And this week, you’ll encounter art in Charleston even before you walk into a gallery or museum – it’s outside, all over the city. There are new sculptures, banners and signs, life-size portraits in unusual places, and art cropping up in many store windows. These displays are part of Charleston’s FestivALL.
FestivALL boasts that “A City Becomes a Work of Art,” and West Virginia’s artists have worked to make it visibly so. Naomi Bays is FestivALL’s Public Art coordinator:
“I think when you walk around town, you should just see art, it should make you happy, want to be here,” she said. “We have so many fun things, as it is, but they shouldn’t all be tucked away, it should be enhanced….There’s really just too much concrete, gray in this town. I want to see some brightness.”
Public art takes many different forms. There are collaborative projects – the letters of FestivALL’s logo have all been designed by different artists, and artists have decorated paper mache catfish in their many styles to be displayed around the city.
Amy Williams and Chris Dutch have labeled objects around town in different languages – Spanish, Italian, and Arabic – to draw attention to issues of language and culture. Bays says that the “Art in the Alley” project will be back with printmaking from Marshall University and students from Charleston Catholic High School have created people from tape that will be posed in different locations every day.
“There will be art all over town,” Bays said. “We’re also going to have Art Gawk, which is art works placed in storefronts downtown, so as you walk down the street, you’ll be hit with the visual images of lots of different art. Some known and some unknown artists, pulling from a lot of different regions around the state.”
Mark Wolfe is another artist whose work is being displayed around the city, inviting people to take a different look at everyday sights.
“It’s called Coming and Going, and it’s a photographic installation of full-size portraits of local citizens who are otherwise shopping or reading, or their usual business, in and out of each place that I’m going to be displaying their images,” he said. “When you approach a store, you see the front view of someone doing what they are doing, and as you come into the store, you see the back, almost as if they are going away from you.
“These people are generally the kind of people, you see every day, so it’s a different perspective, kinda an artistic glance to what these people would be doing, almost a still in time, you know, if you will, but in black and white.”
In galleries and on the street, there’s a wide variety of art being shown – there’s no one style that defines a West Virginia artist.
“The diversity is more than I’ve every seen it, and the people who are able to do visual art are in greater numbers than I’ve seen, and I’ve lived here for a while enough to see an art community sort of evolve,” Wolfe said. “Charleston had never really been a town thought of as center for arts. But now it’s fast becoming a growing, melting-pot for artists and a growing wealth of people here, and there coming together ways than they have before.”
Bays hopes to tap into that wealth of artists so that public art becomes a more permanent part of the city, year round.
“I’m really excited about giving some permanent art back to the city, because I think that was always one of FestivALL’s goals, was to give back to the city, and make it, not just an exciting place to be one week out of the year, but to enhance it as a whole,” she said.
She would also like the artists, as well as their work, to be more visible in Charleston:
“And I want to see a lot more artists on the street, I want to see people working on the street, bring your easel out, paint on the street, I want to see that kind of thing. We have a lot of good, good artists, so we should be much more welcoming to them.”
The Charleston Art Walk takes place at various locations from 5 to 8 p.m. on Thursday night and FestivALL continues through the weekend.