SeasonArt Series

Elizabeth is a muralist who captures strange, beautiful, and comforting moments through the use of intense colors and finds inspiration from the community around her. She has been working in mixed media since 1994, with a focus on portraits, murals, and paintings. She currently has work on display at Hotel Domestique, Restaurant 17, and Due South Coffee. You might see some of her murals around Greenville and Travelers Rest if you ever bike the trail, wander the neighborhoods, or listen to Music in the Park.

Equally drawn to color, science, math, and emotion, Mark discovered art by way of chemistry and architecture. After graduating from high school in Lyndon, VT, where he was born in 1976, he entered Dartmouth College with the intention of pursuing studies in chemistry. His interest soon shifted to architecture, a curriculum that required a drawing class. That drawing class changed not only his college major but also his life, introducing him to the world of creative exploration that fuels his passion and intellectual curiosity today. Mark graduated with honors from Dartmouth in 1998 and then earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. He followed that with a year of painting and printmaking in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. He has had fourteen solo exhibitions, the most recent being Far-fetched at the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth, KS in February 2020. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including New American Paintings, and reviewed by ArtForum, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Two Coats of Paint, the Artblog, Town magazine, and others. He was one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville and is a 2019 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has been the art teacher at Lakeview Middle School for two years and will be transitioning to Greenville Senior High Academy in the fall of 2024.

Kephira Davis is a painter and photographer based in Greenville, South Carolina. She works in acrylic, oil, and mixed media to create large-scale paintings. Most of Kephira's inspiration is drawn from the sky as well as impressionist ideas and techniques. The themes of her work reflect the complex emotions that come with growing up and exploring one’s place within their family lineage. The process of painting allows Kephira to revisit and dwell in her memories for a while. Kephira received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a 2D emphasis from Lander University, where she also developed a deep interest in art history and curatorial museum and gallery practices. Kephira is a current Brandon Fellow at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts.

Statement: My work embodies the transitory nature of the sky and memory. I photograph transitional periods of the sky, as the colors are more vivid and striking. Digitally, I blend my images together creating more passages that emphasize the transition from reality to memory. These contemplative spaces are often where I exist and become the realm in which my figures exist. From my little hand on my mother’s chest to making medicine in acorns, I explore past moments in time that I’ve shared with my family members, which are still vivid in my mind. The action of painting my images allows me to return to those moments I cherish, and dwell in them for a while.

David Gerhard is an artist, designer, and educator. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Gerhard has called Greenville his home since 2011. He has had art studios in the Village of West Greenville at Artbomb Studios, at Taylor's Mill, and currently at Good Art Co. in downtown Greenville. Gerhard is the Visual Arts Department Chair of the Governor's School for Arts and Humanities, and a Lecturer at Clemson University in the Art Department. He has previously taught at Anderson University and Furman University, as well as the Greenville County Museum of Art and the Printshop. His art has exhibited internationally across Europe and Asia, with prints in permanant collections of universities and museums from Estonia to California. He has received grants from the Metropolitan Arts Council and Greenville's Arts in Public Places commition for his public artwork on Pendleton Street. His drawings and prints have recently exhibited at MAC, the Lipscomb Gallery, Artbomb, and Good Art Co. His artwork will be downtown on trash cans in 2024 as he was awarded in Flat Out Under Pressure.

Terri Bright (Greenville, SC) is a fine art photographer whose work focuses on non-traditional beauty. She photographs details, shadows, and misplaced objects that describe her relationship to things within and around her. The tension between the disorder of her surroundings and her internal desire for pictorial order and beauty is crucial to her working process. With a background in painting, Bright uses her camera to create images of quiet, contemplative spaces. Her photographs are like small meditations, granting permission to pause, and creating space for contemplation. Born in Pennsylvania, Bright lived and worked in New York and Japan prior to receiving her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and moving to Greenville. Her work has been included in numerous national exhibitions, and in 2006, she received a full-year sabbatical grant from the Mellon Foundation. Her monograph (Sonnets, 2016) documents forgotten items and ordinary spaces that possess a kind of wilted beauty that alternately suggest playfulness, tranquility, melancholy, and desire. Bright currently teaches photography at Furman University where she holds the title of Professor of Art.

Terrell Washington is an artist on the scene in the local community. Born and raised in Taylors and Greenville South Carolina, becoming a full-time artist has been a passion since he was four years old. Serving as a muse, his older sister inspired him because of her prior interest as a teen. With the use of oils, watercolors, acrylics, nail polish, colored pencils, and 3D materials, he creates a world all his own never seen to the public.

With nightmares and dreams, religion, or whatever catches Terrell’s attention, he takes those ideas and brings them into manifestation.

In the near future, he prays to have his work in galleries and museums across the country and internationally. He also hopes to be a designer, motivational speaker, gallery owner, writer, actor, and successful entrepreneur. There, he will continue to use his talents and voice to speak truth to every listening ear.

Savannah Ralph is a native to Greenville, SC and known for their illustrative and expressive figurative works. Ralph works in her own style—a mix of realism, surrealism, and illustration—and pushes the limits of traditional art using unexpected materials and surfaces. The media in which they prefer to work are acrylic and oil paint, charcoal, pencil, mixed media, and digital art. Ralph is drawn to capturing people and experiences using expressive brushstrokes and a colorful palette. The content of her work displays their passion for equality, social justice, and the human form. Ralph is inspired by their personal experiences and the experiences of others. They value representation and inclusivity, often depicting people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Ralph attended the Fine Arts Center and Greenville Technical College for visual arts, but remains mostly self-taught. In 2020, Ralph became a Brandon Fellow at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts where she works as a studio artist and an art instructor.

Elisa M. Golden, a New Jersey native, has made South Carolina her home for the last thirty years. Having studied art in the Northeast, she subsequently moved to Greenville to continue her education at Furman University, earning a Master’s in education. Resident dramaturg at the Warehouse Theatre for over a decade, she currently teaches courses as part of Furman’s Learning in Retirement program. As a studio artist, Elisa's art has been exhibited in a number of local galleries and juried shows---most notably, Artisphere. Primarily a watercolor artist, she works with digital illustration and pencil drawing. Although her style is generally considered to be realistic, she often incorporates a whimsical quality in her work.

Rachel Rinker (they/them) is a visual artist currently based in Worcester, MA, who works primarily in painting, drawing, collage and printmaking. Originally from South Carolina, their practice draws upon their connection to the vertical geography of the east coast and times of travel and leisure growing up in the South, looking back through a queer lens. Notions of inter connectedness, memory, accumulation, archive and entropy are often explored as they process their states of being over time. Periods of rest are paramount to balance energetic bursts of rythmic, painterly movements and the unfurling of visually stimulating abstract environments full of layered history and human connection. Rachel is an exhibiting artist member with Arts Worcester in Worcester, MA and Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, MA, and is represented by the Zea Mays Flat File 2023. Rachel was a recent artist in residence at Arteles Creative Center in Hameenkyro, Finland, as well as South Porch Artist Residency in Summerville, South Carolina, US. They have shown work regionally in New England and in South Carolina. Rachel obtained their BFA from Clemson University in 2016, and will be attending Arizona State University starting Fall of 2023 to pursue their MFA in art.
Website:rachelrinker.com
Instagram:@rachelrinker1
e-mail:[email protected]