James Island-based artist Cristina Victor showcases Charleston’s ceramic art community in her curatorial debut, SHAPERS. The group exhibition at the James Island Cultural Arts Center includes sculptural ceramic works by 19 Charleston-based artists and is on view now through Jan. 11, 2024.
The maximalist, salon-style exhibition serves as an opportunity to recognize an “incredibly dynamic and skilled community that is overdue and deserving of visibility,” Victor said.
Born and raised in Miami, Victor received her master’s degree in fine art in San Francisco and is now an interdisciplinary artist and studio art professor at the College of Charleston. She moved here in March 2020 and said “ceramics is what got me through” the pandemic and being alone in a new place.
“It was like this thing I could completely pour myself into and endlessly learn,” she said. “It was endless. It was boundless.” (These are themes explored in Victor’s own colorful sculpture included in the show, titled “Quimbara.”)
To get involved in the local artistic community of her new home, Victor started working at Studio Union, an artist-run studio space in North Charleston. That’s where she connected with artists like Susan Klein, a fellow interdisciplinary artist who also teaches at College of Charleston, and Susan Gregory, who directs Studio Union and is an artist working in ceramics and encaustic.
Victor said the exhibition also relied on her meeting Myra Bowie, who owns Riverland Terrace pottery studio Terrace Clay and introduced Victor to many of the represented artists. Like Studio Union, Terrace Clay is an artist-run studio space founded after the longtime Charleston pottery hub cone10 closed in 2019 — after nearly 20 years serving the artistic community — when its space was bought and demolished due to development on the downtown peninsula.
After working in Charleston, Victor decided to curate a group show.
“I knew I had to kind of pay my dues and hang out and see what was going on. But in general, I immediately felt like, there’s a lack of representation of a lot of kinds of artists here.”
Through conversations with fellow artists, Victor began to sense many Charleston artists felt similarly and though art spaces in Charleston represent a very specific kind of work. For artists who are creating experimental, subversive art, the options to show are limited.
“I became aware of this sense that there isn’t a whole lot of representation outside of the kind of art that I feel really appeals to tourism,” she said. “We don’t see enough art about the complexities of the history of this place.”
With these issues of visibility in mind, it was important for Victor that the group exhibition went in an accessible and free community space — that’s why she put SHAPERS in the admission-free James Island Cultural Arts Center.
“I’m kind of punk about things — sitting around waiting for something to happen is not my jam. And so I was like, I’m not seeing this, I’m going to make it.”
19 artists, no labels
A sculptural altar piece by Steph Frederickson invites introspection and meditation, while an artwork of a dilapidated house complete with a spider web inside by Holly T. Benton speaks to themes of ephemeral beauty. A wall of shelves holds many smaller pieces by the group of artists and is presented without labels, as if the works all together represent one large artwork by a collective, rather than individual artists.
The show speaks thematically to community, to Charleston, its beauty and horror, and the compulsive, generative practice that is making artwork — specifically the experience of making three dimensional works which exist in a state of simultaneous physical fragility and powerful presence.
“There’s just a lot of richness here,” Victor said. “And I’m not trying to represent the whole ceramic world of Charleston with this show — I know a lot of people are left out that I probably haven’t met yet or seen yet. I know that there’s a lack of connection with certain communities here. If I do this show again, I want to prioritize finding those kinds of makers.”
Victor received awesome feedback from artists and community members, saying many people agree that a Charleston ceramic salon-style exhibition should occur regularly. She said she hopes SHAPERS “ignites more people to find ways to show their work in ways other than what we’ve had available to us.
“I think we’ve got to demand a little bit more of the city. There’s so much more going on than what’s being shown — we’re busting at the seams. It’s a matter of how we collectively figure that out.”
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