Columbia City Paper

The next solo exhibition for Art + Cayce will be Suzy Scarborough’s intriguingly analytic romantic paintings.

Scarborough’s work represents three different major genres, namely abstract paintings, figurative images and landscapes. Scarborough’s abstracts use celestial spheres to connect abstract with geometry and reality. The circles symbolize the universe, earth and nature. The imaginary sphere of arbitrarily large radius, concentric with the Earth and rotating upon the same axis are just part of Scarborough’s game of painting nature from within. While in astronomy celestial spheres are often used as positioning and mapping tools, Scarborough uses them as guides for the viewer to find the inner consciousness of nature. Golden leaves connect the concentric circles and shapes, representing the interconnectedness of nature.

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Many people are aware of USC’s Fall Festival of Authors but USC also hosts another unique opportunity for Columbia to meet and discuss the craft of writing with distinguished authors:  Caught in the Creative Act. Directed and taught by Janette Turner Hospital, Carolina Distinguished Professor of English and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, these evening courses are free and open to the public.  These classes provide a chance for people to read a book and discuss it in a lecture on Mondays; on following Wednesdays, the class meets with the author of the book.

The first author is South Carolina native, Ron Rash. He’s written four novels, three collections of short stories, and three poetry collections, all of which have received much critical acclaim. Rash is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University.  The class will be covering his latest novel Serena, which is set in the timberland wilderness of Depression-era North Carolina. The novel was a 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist and has received enthusiastic reviews nationwide, including in The New York Times and The New Yorker.  A lecture will be held on Oct. 19 and on Oct. 21 the class will get to met Rash and talk to him personally about the novel and about writing in general.

Next in line are Ceridwen Dovey and her novel Blood Kin. 

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McMaster proudly presents its new group contemporary ceramic exhibition “Ceramics: Southeast.” The group show includes the works of thirteen southern artists including Alice Ballard, Russell Biles, Jim Connell, Don Davis, Lauren Gallaspy, Bruce Gholson, Samantha Henneke, Frank Martin, Scott Meyer, Gay Smith, Paula Smith, Mike Vatalaro, and Jerilyn Virden. The show can be viewed from October 12 to November 19 at McMaster gallery on Senate Street.

The group exhibition combines a wide spectrum of southern ceramics from traditional styles to non-traditional sculpture forms and brings together the creative talent of functional and non-functional ceramic artists from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The group of full-time artists and professors illustrate the never-ending possibilities of ceramic and clay sculptures.  

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