Good Morning Lowcountry

Piccolo at 30

The first two visual arts exhibits for this year's Piccolo Spoleto festival, the 30th, open today.

“Celebration” by Richard Hagerty, Piccolo Spoleto’s 30th anniversary poster.

Corrigan Gallery at 62 Queen St. has hung this year's Piccolo Spoleto Invitational Show, featuring the work of Richard Hagerty, this year's festival poster artist.

The original painting for the poster will be there, along with more of Hagerty's colorful fantasies.

The poster painting, "Celebration," in honor of Piccolo's 30th birthday, is a compendium of Charleston landmarks (the steeples of St. Philip's and St. Michael's, City Hall, Market Hall, the Dock Street Theatre, the new Cooper River bridge, Fort Sumter, wrought-iron gates) and multi-colored people dancing and tumbling through the streets of the Holy City.

Look closely and you'll see oversized strawberries, a coach with kaleidoscope wheels, an African Confederate flag, a dancing harlequin, acrobats, drummers, hornblowers, masks, butterflies, birds, a dirigible, an organist and a unicorn.

There are also dogs, clouds, waves, a possible dragon, a Carolina parakeet and a guy in a skullcap who appears to GMLc to be Brother Blue, the storyteller (and Harvard divinity student) who performed at Piccolo's first festival in 1979.

The organist wears monk's robes; we think he is the late Father Francis Kline of Mepkin Abbey.

Gliding along to the right is a blue piccolo player, a version of the silhouette by artist John Bennett used on Piccolo's first festival program.

"I had a lot of fun with this," Hagerty said. "There's a lot of stuff going on in there."

The Charleston plastic surgeon said he works in pen and ink, watercolor and oils. This is his third Piccolo poster. He also produced the art for posters in 1984 and 1990.

Every picture tells a story, but Hagerty probably won't tell you his. "Every viewer has to tell his own story," he said, laughing.

The opening is 5-8 p.m., absolutely free of course, and the show runs through June 15, Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Meanwhile, an invitational exhibit of photographs by architect Robert Epps opens at 6 p.m. at Piccolo's new digs, 180 Meeting St. (the First Citizens building).

The 11 photographs, titled "Forlorn," are of the now-vacant upper floors of Kerrison's Department Store at 260 King St., a Charleston institution. Abercrombie & Fitch now occupies the bottom floor.

"It was the first department store in the South to have women sales clerks," Epps said. "It was the first to have home delivery in this region of the country. It's significant. It's an amazing building ... You have all these amazing colors in the midst of all this deterioration. I've always thought "forlorn" was such a good Southern word. It means there's beauty in places where there should be none."

Epps said he tries for a sense of place in this photographs, without outright nostalgia. "Architecturally, we try to avoid sentimental nostalgic fakery," he said.

Epps uses a 4x5 view camera and film. The prints are 31x40 inches.

On May 24, Epps will open an exhibit of photographs of Big John's Tavern at Big John's Tavern, another Charleston institution, at 251 East Bay St.

GMLc
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