This evening marks the first-ever Art Walk Spartanburg — a mixture of multi-gallery opening, self-guided downtown tour, art-lovers mixer and all-around awareness raising event for local visual arts and artists. Starting at 5 p.m. and lasting until at least 9 p.m., the event features a couple of opening receptions (which generally means free wine and cheese for you moochers out there), along with several related and nearby shops keeping later hours to cater to (and capitalize on) the crowd.
In other cities, “gallery crawls” and art walks are a highly successful means of helping to build a self-supporting arts scene, and there’s no reason to think that this can’t happen in Spartanburg.
Yet, it’s not the art walk per se that’s interesting me this morning, but rather something associated with it. Tonight, three new downtown galleries will open their doors for the very first time. Starting at 5 p.m., Spartanburg will have nearly double the number of galleries it has at the moment of this writing. For a town with a relatively small — if surprisingly active — arts community, this is a big deal.
Of course, there’s relatively little information available about these new galleries, but what we do know, courtesy of Carolina Gallery and a surprisingly informative story by the Spartanburg Herald-Journal published earlier this month.
- Myst Gallery: The second downtown gallery run by Ed and Shannon Emory, the owners of Carolina Gallery, Myst (154 West Main St.) will feature “feature abstract, surreal and expressive art.”
- Artery: In the space that once housed Cafe Ishi (172 East Main St.), owner Cody Roberts has created a space that will focus solely on work by local artists. Interestingly, Roberts had a gallery opening at Cafe Ishi only last year.
- Crescent Gallery: Owned by Andrew Babb, this gallery is located next to Artery, and will feature “work in the tradition of classical realism.”
The other participating galleries are Carolina Gallery, Spartanburg Art Museum, The Artists Guild of Spartanburg and Hub-Bub (which will have a gallery “window” located at the former location of Kimbrell’s Furniture‎, located at 125 W Main St.).
We hope to have post-Art Walk coverage of the event, and if you can’t make it out, check back with us tomorrow and we’ll tell you how it went. The Art Walks are monthly events and planned through August of 2009, so even if you miss this first one, you’ve got a dozen more to look forward to.
Steve Shanafelt
I just got back from the Art Walk, and it was far better than I expected it to be. There were hundreds of people out looking at art — a great thing by any standard — and the new galleries were very interesting.
As I expected, the work at Artery was the most interesting to me. Featuring a wealth of local artists, Artery had the most compelling, fresh and experimental works on the Art Walk. In particular, I was struck by Kris Inman’s paintings, which have a boldly cartoonish, yet sketched-out quality to them, yet never suffer from the lack of balance that tends to plague that format.
The only unfortunate thing I witnessed at the event was the low turnout at the Spartanburg Art Museum and Artists Guild Gallery, which seemed to suffer from being just a little too far from the rest of the galleries to feel truly walkable.
I’ll have more on the event tomorrow.