a book. This image is from her fall 2006 release Bookworm (Quantuck Press), which celebrates Purcell’s lifelong fascination with books and their various incarnations in our lives.
