How is it that the flowing, watertight weaves of a seagrass basket endure across centuries and continents?
What stories emerge in patches of a quilt or the hues boiled into a batik?
And why does the Confederate flag flap on still?
As Black History Month continues, two Charleston art exhibitions show in sharp, shining relief the continuum of Black artistic excellence in this country, whether spanning standout works from its earlier days or drilling down into one artist’s singular abiding vision.
Neither show is curated chronologically. But both open meaningful entrees to longstanding practices and motifs–some informing, some warning.
At the International African American Museum (IAAM), we land in the exhibition called middle of somewhere: the art and the legacy of Black Southern makers to celebrate the creativity, resilience and cultural contributions of Black artists from and inspired by the American South.
For the exhibition, which runs through Feb. 14, 2027, Martina M. Morale, IAAM’s director of curatorial and special exhibitions, transforms the impressively flexible gallery with works mainly from the museum’s collection.
Sleek, wood displays lend to standout craftsmanship of the Black makers of intricately woven basketry, deftly stitched quilts, masterful mega-vessels of clay. With the faint scents of this freshly cut lumber, sweet seagrass and time-worn textiles, it’s a full-on sensory experience, one wrought from iron and pine, realized in cotton and clay.
To wit: The lustrous brown stoneware of David Drake (Dave the Potter) is poised near an elegant chair by free Black cabinetmaker Thomas Day. An iron gate boasts the signature ornate scrolls of renowned Charleston blacksmith Philip Simmons. Zig-zagging along a wall, textiles veer from a mid-twentieth century Malian mudcloth to the 2020 work Equal Justice by Essie Bendolph Pettway of Gee’s Bend, the Alabama contemporary quilter collective.
On a jutting platform, the intergenerational Gullah Geechee sweetgrass artistry of Dionne and Delores Jones finds a contemporary counterpart in Bantu Knot, a sculptural vase of Danielle Williams. Nearby, an 1800s enslaved cabin chair is perched near a recent sleek work by Chicago-based, contemporary social practice artist Norman Teague. The exhibition also features a digital “Design Your Own Quilt Block” experience; prompts inviting visitors to consider everyday objects.
There is no missing the continuum of artistic excellence in this stellar exhibition, one nimble to needs of the times, and steadfast in its time-tested traditions, too.
Insistent icons
Then there is Dr. Leo Twiggs. The 91-year-old St. Stephen-reared artist and educator has long trained his fine eye on the African American experience through the lens of his own life.
and history in his works using saturated colors and batik on cotton | “Conversation,” (detail) by Leo Twiggs, 2018, batik on cotton/courtesy Gibbes Museum of Art
Revelations: The Art of Leo Twiggs, now up at the Gibbes Museum of Art through May 3, is the first full retrospective of his work on his home turf — a statement in itself about ongoing hurdles with Black artistry. It marks the 50th anniversary of the artist’s landmark 1976 solo show at the Gibbes.
It is guest-curated by Dr. Frank Martin, working in tandem with Sara Arnold, the Gibbes Museum’s director of curatorial affairs, and features more than 40 works between 1961 and 2020.
Throughout five sections — Marooned, Awakenings, Transitions, Transformation and Revelations — Twiggs time and again asserts the visual motifs of flags and targets, calling to mind fellow South Carolinian Jasper Johns, with his encaustic-and-newspaper American flags and targets.
Instead, Twiggs represents the tattered remnants of the Confederate flag, dyed deep, or fading white, or bleeding its trademark borders into cotton. In saturated hues of yellows, blues and reds, his targets are seared on the bodies of Black men, whose features are obscured in silhouettes akin to cameos, which also appear in works like the 1997 Sarah Remembered, depicting his great-grandmother born into slavery.
The artist works mainly in batik, which is able to hold not only the dyes and wax, but the complexities of the human condition — deep indigo skies, achingly lonely, wary black silhouettes, alarming vibrant targets on backs and hearts, and the scraps of Dixie that just won’t quit us.
In Dreamers, his 2018 batik-on-cotton work, these unfold on his rustic Southern childhood home, with its outside shutter evoking the red-and-blue, crossed flag, riddled with targets. From a warmly lit window, a child peers out. On the front porch, his watchful grandmother sits in the dark beneath a crescent moon.
What’s striking about this retrospective is how Twiggs’ insistent symbols endure. From cautionary faded flags to their mournful inclusion in his 2016 Requiem for Mother Emanuel series, then again on his 2020 The Death of George Floyd. As decades march on, the remonstration of those flags and targets does, too. Even so, the aching humanity of this extraordinary work abides, too.
Also newly on display at the Gibbes is Hispaniola III — Mia & Kenya, a 2024 work by Kandy G. Lopez, the 2025 winner of the museum’s 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art. Like Twiggs, the Florida-based artist finds rich, layered terrain in textiles. In yarn and spray paint she portrays two women draped in historic red, white and blue dress reflective of their Dominican Republic and Haitian ancestry. Seated regally, faces half shaded and feet bare, they clasp their hands in silent solidarity.
If you want to go: IAAM’s middle of somewhere is on view through Feb. 14, 2027, 14 Wharfside St. More: iaamuseum.org. Revelations: The Art of Leo Twiggs is on view through May 3 at Gibbes Museum of Art, 135 Meeting St. More: gibbesmuseum.org.
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