Events Calendar

Uncensored expression: anyone is invited to step up to share song, music, poetry, comedy, rants & raves!

The most eclectic open mic around, in a welcoming gallery setting! 6 pm signup, perform 6:30-8:30 pm.

Artist Michael Fowler creates evocative abstract landscape paintings by incorporating vibrant colors with subtle, complex details. His semi-large-scale approach invites viewers to step into his work and build a sense of wonder and contemplation surrounding the natural world. Fowler’s artistic response in contemplating nature is to capture something of a landscape’s pleasantness, which is often unexpected harmonies of color and shape. In his latest exhibit, Arbor Huescapes, Fowler highlights the distinctive vegetation – primarily trees – and topography of North and South Carolina’s midlands and piedmont regions.

Fowler received his Bachelor of Arts from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas with a focus in Advertising Design. He then attended the University of Nebraska where he received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Art History. From there, he attended the University of Memphis where he earned a Doctorate in Higher Education. Based in North Augusta, South Carolina, Fowler is currently an associate professor of design and computer graphics and serves as the Mary Durban Toole Chair of Art at the University of South Carolina in Aiken. His paintings are in a number of public and private collections nationally, and he actively exhibits in regional and national shows.

Please note: Arbor Huescapes has been rescheduled due to the COVID-19 crisis and will now open in fall 2021. The exhibit is on display daily September 18, 2021 – January 9, 2022, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside the Baker Exhibit Center. All works are available for purchase and a portion of sales will be donated to The North Carolina Arboretum Society.

Spartanburg photographer Chuck Reback always had an affinity for horror movies – and abandoned buildings – so when he had the opportunity to photograph inside the now-dilapidated Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, he jumped at the chance.

Six years and three trips later, the results are his upcoming solo exhibition, “Asylum Images,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery II of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg. A reception will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on the third Thursday for ArtWalk Spartanburg.

The building was a state-run, Victorian-era mental hospital that was used up until 1994. The site has a lot of deferred maintenance and is deteriorating rapidly.

A veteran fused glass artist and a relative newcomer to the medium will present a joint exhibition, “Difference in Glass,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery III of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.

A veteran fused glass artist and a relative newcomer to the medium will present a joint exhibition, “Difference in Glass,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery III of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.

“We want people to see the different things that can be made with glass fusing – the different shapes, colors and ideas,” says Judy Martin, whose years of fused glass work “morphed” from her jewelry making, sculptures to painting on glass.

Martin encouraged Thomas Zumbach, who is new to the art of fused glass, to do the joint exhibition. The show will highlight “a veteran glass fuser wanting to show a new path and a ‘newbie’ wanting to show a new perspective of what can be made with glass.

Artist Michael Fowler creates evocative abstract landscape paintings by incorporating vibrant colors with subtle, complex details. His semi-large-scale approach invites viewers to step into his work and build a sense of wonder and contemplation surrounding the natural world. Fowler’s artistic response in contemplating nature is to capture something of a landscape’s pleasantness, which is often unexpected harmonies of color and shape. In his latest exhibit, Arbor Huescapes, Fowler highlights the distinctive vegetation – primarily trees – and topography of North and South Carolina’s midlands and piedmont regions.

Fowler received his Bachelor of Arts from Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas with a focus in Advertising Design. He then attended the University of Nebraska where he received a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing with a minor in Art History. From there, he attended the University of Memphis where he earned a Doctorate in Higher Education. Based in North Augusta, South Carolina, Fowler is currently an associate professor of design and computer graphics and serves as the Mary Durban Toole Chair of Art at the University of South Carolina in Aiken. His paintings are in a number of public and private collections nationally, and he actively exhibits in regional and national shows.

Please note: Arbor Huescapes has been rescheduled due to the COVID-19 crisis and will now open in fall 2021. The exhibit is on display daily September 18, 2021 – January 9, 2022, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. inside the Baker Exhibit Center. All works are available for purchase and a portion of sales will be donated to The North Carolina Arboretum Society.

Spartanburg photographer Chuck Reback always had an affinity for horror movies – and abandoned buildings – so when he had the opportunity to photograph inside the now-dilapidated Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia, he jumped at the chance.

Six years and three trips later, the results are his upcoming solo exhibition, “Asylum Images,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery II of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg. A reception will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on the third Thursday for ArtWalk Spartanburg.

The building was a state-run, Victorian-era mental hospital that was used up until 1994. The site has a lot of deferred maintenance and is deteriorating rapidly.

A veteran fused glass artist and a relative newcomer to the medium will present a joint exhibition, “Difference in Glass,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery III of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.

A veteran fused glass artist and a relative newcomer to the medium will present a joint exhibition, “Difference in Glass,” Nov. 2 through 27 in Gallery III of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.

“We want people to see the different things that can be made with glass fusing – the different shapes, colors and ideas,” says Judy Martin, whose years of fused glass work “morphed” from her jewelry making, sculptures to painting on glass.

Martin encouraged Thomas Zumbach, who is new to the art of fused glass, to do the joint exhibition. The show will highlight “a veteran glass fuser wanting to show a new path and a ‘newbie’ wanting to show a new perspective of what can be made with glass.

Visualizing Prose: Writing and Revision Techniques That Add Shape, Texture, and Focus to Your Fiction and Nonfiction Work

Join this one-day workshop to learn writing and revision tools and prompts that will help you ideate fiction and nonfiction projects, activate your ideas into drafts, and sculpt your drafts into their best, pitch-worthy form. With the help of several visual aids, such as handouts and posters, you’ll generate new work or revise works-in-progress in a synchronous class with author, editor, and educator Cinelle Barnes. You’ll take home said visual aids and walk away with the very same tools Cinelle used in the writing of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and the editing of A Measure of Belonging, a Hub City Press book, and many other long and short works.

Visualizing Prose: Writing and Revision Techniques That Add Shape, Texture, and Focus to Your Fiction and Nonfiction Work

Join this one-day workshop to learn writing and revision tools and prompts that will help you ideate fiction and nonfiction projects, activate your ideas into drafts, and sculpt your drafts into their best, pitch-worthy form. With the help of several visual aids, such as handouts and posters, you’ll generate new work or revise works-in-progress in a synchronous class with author, editor, and educator Cinelle Barnes. You’ll take home said visual aids and walk away with the very same tools Cinelle used in the writing of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom, and the editing of A Measure of Belonging, a Hub City Press book, and many other long and short works.

Cinelle Barnes is a formerly undocumented memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of MONSOON MANSION: A MEMOIR (Little A, 2018, Booklist starred review) and MALAYA: ESSAYS ON FREEDOM (Little A, 2019), and the editor of the New York Times New & Noteworthy book, A MEASURE OF BELONGING: 21 WRITERS OF COLOR ON THE NEW AMERICAN SOUTH (Hub City Press, 2020).

Cinelle earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared or been featured in the New York Times, Longreads, Garden & Gun, Electric Literature, Buzzfeed Reader, Literary Hub, Hyphen, and CNN Philippines, among others. Her essay, “Carefree White Girls, Careful Brown Girls”, is anthologized in A Map Is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home (Catapult, 2020). Cinelle is a contributing editor, instructor, and writer at Catapult.

Cinelle’s work has received fellowships and grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, VONA, Kundiman, the John and Susan Bennett Memorial Arts Fund, the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant, and Capita. Her debut memoir was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. She is the 2021 Vulgar Geniuses Nonfiction Honorary Awardee for her writing and social justice work and 2021 writer-in-residence at Pasadena City College, and was a Focus Fellowship artist-in-residence at AIR Serenbe in 2020, a short-term writer-in-residence at City of Asylum in 2019, and the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, where she and her family live. In 2021, Cinelle was named one of 50 Most Influential by Charleston Business, joining thought leaders in state and local politics, the arts, academia, activism, healthcare, and business.

She is currently at work on a nonfiction narrative book on climate justice, the Philippine water crisis, and Philippine spirituality and folklore.