We usually save the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s for eating leftovers, wearing our pajamas during the day, and gearing up for Syfy’s New Year’s Eve Twilight Zone marathon. But this year, we’ve decided to use it a bit more creatively — while still wearing PJs, of course. Check out our list of fun artsy things to do without leaving the house.


Do some online gallery browsing.

Although many local galleries are open this week, there’s still plenty of art browsing (or buying) you can do online. The Rebekah Jacob Gallery has a curated photo exhibition online, Holiday Edit, that will be up on the site through Jan. 3. They’ve also got a strong online shop with art, books, and art posters year-round. Take a look at rebekahjacobgallery.com.

There’s also Show & Tell Art and Design, an online gallery started by Sullivan’s Island-based curators and collectors Leila and Buff Ross. The site, showandtellartanddesign.com, features works by a small number of artists, accompanied by the story behind the piece, as written by the artist.

Robert Lange Studios also has a strong website, where you can browse images from current exhibitions (Nathan Durfee’s Peering Under Hints of Wonder is up through the end of December) as well as past shows by the gallery’s roster of national artists. See it all at robertlangestudios.com.

And local artist Teil Duncan does almost all of her sales online through her website, teilduncan.com, so she posts everything she’s got to offer. We especially dig her abstract bull paintings.


Try to DIY.

Hunker down with a cup of hot chocolate and a hot glue gun (or knitting needles, or a sewing machine … whatever your crafty vice may be) and let that imagination run wild. If you need some guidance, our website has an archive full of DIY projects by local artists and crafters like Allison Nadeau, Kristen Solecki, and Camela Guevara. You could make an interchangeable Instagram frame, watercolor napkin rings, or an accordion book, among other things. Just visit charlestoncitypaper.com/diy.


Plan your spring theater calendar.

Our vibrant theater scene picks right back up come the middle of January, and you could spend a couple months seeing a different show each week. Some highlights of a strong spring season include Threshold Repertory Theatre’s Don’t Cry for Me, Margaret Mitchell, a comedy about writing the screenplay Gone with the Wind opening Jan. 15; PURE’s Glengarry Glen Ross, opening Jan. 23; The Footlight Players’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, also opening Jan. 23; and Charleston Stage’s production of the Steve Martin play The Underpants, opening March 6. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

You can also check the Theatre Charleston website, theatrecharleston.com, for more info on this season’s theater offerings by their member companies like Midtown Productions, Holy City Shakespeare, the College of Charleston Theater Department, and South of Broadway Theatre. And don’t forget the Woolfe Street Playhouse, 34 West, What If? Productions, and Black Fedora Mystery Theater … we could go on, but you get the picture.


If all else fails, watch an artsy movie.

Maybe it’s just us, but we always feel a little depressed when we can no longer bathe in the warm, holiday TV glow of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and The Muppet Christmas Carol. The best substitutes for those movies are, of course, more movies — and if they shake the candy canes and sugarplums out of your Christmas-addled brain, well, that’s even better. Here are a few of the art docs on our list, some of which are old news but all of which have been well-received.

Talent Freaks web series — A collection of shorts by local filmmaker Andy Coon, Talent Freaks goes inside the creative process of Charleston-based artists like painters Reynier Llanes (who just this fall relocated to Miami) and Sarah Haynes and muralist Douglas Panzone. Fun fact: the series won the Outstanding Documentary Series Award at this year’s Los Angeles Web Series Festival and was also selected to show at the 2014 Melbourne Web Series Festival. You can watch all five episodes online at talentfreaks.com.

Herb and Dorothy — This award-winning doc is about the couple Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, a mail clerk and a librarian, respectively, who amassed one of the most important collections of post-1960s art in the country before donating it to the National Gallery. Watch it on Amazon Prime.

Tim’s Vermeer — This one’s on the list mostly because it’s so weird. Penn and Teller, the buzzkillers to end all buzzkillers, produced this film about a tech wizard, Tim Jenison, who sets out to create a replica of Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” using a mirror and a camera obscura. Lots of people, especially the reviewer at The Guardian, hate it. You can get this one as a Netflix DVD.

And if you still haven’t seen Exit Through the Gift Shop, the Banksy documentary about the fabulously delusional “artist” Thierry Guetta who himself is making a documentary about street art, then do yourself a trippy favor and watch it. You can stream it on Netflix.

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