A lifelong Charleston resident with limited professional training, Alice Smith forged her style from a wide range of sources—her French teacher at the local Carolina Art Association, mentors who introduced her to Tonalism and Japanese woodblock prints, and extensive fieldwork. In a career of sixty years, she defied gender expectations and gained national acclaim.
Descended from prominent rice planters, Alice’s work reflects a reverence for nature and nostalgia for an idealized past. She helped spark Charleston’s historic preservation movement, depicted the waning days of rice planting, and captured the mystical spirit of the Lowcountry’s coast, marshes, and woodlands in luminous watercolors.
Alice was one of the principal guiding lights of an invigorating cultural change that flourished between the twentieth century’s two world wars called the Charleston Renaissance. In recent years, this artistic and cultural movement has been reexamined for its elitist perspective and romanticized view of Charleston and the city’s fraught history. Alice’s story raises important questions about historical memory and the forces that shaped Charleston into the city it is today.
Middleton Place Museum Shop Books
Rhinebeck artist Franc Palaia talks about his catalogue raisonné : Wall Works: Frescoes, Photo-Sculpture and Mixed Media 1973-2021. The discussion will help to introduce a restrospective exhibit that will be on view of Palaia's "Large scale frescoes and photo-sculptures installed to simulate a contemporary archeological site"at the Hudson Beach Glass Gallery on view May 14 - June 5, 2022 in Beacon, New York.
"I have been photographing walls, murals, signs, graffiti, street art, architecture and billboards since 1976. In my travels of 26 countries, I have compiled thousands of urban wall images that I use as reference for my wall works. I am a multi-disciplinary artist and work in photography, painting, sculpture and murals where I incorporate all four mediums into mixed media flat wall pieces and 3-dimensional floor sculptures. I have a saying: `walls are drop cloths of a society', whatever you seen on a city's walls gives you a sense of what is happening in that particular city or country. They signal the current state of their economy, politics and social condition." -- from Franc Palaia, "Artist Statement."
copies of the catalog are obtainable by emailing Franc Palaia at francpalaia1@gmail.com
“It is a condition of masterworks that they attract, even demand, interpretation and reinterpretation. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is a case in point. In 1946, Alfred Barr called it ‘a battlefield of trial and experiment’ marking ‘the beginning of a new period in the history of modern art.’ Twenty-six years later, Leo Steinberg argued that its psychic and pictorial ‘violence’ resides in its power of displacement, in ‘the startled consciousness of a viewer who sees himself seen.’ Others have examined its ‘primitivism’ and l’art negre as central to its power and originality. Now, Suzanne Blier, through a close textual and visual analysis of an astonishing range of references, argues that Picasso’s creativity ‘involved both drawing on and subverting the past’ while reimagining the present and creating the future anew. Blier's study rewards close reading, just as the painting rewards close and sustained looking.” — James Cuno, President and CEO, The J. Paul Getty Trust
“Combining the specialized skills of an art historian with the zeal of a detective, Suzanne Preston Blier offers a bold and transformative re-reading of the Demoiselles. She startlingly shifts the interpretive foundations of Picasso and the Demoiselles: she shows us a Picasso not as bombastic egotist but as capacious globalist; not as masculine master fixated on female sexuality and its attendant anxieties, but as explorer of the power and presence of women and their generative capacities. This provocative and pathbreaking book scrambles the logic of modernism, primitivism, and feminism in the discipline of art history.” — Debora Silverman, author of Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art
The author and biographer Laurie Lisle returns to the program to talk about her new memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life, newly published by Artemis Editions.
"With Word for Word, Laurie Lisle enters the pantheon of great memoirists . . . Bolstered by exquisite, evocative observations of the physical world that inform her prose, past and present, she threads a fine line between revelation and reticence, generously exposing her most intimate feelings about the conflicts and sacrifices inherent in the need for both love and freedom, as a woman and a writer. If ever there is a book that will trigger a desire to pen one's own memoir, this is it." --Marnie Mueller, author of My Mother's Island
"Word for Word is a perfect title for a memoir about the hard-earned creation of a writer's life that is wrested out of the honest self-examination of a woman who faces the personal, family, class, and social forces that shaped—but did not determine—the person and writer she would become. A richly rewarding read."--Lois Rudnick, author of Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds
"Word for Word is a beautifully told story about the growth of a woman writer of the second-wave generation, whose intellectual and spiritual debts are to women writers, feminism, and, more generally, strong women." -- Carol Ascher, author of Afterimages: A Family Memoir
"Taking cues from Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers—two influential 20th-century artists whose careers shaped the course of contemporary art—Spector draws from art historical precedents and adapts borrowed materials, injecting poetic humor and philosophical musings along the way. . . .
"Spector is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of contemporary art. He taught painting, sculpture, and two-dimensional design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for a decade before retiring in 2019. This is the first presentation of the artist’s work at a St. Louis museum."
The Rowland Atkinson skit we mention.
Art Speaks: a 53 minute video on Buzz Spector: Alterations by SLAM
November 4, 2020.
"Portrait of an Artist is a sensitive and beautifully documented biography. It moved me deeply--I can't remember when a book involved me so totally."
Patricia Bosworth, author, Diane Arbus: A Biography
"What a personality emerges from these pages!...Portrait of an Artist is filled with riches."
Joyce Carol Oates, Mademoiselle
"Through interviews with O'Keeffe's friends and acquaintances, by delving into the published an unpublished sources and letters...she gives a fine and poignant accounting of the relationship between O'Keeffe and Stieglitz...Above and beyond the personal portrait, Lisle's biography is a marvelous evocation of the American places that have been important in the development of O'Keeffe's character and her art."
James R. Mellow, The Saturday Review
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| Photograph by Elena Rossini |
