Each year as a part of North Charleston Arts Fest, the annual city-wide celebration by the City of North Charleston’s office of cultural arts, there’s a statewide poster design competition.
The winner of this year’s poster design contest, Charleston native Jirah Perkins, was awarded a month-long solo exhibition at Park Circle Gallery — among other honors, like having her winning painting “Playpen” acquired by the city’s public art collection and seeing it used on all of this year’s promotional materials for Arts Fest.
“PlayPen” was the winning piece out of 106 entries from 43 artists working in 20 cities across South Carolina. The colorful abstract painting connects the imaginative play of childhood with making art: The silhouettes shown in the mostly blue artwork are from images the artist captured of her toddler son, Jace, while he was busy playing in a world of his own.
Her solo exhibition, on view until May 31 with an opening reception from 5-7 p.m. May 4, is titled Sowing Seeds. It’s the second solo exhibition for Perkins, who works out of a studio at Summerville’s Public Works Art Center. And this show is drawing on some of the same themes from her last solo, held at the Saul Alexander Library in 2020, titled Miss Mary Mack.
“I definitely consider this body of work a continuation of Miss Mary Mack,” Perkins told the Charleston City Paper. “Sowing Seeds is about emerging into adulthood” she said, and in the process, contending with, dreaming about and healing from our childhoods.
Perkins said Miss Mary Mack was created out of her desire to share Black girls’ shared childhood experiences of joy, specifically by highlighting games played by young girls, as the exhibition title references.
Visual storytelling
Perkins’ paintings explore these themes skillfully through color, composition and texture. She’s honed in on a distinctive, abstract, color-blocking style in the last few years, and with the way she paints, her figurative artworks take on a sort of timeless and spiritual quality: Some of the figures are painted in hues so close to the background color, they nearly disappear into the composition, while others are more prominently presented.
So Perkins’ viewer might find themself questioning who’s really here in this image; who’s a representation of a childhood memory, or a future self, or an ancestor? Perkins seems to say in Sowing Seeds that we can access the past and future in the present moment if we pay attention to how we’re acting on both the individual and collective level.
“Especially as a mom, now, I’ve spent a lot of time just reflecting on our human experience as one and also as a collective,” Perkins said. “We’re constantly sowing seeds into each other — whether you’re working 9 to 5 or you’re an entrepreneur or a stay at home parent — We all have a purpose here. And we also all have the power to cultivate a new future. We are the village.”
Perkins’ art business is called “Ujorii Fine Art,” which originates from the combination of the Swahili term, “ujima,” meaning collective work and responsibility, and “satori,” a Buddhist term which means sudden enlightenment and understanding. It makes sense considering the hopeful and spiritual images she presents.
Her hope for viewers of Sowing Seeds, she said, is that people feel inspired to live more authentically and embrace the commonalities of our human experiences.
Jirah Perkins’ solo exhibition Sowing Seeds is on view at Park Circle Gallery May 3-31. Opening reception 5-7 p.m. May 4. Learn more about the artist at ujorii.com.
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