A two-panel outdoor mural tucked away near the corner of East Bay and Calhoun streets has for years presented passersby with a vision of Charleston’s potential future should water levels continue to rise.
Ironically, exposure to the elements has, over time, also worn down the work down so much that you notice — an impact that underscores the artist’s message in unintended ways.
“It’s really deteriorated a lot in just the last six months,” said David Boatwright, the artist behind the mural. “So it’s time to take it down, I think.”
But he couldn’t do it alone. That’s where local advocates like Douglas Hamilton of Charleston Hacks and Paul Turner, a digital archaeologist, came in.
“These guys just came out of the woodwork and sort of goaded me into doing something about it,” Boatwright said. “Over the course of my life, I’ve produced a lot of stuff, and I’m just not a very good self-archivist. I’m always thinking about the next piece or the piece after that.
“But I really would like to restore this one,” he added. “I’d be really happy to do that and find a new home for it.”
Turner specializes in digital preservation. In fact, his background of working with architects and preserving buildings in 3-D spaces brought him to Charleston. But about three years ago, he fell in lockstep with local artists like Shepard Fairey and Boatwright to preserve public art, too.
Hamilton’s work is broader. Charleston Hacks, a local tech advocacy group, looks for opportunities to support tech entrepreneurship and creative spaces all over the Charleston area. But Boatwright’s mural especially caught his attention.
“You have to be intentional about it,” Hamilton said. “That’s the problem with all of this stuff. If everybody drives by and sees your lovely, awesome mural degrade and degrade and degrade, they start to wonder, ‘How much does Charleston really care about you?’ That feels kind of bad, right? We have to intentionally say, ‘This is an important artist, and we want to save his work.’ ”
Storied origins
Usually, when artists paint murals, there’s little to no expectation that they will ever get that work back, especially if it’s commissioned as an exterior painting. But the East Bay mural wasn’t originally intended as an outdoor piece, or even for that building at all. Instead, it was painted on plywood panels as part of an art exhibit at the City Gallery more than a decade ago. It wasn’t until 2014 that it would be installed at its current spot.
The mural depicts dual-scenes of Charleston: one in the past, and one in an “uncertain future,” as Boatwright put it.
“It’s not all that dystopian,” he said. “But the right-hand panel is post-apocalyptic in a way, you know. It’s got water up to the stoop level. It’s only three feet, it’s not that high, but with climate change, it could very well be the future.”
Boatwright thought the paintings would end up “somewhere” after the gallery showing, he said, but “nothing really happened.” So when the owners of the East Bay building asked him for a mural, he told them, “I think I’ve already got something.” The building owners leased the mural from him for five years, then moved out of the space, leaving the mural for the new owners in 2019.
“The murals are always commissioned — except this one, actually.” said Boatwright, who has done a number of public projects around town. “Usually, I’m doing a mural for someone who is sponsoring it. It doesn’t necessarily have a strong commercial purpose, but it does in a way. It’s sort of an image-building thing. … But this one is unique.”
The plan going forward
The preservation-minded trio is faced with two real options to ensure the mural’s future: restore it in place; or remove it, restore it and reinstall it — even if it’s somewhere else.
“It would make sense, if the current building owners wanted to pay for it and work to maintain it, to restore it in place,” Turner said. “It’s the perfect home for it. It gets a lot of eye traffic.”
But Boatwright said conversations with the owners over the last few years, while positive, haven’t really gone anywhere. So the team is starting to lean more toward removing it before beginning the restoration process.
As of now, the plan is to restore the mural and rehome it to the Navy Yard in North Charleston.
“There’s this idea of a placemaker, where you build something, and it kind of creates the reason for going there. It becomes the destination,” Hamilton said. “You put these public art installations in this context where you’re protecting them, and they’re something you go to see. They become art again.”
Turner said the space would be perfect for large-scale galleries to display previously public art installations. Several warehouses on the site, which now sit mostly empty, boast a massive 45,000-square-foot interior. “You could put 20 murals in one of those buildings,” he said.
The ball is only just getting rolling, Boatwright said, but it’s moving in a positive direction. Once the team members figure out how to move the mural from its current spot safely, they expect things to develop quickly.
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