Although it's not quite spring — it begins officially on March 20 — the Sumter County Gallery of Art has begun its program of classes for the season. The eclectic nature of the short courses offers something of interest for almost everyone, from beginner to advanced artist, SGA Chief Curator Mark Mcleod believes, and he is teaching one himself.
Mcleod, who received his master of fine arts degree in sculpture from Syracuse University just last year, has been at the gallery for about eight months. In addition to finding talented artists for the gallery, he is busy making art for various exhibitions across the country, and for adults, he will offer a five-part series of lectures titled "Contemporary Art Since the 1950s" on consecutive Thursday nights, beginning Thursday.
"We've always offered spring classes," Mcleod said, "but we're expanding them. We're going to try to offer some new classes during the summer, too. Last summer we had around 300 students, so this year we're extending the school to eight weeks."
Mcleod, 26, is a native of Sumter, "born at Tuomey," he said.
He credits his education in the city's public schools for his success as an artist. Before Syracuse and Winthrop universities, where he got his undergraduate degree, Mcleod said, "I had a great art education background. Speaking to other people about it, I think (the art department at) Sumter High School did an incredible job and then going to the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts."
Mcleod said he was "probably in the eighth grade when he took an art class, REACH classes with Mr. Friday at Alice Drive (Middle School). When I got to Sumter High School, I took every art class they offered, except for sculpture, which is ironic. They even made Art 4, 5 and 6 for me and another guy because we'd taken everything they offered."
The decision to leave New York, the center of the country's art world, to assume the curatorial position wasn't difficult, he said.
"The arts in Sumter are what got me started," he explained. "In high school, studying with Elaine Lentine, REACH groups and in an Accessibility (Sumter's annual installation exhibition). Seeing what a small town it was, but it has such a tremendous arts movement going on. That's what really drew me back. I really want to be a part of that."
While curating full time is new to him, Mcleod said, "I had organized a couple of shows on my own, but you know ideally, when someone graduates with a master's in sculpture, they want to get out and just live on making art."
But when the job opportunity at the gallery arose, Mcleod said, "It was 'Yeah, that really does sound like fun.'"
And it has been fun, he said.
THE ART OF CURATING
As curator, he is already working on booking exhibitions for next year.
"It really starts with Ronald Gonzalez," he said. "That's November of this year. We're booked the whole summer. We're not taking any time off."
The process of selecting artists for the gallery begins with Executive Director Karen Watson, Mcleod and the exhibits committee. It's a collaborative process that works very well, he said.
"Everybody brings (recommendations of) two or three artists," he explained. "The committee understands what the community wants to see, what needs to be in the art gallery to educate the public on art. We kind of pick and place where the artists will fit in the exhibition year.
"We have a lot to choose from, and we're going to start some more things to get even more artists (interested in exhibiting in Sumter) — a slide registry. We give preference to artists from the Southeast."
The exhibitions are designed both to support local and regional artists and to bring in "some bigger name artists," Mcleod said. "Most of the people in Sumter are not going to get to go to New York every month or so to see the artwork, so we can bring some of that art here, which is really good."
While he said he doesn't get as many opportunities to see what's going on in the wider art scene, as in New York, "you get the opportunity to bring what's going on here, which is a good thing."
Mcleod keeps in touch with a lot of people he knows in the greater art world, visits a lot of Web sites, reads the art magazines and gets to know a lot of gallery owners and curators as well as people who are in the exhibitions at the SGA.
Exhibitions coming up include Force of Nature, a collaborative show that has already been to Charleston and Charlotte. The exhibition features 10 Japanese artists, including Yumiko Yamazaki, whose work was featured on the grounds of the Sumter County Courthouse during Accessibility 2004.
Mcleod said the gallery has booked another of the artists, Yamamoto Motoi Ishikawa, "to do an installation in the Booth Room. I'm really excited about that show. We'd also like to get some new media artists."
Other upcoming exhibitions, he said, include "an invitational group show, a themed show with artists that use just crazy amounts of very intense color in their work. It seems to be a trend in contemporary art to see this enormous amount of color. I think that will be a really exciting show. It's going to have video, a lot of new media that we haven't seen."
On the tentative calendar for 2008, he said, is "an emerging artist who does knitting, very contemporary knitting."
THE ARTIST AT WORK
When he's not involved in gallery work, Mcleod can often be found working in his own studio on the second floor of the gallery. Primarily a sculptor, he said his work "is more 'make props' and then incorporate those props almost like theater. I set them up and do these performances."
In is office is a 6-foot "gold" nugget used in a previous performance piece.
"I went out and buried it, dressed up like a prospector and went and dug it up," Mcleod said. "The final piece is photographs to document that find. There's some deceitfulness involved, a lot of theater. It's really theatrical type of work."
Also, he said, "I do some paintings and drawings with different materials, like cast sugar."
In the course he'll teach, beginning tomorrow night at the gallery, Mcleod will talk about contemporary artists who have had the greatest influence on art around the world. Each class can stand on its own, also, he said.
The biggest curator of that time (since the '50s) was "Clement Greenberg," he said. "He really shaped, for good or bad, everything that came after that. The main artist of that time is Jackson Pollock."
Describing the series of lectures as a "kind of 'Contemporary Art 101,'" Mcleod said, "A lot of people confuse contemporary art with modern art. I thought the class was necessary because you really can't appreciate what is being shown in galleries today, or you get that 'I don't like it because it's abstract', so you can't really understand it unless you know what's come before it.
"That's really what the class is designed for, to take a decade-by-decade look at what was going on. History, world history, what was influencing these artists at the time."Mcleod said he will deal "mostly with themes and movements, mostly U.S. artists, just because it is a five-week course. Each course is an hour-and-a-half long. We'll have slides, videos, handouts of readings to take home."
Each class will include time for discussion.
"We can talk about what we've seen and what was going on in that time period," he explained, "Jasper Johns, performance art, sculpture, fluxus, dada, neorealism, conceptualism. It really helps if you have just a brief understanding of those major movements. You can really get a lot of today's art."
Mcleod hopes his lectures will change people's attitudes toward art galleries.
"I think galleries have this whole persona that you have to go in with some kind of knowledge to understand it," he said. "Maybe this course will help break some of those stereotypes down and add a little bit of knowledge, so we'll have more people who understand and appreciate art."
That's not to say there aren't already many people here who already do.
"A lot of people who come into the gallery are really surprising," he said. "They come in and you find out they've owned a gallery in Chicago (or something similar); one of our docents was a gallery owner. It's just amazing. And then you get some people who only like landscapes and portraits, something that's easily recognizable. But the fact that they're in here looking, I think that's a good step forward."
In addition to Mcleod's contemporary art lectures, the gallery's spring art classes include pottery, mosaics, pinhole photography, acrylic painting, illustration, multimedia art and silver clay jewelry making. Fees vary.
Mcleod's work can be viewed on his Web site, www.markmcleod.net. He has work in the Sugar Buzz exhibition at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y., and in the World's Smallest Biennial, which will travel to 60 galleries on four continents.
For more information about upcoming exhibitions and adult and children's spring classes at the Sumter County Gallery of Art, call (803) 775-0543.
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