Paper Products: June 2-25, 2016

ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY, March 22 - April 2, 2013

To see work from artists in Zoological Society click on their names: 
Roland Albert, Carl Blair, Steven Chapp, Phil Garrett, Tonya Gregg, Diane Kilgore Condon,Peter Lenzo, Philip Morsberger, Marcelo Novo,Anna Redwine, Kees Salentijn, Leo Twiggs andDavid Yaghjian. 

For a PREVIEW of the exhibition  CLICK HERE

To see installation shots of the exhibition CLICK HERE

18/100 Southern Artists The if ART Contingency, October 28 - November 17, 2012

18/100 Southern Artists
The if ART Contingency

October 28 - November 17, 2012

@ if ART Gallery
1223 Lincoln St. 
Columbia, SC

1 new book about Southern artists
100 artists in the book
18 of 100 artists from if ART Gallery

ARTISTS' RECEPTION & BOOK SIGNING
Sunday, October 28, 2 - 4 pm

To view works of art available at if ART Gallery featured in 100 Southern Artists CLICK HERE

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART Gallery
(803) 238-2351/ wroefs@sc.rr.com

Contemporary Carolina Abstraction I

Works of Art: Carl Blair

CLICK HERE FOR MORE WORK.

Works of art by Carl Blair are available at if ART Gallery, 1223 Lincoln Street, Columbia, SC.

Contact Wim Roefs at if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com or (803) 255-0068/(803) 238-2351.

Carl Blair's Flora & Fauna: April 17- May 9, 2009

Click here for an essay on Carl Blair's Flora & Fauna.

Click here for a preview of the exhibition.

Click here for installation photographs.

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, SC

presents

Carl Blair’s

Flora & Fauna

April 17 – May 9, 2009

Artists’ Reception: Friday, April 17, 5 – 10 p.m.

For more information, CLICK HERE

or

contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

Carl Blair's Flora & Fauna: Essay

Salon III: January 15- February 4, 2009

For exhibition preview, click here.

For installation images, click here.

For printmaking demonstration schedule, click here.

if ART Gallery

presents

SALON III: The Print Exhibition

January 15 – February 4, 2009

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C. 29205

Reception: Thursday, Jan. 15, 5 – 10 p.m.

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Printmaking Demonstrations:

Sunday, Jan. 18, 3 – 5 p.m., Marcelo Novo, Print Gocco

Sunday, Jan. 25, 3 – 5 p.m., Phil Garrett, Monotype

Saturday, Jan. 31, 3 – 5 p.m., H. Brown Thornton, Photo Transfer

Sunday, Feb. 1, 3 – 5 p.m., Steven Chapp, Linocut & Photopolymer Prints

For more information, CLICK HERE

or

contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

&

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

For more information, CLICK HERE

or

contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

The Inventory: February 15-26, 2008

if ART

presents at

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady St., Columbia, S.C.

THE INVENTORY:

A Group Show of if ART artists

Feb. 15 – 26, 2008

Artists’ Reception: Friday, Feb. 15, 5 – 10 p.m.

For more information, CLICK HERE

or

contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

SCULPTURES

Hey, I Was Here First, 2008

Polychrome wood

20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 12 1/2 inches

$ 2,900

Help, I've Got Something Stuck In My Bad Eye, But My Leg Feels A Lot Better, 2008

Polychrome wood

23 x 28 x 15 inches

$ 3,100

Bill, He Yaps A Lot But He Don't Say Much, 2008

Polychrome wood

15 1/4 x 6 1/2 x 23 1/2 in.

$ 2,900

Zero, 2008

Polychrome wood

32 x 43 x 12 1/2 in.

$ 5,800

The Valedictorian, 2007

Polychrome wood

35 x 29 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches

$ 6,500

Tied To His Mother's Apron Strings, 2008

Polychrome wood

20 1/2 x 24 x 12 in.

$ 2,500

At Wits End, 2008

Polychrome wood, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 26 in.

$ 6,500

Freaked Out, 2008

Polychrome wood

10 3/4 x 11 x 11 3/4 inches

$ 1,200

Jimmy Crack Corn, 2008

Polychrome wood

19 1/4 x 15 1/2 x 13 inches

$ 3,100

Seems Like Someone Is Always Saying Goodbye, 2008

Polychrome wood

13 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 15 inches

$ 1,800

Billy Goat Gruff, 2007

Polychrome wood

18 x 15 ½ x 11 ½ inches

$ 2,100

Ow, My Goiter Hurts Me So, 2008

Polychrome wood

25 x 23 x 11 1/2 inches

$ 3,500

Delusions Of Grandeur, 2008

Polychrome wood

18 3/4 x 11 1/4 x 17 1/4 inches

$ 3,100

The Dope, 2007

Polychrome wood

16 1/4 x 14 1/2 x 25 inches

$ 3,100

Biography: Carl R. Blair

Carl Blair (b. 1932)

Kansas native and Greenville, S.C., resident Carl Blair in 2005 received South Carolina’s Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts for Lifetime Achievement. He has been as an artist, administrator, educator and a driving force in South Carolina arts since in 1957, when he began teaching at Bob Jones University, from which he retired in 1998. He has shown in galleries and museums all along the East Coast as well as abroad. His prominence as a painter and sculptor has increased steadily and has been marked by several museum retrospectives since 1995. In 1999, he was included in “100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Arts,” the South Carolina State Museum’s look back at the 20th century.

Essay: Carl Blair

Missing You, 2006

Acrylic on canvas

17 x 17 inches

$ 2,800

CARL BLAIR: Old and New Show

October 2007

By Wim Roefs

Nature always has been Carl Blair’s main visual inspiration – nature and the countryside in general. Even his early figurative work was never far removed from his upbringing on a Midwest farm. His wooden sculptures, of which he has just produced a new body, are of animals, some representative, all of them fanciful. They are a reminder of that farm and of Blair’s insistence that as a youngster, he spent more time with animals than with human beings.

Nature typically is the basis of his heavily abstracted paintings, whether it’s the flatlands of the Midwest or the more mountainous terrain of the South Carolina Upstate. There, Blair lives on Paris Mountain, just outside of Greenville and near Paris Mountain State Park. He has lived there since the 1970s, when the place was still mostly undeveloped.

While the current show is not a true retrospective, it nevertheless gives an overview of what Blair has done with the landscape since 1970. The earlier work in the exhibition, including Ode To An Eastern Dream of 1970, show the darker pallet he used when he moved from figuration to abstraction in the late 1950s, around the time he arrived in Greenville to teach at Bob Jones University. They indicate that Blair was mixing influences that ranged from Charles Burchfield to the Abstract Expressionists.

Those very Abstract Expressionists, Blair’s South Carolina contemporary Leo Twiggs suggested in 2006, might have instigated Blair’s move from his earlier muted pallet to the colorful spectacles he created after he grew into his own style. They showed Blair, Twiggs wrote, that “he didn’t have to draw a tree or a rock. He could use broad areas of colors, letting values and intensities define form.”

He has done so, and still does so, creating works from which colors burst off the surface and that at times seem like fireworks. He paints in wildly differing pallets and with varying degrees of color intensity. Union and Burst Of Spring, both of 1986, show the lighter but luscious, intense coloration that defines many of his 1980s’ paintings. Spring Odyssey, of 1988, continues the light, bright pallet but in an understated, even somewhat faint fashion. In the 2006 paintings in the exhibition, Blair takes a different approach, using high contrasts with black lines and saturated, often primary colors.

Spring Odyssey shows the lively hand Blair brings to his work not just as a painter but also as a draftsman. In it, he adds definition to the blots of pastel-like colors through fine, delicate lines suggestion tree limbs and trunks. Drawing is crucial in many of his 1990s monochromatic monotypes, too. Those works are also evidence that the colorist par excellence Blair doesn’t need color to pull off energetic and sure compositions.

Carl Blair & Anna Redwine: Old and New: October 12-23, 2007

if ART

1223 Lincoln St.

Columbia, SC 29201

(803) 238-2351

wroefs@sc.rr.com

if ART PRESENTS AT GALLERY 80808/VISTA STUDIOS:

CARL BLAIR:

Old & New

&

ANNA REDWINE:

New

OCTOBER 12 – 23, 2007

Opening Reception: Friday, Oct. 12, 2007, 5 – 10 pm

Opening Hours: Weekdays, 11 am – 7 pm; Sat., 11 am – 5 pm;

Sun, 1 – 5 pm

From October 12 – 23, if ART will present at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios two solo exhibitions: Carl Blair, Old & New, and Anna Redwine: New. The exhibition opens October 12 with a reception from 5:00 – 10:00 p.m. Opening hours for Gallery 80808/Vista Studios will be expanded during the if ART exhibition. They will be weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Sat., 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.; Sun, 1 – 5 p.m. Gallery 80808/Vista Studios is located at 808 Lady St., Columbia.

Carl Blair, of Greenville, will present oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and paper, gouaches, monotypes and etchings from the early 1970s through 2006. Most of the work suggests the landscape and is executed in an abstracted, lively, colorful, expressionist manner. Anna Redwine of Columbia will show vivid and energetic graphite drawings, on gessoed panels, of insects and other animals. Redwine produced the work earlier this year during a residency at Paris Mountain State Park near Greenville. Blair, too, created most of his work at Paris Mountain, where he lives.

Kansas native Blair (b. 1932) in 2005 received the Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Governor’s Award for the Arts for Lifetime Achievement. He has been as an artist, administrator and educator a driving force in South Carolina arts since he appeared on the scene in 1957. His prominence as a painter and sculptor has increased steadily and has been marked by several museum retrospectives since 1995. In 1999, he was included in “100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Arts,” the South Carolina State Museum’s look back at the 20th century. Blair in 1998 retired from teaching at Bob Jones University in Greenville, where he taught for four decades.

Anna Redwine (b. 1978), a native of New Orleans, in 2000 received a BA in English from the University of Mississippi. In 2006, she received her MFA at the University of South Carolina art department. Her April 2006 masters’ thesis show, Life In One Breath, was at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, organized by if ART.

if ART Gallery Opening

Marching Through Georgia, 2005

Acrylic on canvas

18 x 23 in

$3,400

OPEN NOW: 

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St.

Columbia, S.C.

Gallery Hours:

Most days, except Sunday, from 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM

& by appointment (call 803-238-2351)

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART

(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

On Nov. 10, 2006, if ART, International Fine Art Services, opened if ART Gallery. The gallery is at 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C., in the Vista district, across from the Blue Marlin restaurant. For more information, contact if ART’s Wim Roefs at (803) 238-2351 or wroefs@sc.rr.com.

If ART Gallery carries the work of South Carolina artists Leo Twiggs, Mike Williams, Carl Blair, Tom Stanley, Virginia Scotchie, Tonya Gregg, Peter Lenzo, Jeff Donovan, David Yaghjian, Anna Redwine, John Monteith, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Paul Yanko, Laura Spong, Steven Chapp, Katie Walker, Edward Rice, Aaron Baldwin, Bill Jackson, Herb Parker, Dorothy Netherland, Eric Miller, Mary Gilkerson, Matt Overend, Kim Keats and Phil Garrett. The gallery also carries work by Dutch artist Kees Salentijn, German artists Reiner Mahrlein, Roland Albert and Klaus Hartmann, and Washington Color Field painter Paul Reed.

The gallery also carries a wide selection of unframed and lithographs, silkscreens, etchings and other limited edition prints by such nationally and even internationally prominent artists such as Karel Appel, Richard Hunt, Bram van Velde, John Hultberg, Sam Middleton, Benny Andrews, Hannes Postma, Corneille, Lucebert and Alvin Hollingsworth.

Since March 2005, if ART, International Fine Art Services, has organized commercial gallery exhibitions in Columbia, mostly at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808. In addition to presenting gallery artists and special exhibitions at if ART Gallery, if ART will continue to organize exhibitions at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808. The company also provides curatorial and exhibition design services. 

Most recently, in September, if ART was hired by the Technical College of the Lowcountry to install dozens of art works at the college’s new building in Bluffton, S.C. Earlier this year, if ART installed two exhibitions of work from the South Carolina state art collection at the Sumter (S.C.) Gallery of Art. The if ART production “South Carolina Birds: A Fine Art Exhibition,” curated by company owner Wim Roefs, is at the Pickens County Museum of Art & History until Nov. 11, 2006. The exhibition opened in 2004 at the Sumter Gallery of Art and traveled to the Burroughs & Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C. Roefs wrote the essay for the exhibition catalogue, which he also edited.

In 2005, Roefs curated exhibitions of work by Leo Twiggs and Carl Blair for the Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden, S.C. He also curated an exhibition of paintings by Marcelo Novo for HoFP Gallery in Columbia, S.C., and wrote the essay for the exhibition catalogue. Earlier this year, Roefs curated an exhibition with work by Dutch artist Kees Salentijn for the Center of the Arts in Rock Hill, S.C. In May, he curated an indoors/outdoors sculpture exhibition for the city of Dillon, S.C. 

Roefs contributed an essay to the catalogue for the exhibition “A Collection for Margaret: The Personal and Private Art of Carl Blair.” The exhibition is on view at Hampton III Gallery in Greenville until Nov. 11. Roefs teaches a course in African-American art at the University of South Carolina.

Since March 2005, if ART has published eight small exhibition catalogues. The catalogues featured short essays by Roefs about Aaron Baldwin, Mike Williams, Anna Redwine, Tom Stanley, Carl Blair, Janet Orselli, Matt Overend, Laura Spong, Leo Twiggs, Jeff Donovan, John Monteith, Dorothy Netherland, Herb Parker and Phil Garrett and Mary Gilkerson and the process of making monotypes.

Carl R. Blair: Biographical Essay

The Struggle For Nightfall, 2006

Acrylic on canvas

19 x 16 in.

CARL R. BLAIR: A CAREER

By Wim Roefs

Carl Blair has been on many levels a driving force in the arts since he came to South Carolina in 1957. He’s one of the state’s most prominent painters. He was a leading force in making Bob Jones University’s art department a central part of the Upstate South Carolina art scene. He is among the founders and owners of one of the state’s oldest art galleries. He’s been on scores of local and statewide boards and commissions. And he’s been a mentor to students and friend to many colleagues, providing both moral and practical support for more than a few. In 2005 he won for Lifetime Achievement the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award, South Carolina’s Governor’s Award for the Arts.

As an artist, Blair was with colleagues such as William Halsey, Corrie McCallum, Merton Simpson, Arthur Rose and J. Bardin in the vanguard of modern art in South Carolina. His prominence as a painter is marked by several museum retrospectives since 1995. In 1999, he was included in “100 Years/100 Artists: Views of the 20th Century in South Carolina Arts,” the South Carolina State Museum’s look back at the 20th century. “When people think of South Carolina,” Greenville artist and independent curator Sharon Campbell already said in the 1980s, “I am sure they think of Carl Blair as being one of the foremost artists in this area.”

Blair worked his way to success through several styles and approaches, as the current exhibition of the Margaret Blair Art Collection shows. With the landscape as his main subject matter, he arrived at an abstracted style and aesthetics that allowed for great variety while always revealing Blair’s touch. His paintings, Blair has written, are neither realistic nor abstract but “visual poetry” and “statements about nature and the aura which surrounds it, placing emphasis on the formal elements.”

After forty years, fellow artist Edward Rice commented in 1995, Blair’s work still stands. “From his somber, largely derivative, early works to his joyous, secure, recent canvasses, Mr. Blair has shown us how to see the splendor of everyday existence; the face of a Kansas rock quarry is transformed into a cathedral wall of faceted translucent alabaster; the light on fall foliage is fixed on the canvas as crushed pigment straight from the colorman’s mill.”

As an art teacher for four decades, Blair helped BJU become a hub for fine art production. His influence has been evident as former students such as Jason Wagoner, Eric Benjamin, Mark Mulfinger, and Diane Kilgore Condon and others have made names for themselves. “Carl was an inspiration to all of us students in countless ways,” Kilgore Condon wrote in a letter supporting Blair’s Verner nomination. “I fully credit him with the unflagging support that kept me in school and ultimately, in the arts to this present day.”

During her seventeen years since school, Kilgore Condon wrote, Blair “served unfailingly on our behalf as a mentor, friend and source of information and support.” When in the early 2000s she and others started the ArtBomb Studio, a large artist-run studio complex in Greenville, Blair showed his enthusiasm and regularly checked on the progress. “Never once did he attempt to quell our enthusiasm despite the size of our project.”

Blair also taught in the summer honors program at his state’s Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and at the Fine Arts Center for the Greenville County School District. He also taught night and summer classes for two decades at the Greenville County Museum of Art. “His students learn a great deal more than painting from him, as do many of the rest of us,” Sharon Campbell wrote in the catalogue for a 1998 Blair retrospective at BJU. “We learn to live lives of compassion, diligence, and freedom. He is invaluable to the artistic life of this region…”

As co-founder, part owner and president of one of the state’s oldest and most prominent galleries, Hampton III in Taylors, just outside of Greenville, Blair from the early 1970s helped provide an early outlet for contemporary art in the state. Hampton III’s importance cannot be overstated. In addition to Halsey, McCallum and Bardin, the gallery from the start provided representation for Leo Twiggs, Jeanet Dreskin, Bette Lee Coburn, Tom Flowers, John Acorn, Darell Koons, Emery Bopp and others, many of whom were leading contemporary South Carolina artists. The gallery also tapped into subsequent generations as it exhibited work by Philip Whitley, Edward Rice, Bob Chance, Alice Munn, Jim Craft, Jeri Burdick, David Yaghjian, Janusz Zadurowicz, Dave Appleman and many others.

In recent years, Hampton III has organized landmark exhibitions of works by Halsey and Edmund Yaghjian that helped establish new price levels and recognition for those deceased icons of post-war South Carolina art. The gallery also reintroduced veteran artists such as Sigmund Abeles, Charles Quest and Alta Alberga. Blair played a crucial role in all this. Between Hampton III and BJU, he has, by his estimate, hung more than 1,500 exhibitions.

Statewide, too, Blair helped promote and steer the development of the arts. He held office in the legendary Guild of South Carolina Artists, which served visual artists from 1950 through the 1980s, especially with its annual statewide exhibitions. In 1968 he was appointed to Greenville’s Arts in Public Places Commission. He served on the acquisition committee of the S.C. Arts Commission from 1969-1972. In 1987, the governor of South Carolina appointed Blair to his first three-year term on the S.C. Arts Commission Board of Directors. He was reappointed in 1990 and 1993 and elected chairman of the board in 1994 and 1996. Blair also sprung into action in 1989 when Hurricane Hugo wrecked coastal South Carolina, organizing an effective fundraising campaign for artists affected by the storm.

Blair was born in 1932 in Kansas, where he grew up on a farm and, by his own account, “dreamed a lot... I spent a lot of time in the woods, got to know trees and plants and atmosphere, the effect of the sun and light… I took everything in, stored those impressions up.” In 1956, he received a BFA from the University of Kansas; the next year, he earned an MFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design. He married Margaret Ruble, and the couple, also in 1957, moved to Greenville, where Blair joined the art faculty at BJU.

Margaret Blair became Blair’s rock, both personally and professionally. She was, Blair often claims, “the brains behind the operation.” His wife, Blair told Deb Sim for a Greenville Museum 1995 retrospective catalogue, “is smarter than I am, she is better looking, she has a vision… She can see way farther ahead than I can… She has been everything to me, and if I have any success as an artist, I owe much of it, most of it, to her.”

After coming to BJU, the Blairs decided that Carl would without compromise try to make the best art he could. “We agreed that if we didn’t sell anything, we’d have to live with it,” Blair told Sim. “We wouldn’t short-cut or do pretty things that we thought would sell. We would do good art. And we lived with it for years and years… If I did sell anything it would be five, ten, fifteen, twenty dollars. After a number of years of struggling and being true to our art dream, I did start selling a few things.”

Soon after their arrival in Greenville, Blair began teaching at the Greenville Museum, too. In the 1960s he also taught several years at the Kansas City Art Institute’s summer school. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Blair began his long involvement with the Guild of South Carolina Artists, entering work in its annual art competition and starting the string of awards he would receive from that organization. He frequently began to collect awards from other statewide, regional and national competitions, too, receiving a good hundred altogether.

Critics were impressed with the technical ability Blair demonstrated in his abstracted landscapes. University of Georgia art professor A. Graham Collier called him “a lyrical poet.” One judge, Louis Bosa, chair of the advanced painting department at the Cleveland Institute of Art, selected Blair for a top award because “the artist had captured the most strange mood of nature” the judge had seen for some time. Blair’s entry, Bosa wrote, captured “the feeling of wind blowing, as well as almost the growth of nature.” The art competitions took Blair’s work to venues such as Atlanta’s High Museum, the Isaac Delgado Museum in New Orleans, the Montgomery Museum of Art in Alabama, Florida’s Ringling Museum of Art, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Clemson University and, in his home state, the Greenville Museum, the Gibbes Museum in Charleston and the Columbia Museum of Art.

In 1962, Blair was invited to join the Joanne Scott Gallery in Norfolk, Va. Six years later, the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City followed. He was included in Prize Winning Art Book Six in 1966 and in Paris, France’s Le Revue Modern in 1965 and 1968. In 1969, Blair also was part of the first major survey of visual arts in South Carolina, the “1st S.C. State Invitational” at the Columbia Museum of Art. That same year, he was included in Jack Morris’ book Contemporary Artists of South Carolina, published by the Greenville Museum.

Two years later, Blair was invited to “Six South Carolina Painters,” an invitational at Clemson University, and to an exhibition of art from ten Southeastern states at Georgia College at Milledgeville, juried by Elaine De Kooning. Also in 1971, Blair became president of the Greenville Artists Guild. The next year he was the first person to receive the “Annual Director’s Award” from the Greenville Museum. In 1972, with Emery Bopp, Darell Koons, and Richard Rupp, he founded Hampton III.

Blair kept up a busy exhibition schedule throughout the 1970s and 1980s. His reach extended well beyond the Southeast. One of his paintings was in the 1984 group exhibition “Portrait of the South” at the Palazzo Venesia Museum in Rome, Italy. Blair had his first major solo museum exhibition in 1982, at North Carolina’s Asheville Museum of Art. He participated in several in-state museum exhibitions. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions at Erskine College in South Carolina and his own Hampton III Gallery, Blair had one-man shows in Atchison, Kan., Scottsdale, Ariz., and, repeatedly, at the Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, N.C.

Throughout the 1990s and after, Blair kept up his torrid exhibition pace at museums, institutional venues and commercial galleries, including Melberg, Hampton III and galleries in Columbia, Charleston, Atlanta, Kansas City, Mo., Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio, and Vero Beach, Fla. He also showed at Blue Spiral I in Asheville, N.C., the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga., and the Las Vegas Art Museum. Blair’s work was part of the U.S. State Department’s Art in the Embassies program, in Egypt and Mauritania. In 1994, Blair was invited to the S.C. State Museum’s “Centennial Celebration Exhibition.” Blair’s work is in more then 2,500 private, corporate and public collections.

The Greenville Museum in 1995, BJU’s Gustafson Fine Arts Center in 1998, the Burroughs & Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach in 2002 and the Blue Ridge Arts Council in Seneca in 2003 organized Blair retrospectives. The Greenville retrospective also traveled to the State Museum in Columbia. Both the Greenville Museum and BJU published catalogues. “For over four decades,” Greenville Museum director Tom Styron wrote, “Carl Blair has been a vital force in the Greenville arts community, setting standards of professionalism and personal integrity that inspire all who know him. Carl is the very soul of creativity, and he is a terrific painter. From his earliest brooding landscapes to his latest bold abstractions, his vision of transcendent energy, order, and purpose has remained steadfast.”

Blair retired from BJU in 1998 but didn’t slow down as an artist. In addition to the never-ending stream of solo and group gallery shows, several recent museum exhibitions testify to his continued relevance to the South Carolina art scene. In 2000, the Greenville Museum organized an exhibition of Blair’s black-and-white monotypes. In 2001, the Columbia Museum of Art followed with an exhibition of Blair’s grid-patterned landscape paintings and monotypes. These works, Bill Bodine, the museum’s curator at the time, wrote in the catalogue, “speak eloquently of Carl’s lifelong pursuit of an art that combines elements of both representation and abstraction.”

In January 2005, yet another solo exhibition closed at the Spartanburg (S.C.) Museum of Art just after a show of five prominent, historic South Carolina artists, including Blair, opened at the Greenville Museum. Blair also had solo exhibitions at Lewis & Clark Gallery in Columbia and at the Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden, S.C.

When Blair was nominated for the Verner Award, the letters supporting him did more than testify to the quality and extent of his contributions as an artist, educator, gallery operator, and arts advocate and administrator, although they did that. What stood out were the many references to his loyalty toward colleagues and his quiet support for many of them individually, including his willingness to ferry other artists’ artwork around the state to exhibitions and competitions. “Carl is one of the most non-egocentric artists that I have ever met,” wrote artist John Acorn. “I do not know of any other individual,” former student Kilgore Condon wrote, who “has stepped into my life time and time again with friendship, respect, humor, guidance and a strong moral compass and spiritual faith, hoping to see me excel in my own personal artwork and in my hopes for Greenville’s artistic growth.”

What also stood out among the Verner letter writers was that many were surprised with the request for a support letter; they assumed Blair already had a Verner. “WHOA!!!,” Columbia furniture designer and Verner Award winner Clark Ellefson proclaimed, “Carl Blair has not received the Verner? How can this be? I had always assumed Carl had been awarded this recognition – he has done so much!”

© Wim Roefs

July 2006

Wim Roefs is a free-lance writer, independent curator, and art dealer. He is the owner of if ART, International Fine Art Services, in Columbia, S.C.