ArtFields is more than its audacious parts.
The annual Lake City, S.C., phenom is testament to the abiding agency of the arts.
Anyone who has followed my previous arts coverage may have noted my fascination with ArtFields. In a decade’s time, the ingenious, indefatigable annual arts immersion in Lake City, S.C., has in short measure transformed an erstwhile tobacco town into a bona fide cultural destination.
That’s an eyebrow-raising turn of events, to be sure. In this day and age that seems hellbent on knee-capping the arts, ArtFields demonstrates their abiding agency to strengthen community — and, yes, to even bolster the bottom line, too.
Enter Darla Moore
It was inarguably audacious when Lake City native Darla Moore nursed her notion to uplift the once-thriving tobacco mecca. Tucked into the South Carolina Pee Dee and with a population scratching at 6,000, Lake City had languished since the undoing of big tobacco, with no clear means of stoking the smoldering embers of its vitality.
Moore, an accomplished investor and philanthropist — and former president of Rainwater Inc., which was founded by her late husband Richard Rainwater—envisioned Lake City’s revitalization rising from the cigarette ashes by way a community-wide arts program. She’d seen it happen in other places, and determined it could in her hometown, too. To that end, she cracked opened her considerable coffers to get it up and running.
Anointed ArtFields, the initiative fanned out from the central artery of East and West Main streets, which were punctuated there and on nearby streets by Mayberryesque merchants coming together in a cross-section of Lake City life.
The shops today provide much of the wall space for the festival. Among them is Merle Norman & Cabbage Patch Boutique, which boasts the de rigueur cosmetic line among my mother’s yesteryear Charleston set, along with unapologetically bright, Southern-friendly fashions. At the corner is Joe’s Barbershop, West Main Street’s longest-running Black-owned business and a small-town standout with its vintage red-and-blue pole. On a nearby street, Daisy’s Snax, a homespun, happy ice cream parlor, tops its facade with a shiny fiberglass cone. There is also Jarrito’s, a family Mexican restaurant that, in accordance with local ordinance, does not serve margaritas on Sundays.
Main Street is is split west and east by train tracks once powering Lake City’s thriving tobacco trade. Those rails still host many a locomotive, and at any given moment the town’s sleepy Southern default can be jolted awake as a beast of steel hauling goods screeches by, an urgent howl announcing its purpose-driven tonnage.
In 2013, ArtFields first unleashed Moore’s audacious plan, each year adding to the collective expression that involves the entire community, and includes a school-age component. Vibrant murals and whimsical, site-specific installations splash euphoric on buildings along sidewalks. Green spaces pop with the likes of metal flowers or ornate bird boxes, as if Dorothy’s house just landed in some Southern-style Munchkinland.
During ArtFields, many of the historic storefronts of modest height invite visitors to engage with hundreds of works, all submitted artists from Southeastern states. All are submitted for the annual cash-carrying competition that this year added up to $100,000 in prizes. The works are distributed among merchants, who pepper them through clothes racks, barber chairs or dining nooks. An ArtFields seal on an entrance door signifies there are works within.
Others are displayed in abundance among three sleek gallery spaces: Crossroads Gallery, Jones-Carter Gallery, Trax Visual Art Center, as well as at The R.O.B., a sprawling 22,000 square-foot facility that was a former charcoal briquet warehouse then called the Ragsdale Old Building.
And it worked. Drawing thousands visitors and hundreds of artists from near and far, the 9-day festival folds in a good portion of local boosters, and gets regular praise in a host of sleek national publications, including Travel & Leisure, AFAR, Garden & Gun and USA Today. In 2021, it landed in a top-10 spot on the Reader’s Digest “Top Nicest Places in America” list. It’s also featured on the Bloomberg Connects app.
This year at ArtFields
That brings me to this past weekend, when we motored two hours from Charleston to Lake City for opening Saturday, primed to take in as many of the 700 works as cognitively possible. This year’s festival ran from April 26 - May 4, making tomorrow its final day.
We landed in a buzzy, upbeat scene. Locals and visitors streamed along streets, popping in to survey works and chat with shopkeepers, stopping for a sweet treat at Baker’s or to admire the goods on sale. The festival’s headquarter offers a welcoming new post offering patrons information and merch for sale — T-shirts in happy green shades extolling art appreciation, hats and mugs and such.
Much of the work at Merle Norman & Cabbage Patch displayed focused on women or family. In the mixed-media “There’s No Place Like Home,” Joann C. McDaniel from Matthews, N.C., portrayed a group of women resting and chatting on a wall. Johns Island, S.C. artist Masare’s portrait of Edith Piaf stared mournfully from a shop wall, while “Evelyn Again,” by Kelsey Duncan of Antioch, Tenn., an arresting, in-your-face glazed stoneware bust of a bespectacled, self-possessed woman with curler-like pearls for hair.
In Joe’s Barbershop, patrons lined up politely to take in pieces placed along two walls, between a Coca Cola machine and a row of barber chairs that hosted customers assessing their stylings The works celebrated the African American experience by way of its chosen subjects, among them the elegant, reflective “Idea of Camaraderie,” by Chinemerem Odeh from Atlanta, Ga., a work of acrylic, ink and oil featuring a family, that mined familial unity and individual differences.
This year’s haul spanned media and subject matter, with much of it representing an impressive level of skill and rigor, a continued evolution from past years, which could ping-pong between the outre and the folksy.
There are precision-stitched textiles, such as “Garden Zen,” a fiber work by Amy P. Gambrel of Corbin, Ky. with fabric dyed from plants quilted with serene mandala designs, or “Nothing Stays the Same XIV: Seaglass,” a boldly hued, geometric work by Janet Swigler of Columbia, S.C. of pieced and quilted cotton.
There are those from repurposed bits and pieces that transform the sterile into the magical; evocative oil portraits training rich hues on tough themes; photography and video; ceramics and wood.
Some ubiquitous subjects offered a barometer for what’s pressing on the minds of Southern artists. In aggregate, it embraces an “anything goes” ethos, as a good arts festival should, a striking juxtaposition in a Southern town that might as likely keep such opinions off the walls.
The environment, for instance, gets considerable attention. Among works contending with it is the elegant, mournful “Spare Me Father, It Is Not I Who Has Created Such Devastation,” by Tyrone Geter of Elgin, S.C., which in charcoal and torn paper comments on climate change by way of a wide-eyed child and lightening-struck sky. In the mixed-media “Rivernest” by Livlab Morgan Kennedy and Kevin Kirkpatrick of Cullowhee, N.C., reclaimed chestnut wood, found glass and reused cork meet local river sound recordings recreate the experiences of Western North Carolina waterways.
The plight of women — stripped of power, confined by societal standards — persists. Sofia Margaret, from St. Augustine, Fl., contributes a pair of oil-on-canvase portraits titled “mistrust in men, having fallen,” which delves into the horror and healing of sexual assault. “One Trick Pony,” a holographic video installation by the artist Annagram from Greenville, S.C., examines the fraught dynamics of girlhood.
A harkening back emerges as well. Some works pay tribute to ancestors; others paint nostalgic scenes of time-worn Southern homes and vintage snaps. Mining past childhood trauma in “Ubuntu,” Atlanta-based artist Masela Nkolo transforms violence to positivity by creating masks from screwdrivers similar to those used a child during civil war, inspired by baKongo (Congolese) practice called “Bibaaku.”
The festival’s large-scale statement can be found at Moore Farms Botanical Garden, which is open to the public during the festival (and other times of the year through classes or special events only). “An Ode to Those Who Labor(ed)” is a vast artwork created by Atlanta, Ga.-based William Massey, who has pieced together historic farm equipment in a 65-foot sculpture of a resting person, shoulders-up and emergent from beneath a blanket of organic matter.
There are swipes at political leaders and ruminations on displacement. There are painted private parts, tricked-out eggs and fashioned cut-off shorts. There are lush landscapes and jarring hellscapes. All coexist in spaces filled with the niceties uttered between shopkeepers and patrons, with no evidence of censure or cynicism.
At one point, I spotted Moore, her thin frame and blonde mane a whirl as she enthusiastically paced herself through a gallery. I’m not one to interject normally, but I felt compelled to introduce myself, identifying myself as an arts writer and commending the effort for its inspiration. Struck, she smiled warmly and thanked me for my words, and for my own contribution to the arts.
An artful way forward
Frequently on this beat, I’m met with a hand-wringing hew and cry on the state of the arts. Sure, there is reason for despair. I know all too well that arts coverage is readily diminished or dumbed-down in mainstream media, with substantive critical analysis no longer a given. (Special props go to scrappy, doggedly idealistic alternative weeklies like my own present roost at Charleston City Paper for its commitment of column inches).
But I take exception to any death knell — and not just because it’s my lifeblood the gloom-and-doomers are watching bleed out. Growing up in Charleston, I witnessed the arts as a powerful economic driver with the watershed 1977 launch of Spoleto Festival USA. Embraced by the community, it was instrumental in transforming a two-restaurant, woebegone town to one that had regained its luster.
And now, there’s a little town, without so much as a Carolina coastline, that continues charming locals and wanderers alike, that each year ups its game, and that offers us a rare composite of what artists throughout the region are thinking and feeling and seeing and making, in places small and big, in their own boundless fields of dreams. So, yes, take that naysayers, and maybe get head out tomorrow, which is closing day, to go see some art.
Maura, thank you for keeping the arts alive. What a fantastic article! I hope many of your readers will be spontaneous and travel to Lake City in the next 36 hours. Darla Moore has done a phenomenal job revitalizing her small hometown. The Moore Farm and Botanical Garden offers tours, plant sales, special events, and workshops year-round. My picnic is packed and I’m leaving for Artfields in the next hour.