CLEMSON — The ceramics studio in the department of art at Clemson University will hold the annual Fall Ceramics Bowl Sale from noon to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 20, in the hallway in front of the Lee Gallery in Lee Hall.

All proceeds support student scholarship and travel to the annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts conference.

A large selection of functional work by students and faculty will be on display in a variety of price points. Soup will be served between noon–1 p.m. with the sale continuing until 5 p.m. The annual Spring Ceramic Sale will be held April 22, 2020.

For additional information, contact the department of art chair and associate professor of ceramics Valerie Zimany, vzimany@clemson.edu.

CLEMSON – Valerie Zimany, chair and associate professor in the department of art at Clemson University, has been awarded a 2020 South Carolina Arts Commission Artist Fellowship.

Through the fellowship, the Arts Commission recognizes and rewards the artistic achievements of South Carolina’s exceptional individual artists. “These awards can be transformative; they lift artists’ spirits and self-perception while allowing them to focus on their art. Past fellows talk about how it can be a life-changing event,” said Ken May, former executive director of the S.C. Arts Commission. “South Carolina’s artists are at the core of our creative economy and serve as indispensable contributors to quality of life in our communities. Our agency is proud to deliver these tokens of gratitude on behalf of those most affected by the work being honored: the people of South Carolina.”

Valerie Zimany is an innovative ceramic artist, professor and chair of the department of art at Clemson University.

Zimany, a department chair and faculty member in the College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities, will use the award to facilitate her creative practice blending digital and hand processes in ceramics, work which received early support through a CU SEED research grant from the Office of the Vice President of Research at Clemson.

Zimany, a two-time Fulbright award recipient and Japanese government scholar, digitally models and fabricates florals through 3D printing and mold-making to explore cross-cultural influences of Asian and European decorative patterns and the sometimes imperfect translation of cultural codes through ornament.

“I am honored to receive this fellowship to assist with the creation of new work for several upcoming national exhibitions as well as a forthcoming solo exhibition in Kanazawa, Japan,” Zimany said. “The S.C. Arts Commission’s long history of funding the visual arts is critical to an active future generation of artists in our state and the Clemson University research campus is the ideal environment to expose more students and, by extension, a larger community to how new technologies and tools are being used for creative purposes within the context of contemporary art and education.”

Zimany joined Clemson University in 2010. During her time at Clemson, she has been selected for numerous solo and group exhibitions and competitions in Asia and across the United States and garnered praise in the ceramics world for her award-winning research and internationally active Master of Fine Arts graduates. Zimany is a past Fulbright Fellow through the U.S. Department of State and was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Grant through the U.S. Department of Education.

The South Carolina Arts Commission is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The commission also collaborates with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and South Arts. The fellowship jurors in the 2020 cycle were Wendy Earle, curator of contemporary art, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Bruce Pepich, executive director and curator of collections of the Racine Art Museum and Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, Wisconsin; and Marilyn Zapf, the assistant director and curator at the Center for Craft, a national arts nonprofit headquartered in Asheville, North Carolina.

Athletics and art are uniting at Clemson University with a new sculpture at the Allen N. Reeves Football Complex.

Following the opening of the 140,000-square football complex in 2017, students with Atelier InSite, Clemson’s student-driven public art program, began the process of commissioning the piece. After two rigorous years, main campus’ newest public art is now complete.

Designed by renowned artist Gordon Huether, “All In” is a 25-foot aluminum spheroid structure that encapsulates the building’s purpose and vision while complementing the facility’s existing spatial and aesthetic elements.

“Ultimately, ‘All In’ is intended to reflect the precepts of Clemson’s football program: striving for excellence, individual personal growth and community service,” said Huether, noting how it represents the optimism, diversity and complexity of both the athletic department and the broader Clemson community.

Located outside the facility, it serves as a visual link between students’ academic and athletic successes, which is perfectly summed up by its name, “All In.”

First adopted by Coach Dabo Swinney in 2008, the phrase “All In” has become synonymous with Clemson football. The Tigers are 116-30 under Swinney’s leadership, including winning national championships in 2016 and 2018. His “All In” approach has similarly led to academic success, as his 2018 national championship squad not only became the first 15-0 team in the modern era of major college football but also set program records for team GPA and the number of student-athletes with a 3.0 GPA or better, while also earning the Academic Achievement Award from the American Football Coaches Association.

“Though inspired by the game of football, this piece signifies a metaphoric bridge connecting the academic core of Clemson to the university’s athletics programs,” said David Detrich, an art faculty member who works alongside Joey Manson and Denise Woodward-Detrich to lead the Atelier InSite initiative. “It is also uniquely Clemson in the fact it is ‘by students, for students,’ and enhances the existing cultural capital that makes this university such a distinctive place.”

By students. For students.

Since 2012, four large-scale art pieces have been installed on the main campus of Clemson University.

What makes these public art installations remarkable – beyond the inspired final form of the individual works – is the innovative and inclusive selection process that led to their creation.

Building off of the legacy of Thomas Green Clemson, himself an avid art lover, Clemson University has taken steps to ensure that public art has a permanent place on campus. Thanks to the university’s Percent for Art policy, any capital building project of more than $2 million must have one-half of 1 percent of that investment dedicated to public art.

At Clemson, the campus community is part of the public art selection process. Faculty contribute to the decision-making, and students are directly involved, too, through a Creative Inquiry class, which brings together undergraduate students from different disciplines to work on research projects in close collaboration with faculty.

To that end, the Atelier InSite class was created to provide the structure and broad representation necessary for the selection of public art. Atelier InSite’s motto, “by students, for students,” is behind every step of its rigorous selection process for public art.

Public art. Practical skills.

The Atelier InSite program gives students robust, real-world opportunities to apply the skills they have learned in the classroom.

“Being in the Atelier program has helped me to enhance my design skills, which I will definitely be using after graduation,” said Katherine Comen, an Atelier InSite student and senior visual art major. “The program has taught me about working with a team, as well as communicating well, which are both skills that I intend to use after graduation, too.”

Students participating in the Atelier InSite program have had majors as diverse ashorticulture, chemical engineering and economics. Working alongside students from different educational backgrounds has exposed them to new lines of thought they may not have encountered in their own courses of study.

Students come to Atelier InSite in various ways. Some, like Comen, arrive at the program because of their curiosity about the role of public art at Clemson.

Kendall Massey, a senior architecture major, signed up for the class on the recommendation of a friend who knew of his appreciation of art.

“Public art is important to me because it’s artwork that truly everybody can enjoy or take part in,” Massey said. “The practical aspects of the course and my architecture major have helped me better understand spaces and how public art can improve these spaces.”

Public art with purpose

In 2017, Atelier InSite students put together a request for qualifications, which resulted in more than 230 artists submitting their portfolios for further consideration. The students then worked with campus constituents and the public to narrow down the submissions to 50, then 12 and finally down to three.  The remaining artists were required to submit their proposals for the space.

“We developed a set of guiding principles that help our decision-making process and assist us in determining if a proposal is a good fit with the site we have selected,” said Woodward-Detrich. “Atelier InSite members take great care to ensure that each installation is an organic offshoot of the environment it is being placed in.”

Atelier InSite principles and student input were vital in crafting “All In.” Selected from three other proposals, Huether’s sculpture best fit its mandate from Atelier InSite. It not only fit its installation site, but also will engage the people who interact with it.

While “All In” is the latest public art installation at Clemson University, it is not the last. The Atelier InSite team will now set its sights across Bowman Field to the new College of Business. Atelier InSite recently finished the request for proposal process and will select an artist in fall 2019 for an installation date of spring 2020.

CLEMSON – The call came on April 1. The voice on the other end of the line told Clemson University instructor of fine arts Mark Brosseau that he would be receiving the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation (PKF) grant, a life-changing development. He wondered whether it was true.

He laughs about it now.

“All I could think was ‘Don’t call people on April Fools’ Day. Just wait a day!’”

It turns out, it wasn’t a prank. He had become the only artist in South Carolina to receive a portion of the more than $3 million grant.

“Each year the Pollock-Krasner Foundation awards funding to a select number of deserving artists, and we are excited that Mark has been recognized by a granting institution of this international caliber,” said Valerie Zimany, Chair and associate professor of art in Clemson’s College of Architecture, Arts and Humanities. “Mark has successfully integrated professional arts practices in both art studios and general education courses with critical perceptivity and good humor. We are proud of his accomplishment, as fostering new work and the development of visual artists is central to our department’s mission, and appreciate the aspirational model it establishes for our students to excel in their creative pursuits.”

The PKF award was a validation of sorts for Brosseau, for a lifetime spent following his obsession with lines, shapes, compositions and colors. Taking an artist’s path through life is not easy. It takes discipline, resilience, a complete disregard for wealth and, most of all, a bottomless love for creating.

Brosseau is the rare traveler who stuck to that path long enough to make a living at it.

“I think all art really is, is a context for looking at things,” he explained. “The thing that gets me excited about painting is that you’re creating a space – a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface that’s never existed before. It’s not about a facility or a talent. That’s a lesson you can only get from studying art.”

Brosseau grew up in Vermont, with a mom who worked as a bookkeeper and a father who worked for a John Deere parts distributer. The art bug didn’t bite him when he was young. He was heavily into math and science and went to Dartmouth as a chemistry major only to discover he didn’t want to be a chemist.

“I was in my first chemistry class in this big lecture hall with like 70 kids, and I realized that sense of discovery was just gone. That thing that had really drawn me in had disappeared,” said Brosseau. “Eventually I decided I wanted to go into architecture. I had to take a drawing class to build a portfolio. As soon as I was in that class that sense of discovery came back, and that was it.”

He went on to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Fulbright Scholarship in painting and printmaking in 2001. He used the scholarship to move to a ranch 30 minutes outside Reykjavik, Iceland, and paint.

“I got there a week before 9/11,” he said. “I was on my own at an old sheep farm in the middle of these lava fields that had been converted into art studios. It was a weird year.”

Brosseau met his wife Jenny, an English teacher at Greenville Middle School, online through the personal ad page on the satirical news site The Onion. They moved to the Upstate in 2016, where she could care for her ailing father and he could become a lecturer at Clemson.

Students from across all disciplines take Brosseau’s introduction to art and art appreciation classes. For some of them, figuring out how to open up their inner artist was a puzzle at first.

“I love Clemson kids — they’re really engaged,” he said. “But there was an interesting experience when I first started teaching. I’m just comfortable with doubt, it’s part of my practice, but there was a moment when I realized I was giving them this assignment that was kind of vague and they aren’t trained to be comfortable with doubt. I remember when I was that age­ — neither was I.”

Brosseau has learned to help his students push past their doubts and create without worrying how their work compares to others’. He says experiencing art is important for everyone, even those who would never consider themselves artists.

“Anything that can get you to look at the world in a different way, and really recognize that it’s not always the exact way you expect it to be is really important,” he said. “And anything that can get you to ask questions and deal in gray areas in a way that’s not combative or confrontational is essential. Art can do that.”

Brosseau’s colorful acrylic paintings layer lines, shapes and patterns into quilted images reminiscent of the French artist Robert Delaunay.

“I’m interested in making environments or experiential spaces,” he says. “I try to create a space that you can feel yourself inhabiting. That’s a feeling you can only get from art.”

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Inc. was established in 1985 for the sole purpose of providing financial assistance to individual working visual artists of established ability through the generosity of the late Lee Krasner, a major abstract expressionist painter and the widow of Jackson Pollock.

The foundation reports that since its inception, it has awarded more than 4,500 grants totaling nearly $74 million to artists in 77 countries.

CLEMSON – Over the past seven years, the Clemson Community Supported (CSArt) program has been a popular way for the public to build a relationship with student artists. Shares for this spring season’s engaging and unique art-shopping experience are available now.

The program is a new spin on the grassroots “community supported agriculture” farm share concept, which provides fresh produce for investors who buy a “share” of a local farmer’s crop each season.

Clemson’s CSArt program aims to create the same market for fresh, handcrafted artwork. With the purchase of one share, the “shareholder” will receive five different artwork made by a selection of Clemson student artists in a specially packaged crate.

This season includes two approaches to ceramic vessels, a small ceramic sculpture, a drawing and a photograph. A respected professional in the arts juries each season’s share. This spring’s share is selected by Wim Roefs, owner and director of the contemporary art gallery if ART Gallery and board chair of the 701 Center for Contemporary Art, both of Columbia.

CSArt plans to sell 15 shares this year at a cost of $200 per share.

The CSArt program was begun through a Creative Inquiry team led by Valerie Zimany, art department chair and associate professor of art, who researched with her students the strategies and successes of CSArt programs in galleries, art studios and art centers.

“This initiative provides students with an entrepreneurial learning opportunity –many of our graduates go on to work for institutions, nonprofits, galleries and more, and the real-world marketing and administration skills they acquire through participating in CSArt program gives a tangible experience to enhance their studio-based portfolio upon graduation,” Zimany said. “For those students who create the limited edition works for the share, the commission is a vote of confidence in the developing quality of their artwork and a challenge to meet our enthusiastic shareholder’s expectations at our seasonal pick up event.”

Proceeds from the shares support student scholarships and allows students to present Clemson’s CSArt program at national conferences. Shareholders can meet the artists and pick up their shares during the Spring Ceramics Studio Sale at the CSArt Pick-up from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 24 in the Lee Gallery hallway, 323 Fernow St.

To learn more about Clemson CSArt or become a shareholder-member, visit www.clemson-csa.org. The website features the student artists and provides sneak peeks of the artists’ works in progress.

CLEMSON – Today’s Instagram models and celebrity Tweeters can shift public discourse, paradigms, and even the destiny of Fortune 500 companies with a single post on social media. Those that accrue that power have been titled “influencers,” but the man who ignited the pop culture machine died decades before Instagram, Twitter, or the internet as we know it existed. Andy Warhol is the grandfather of it all.

A selection of Warhol’s groundbreaking work is on display at Clemson University until March 6 in the exhibition “Andy Warhol: Portraits and the Everyday” at the Lee Gallery.

Free to the public, the exhibition features 98 pieces of Warhol’s work. The selection of images can thrill one viewer while challenging another’s perception of what “art” is.

The show includes several of Warhol’s iconic screen-printed portraits alongside black-and-white photo prints and Polaroids with subject matter ranging from headshots of some world-famous celebrities to head-scratchingly banal snapshots from his day-to-day life. Glamorous photographs of Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, Chris Evert, and Lauren Hutton hang next to unstaged pictures of Warhol’s desktop lamp, an out-of-focus group of seven eggs, and – in what might be considered a precursor to Instagram – a plate of pasta.

Denise Woodward-Detrich, who has been the director of the Lee Gallery for 22 years, explained that many of the photographs in the show were not taken to be displayed as “art,” but rather were part of Warhol’s process as he gathered information and inspiration. In that way, they offer a look into the mind of someone the majority of art historians consider one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

These Polaroids are particularly interesting. Warhol was enamored with inexpensive and easy-to-use photographic technologies and carried a Polaroid “Big Shot” camera or a small 35mm point-and-shoot with him at all times. In the last decade of his life, he went through a roll of film every single day.

“In my opinion the Polaroids are like looking through an artist’s sketchbook,” Detrich said. “He used multiple Polaroids, for instance, to identify multiple angles of one individual. It’s like looking through someone’s private collection of ideas. He was a voracious collector of things – and this was one way he collected information about his subjects so that he could eventually make screen prints of them.”

Warhol’s work was always controversial, especially in the last two decades of his life when he shifted to a more entrepreneurial approach that some considered “selling out.” He unabashedly used his celebrity to draw people to his work and he was never ashamed to make money, saying famously in his 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: “Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art.” In that regard, too, he paved the way for the social media superstars of today.

“Andy Warhol’s art speaks to some really difficult things – identity, homosexuality, acceptance… but he wanted to be liked. Who doesn’t feel the need to be liked?” Detrich said. “It’s not just entertainment – it’s core heart stuff.”

Photographs in the exhibition are on loan from the University of South Carolina-Upstate and East Tennessee State University. Both universities were granted original Warhol photographs for viewing and study as part of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, organized by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Legacy Program distributed Warhol’s photographic works to colleges and universities across the country to provide greater access to these relatively unknown bodies of work.

Detrich was thrilled when all the pieces fell into place to bring the exhibit to Clemson, but she was most excited for her students.

“It’s a teaching gallery, so I didn’t do this all by myself. I had my seniors help unpack the work and install it and I worked with one of our Graduate students Amanda Musick to select the work for the exhibit. Can you imagine as an undergraduate student being responsible for putting an Andy Warhol on the wall or being a graduate student and having a curated exhibit on your resume? These are important opportunities the gallery provides our students both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”

Meredith Mims McTigue, the marketing and public relations director for Clemson’s Center for Visual Art, credited Detrich with bringing such a world-class exhibit to campus, where students will benefit from it the most.

“What Denise has done is such a gift for the university,” McTigue said. “Having Andy Warhol in the Lee Gallery puts Clemson on the cultural map – and that’s kind of an understatement. His international body of work is important to the world, and that brings people into the gallery which is great – but she’s here day in and day out putting up exhibitions all over campus of other names not as big as Warhol that have extraordinary work – including our students.”

Detrich pointed out how much thought she and her students put into hanging each piece of art in the show. A large print of Beethoven, for example, hangs next to a wall of Polaroids, all taken of the same businessman whose dark, arching eyebrows are similar to the musician’s.

One of Warhol’s trademarks was repetition, which is showcased perfectly in the exhibit. Stand in a certain spot, and you can see two different prints of Queen Beatrix. In another spot, you can see two prints of Sitting Bull, and see how Warhol manipulated colors and lines and how those differences change the feel of each piece.

That repetition is in the Polariods, too – even the ones that show the mundane. Thinking about it for a moment, one might come to see that if a careless snapshot of a pasta dinner can be framed and hung in a gallery, maybe every moment is that precious. Maybe every second of life is worth cherishing like a work of art.