Third Annual Charleston Arts Festival Begins Next Month

The third edition of the Charleston Arts Festival, which celebrates area creatives working across genres like music, dance, visual arts, comedy, culinary arts, and more, will feature periodic events over the next two months.

You can see this year’s schedule below:

Wednesday, September 5th

• Pecha Kucha 31 at Charleston Music Hall
  • Doors: 6:00 PM; presentations: 7:00 PM
  • This exciting evening will as always feature an array of Charleston’s most stellar creatives: Tom Bradford, one of the innovators behind the Charleston Low Line; Jen and Mike Kulick, the dynamic husband-wife duo who launched the Tattooed Moose phenomenon; Mike Quinn, master of saxophone and one of the city’s most prolifically talented  music impresarios; Trace Bonner, the city’s premiere queen of Holy Cow Yoga; Jonathan Boncek, photographer extraordinaire; Taneka Reaves and Johnny Caldwell, the saucy and spirited Cocktail Bandits; Mark Sloan, director of the Halsey Institution of Contemporary Art and curator of its upcoming landmark “Southbound” exhibition; Wolfgang Zimmerman, musician-mastermind behind the brand-new Invisible Low End Power and producer at Rialto Row. These presentations will all fall within Pecha Kucha’s signature six minute-forty second formatting.
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    Kelly Rae Smith, Music Editor of Charleston City Paper, will emcee and Professor Ping will be DJing.

September 6th – October 7th

• Sara Pittman Solo Show at Beresford Studios
  • For a second year, the Charleston Arts Festival is proud to collaborate with Beresford Studios and will be presenting “The Road Between”, an exciting new body of work by one of the city’s most talented young artists, Sara Pittman.Pittman is an emerging abstract expressionist, who has always found art to be an intrinsic part of her being. Relying heavily on intuition, her work explores the constant exchange between her repressed state of mind and her conscious self. These are represented through the juxtaposition of loose and controlled movement, defined areas with the use of negative space, and the tension between bold and soft color.
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    Incorporating negative space invites the viewer to have a focused dialogue with the images that are presenting themselves and beckons deeper observation. A wordless narrative unfolds in the thin, transparent layers of paint and mark-making, evoking a sense of mood and mystery between what the viewer sees as the foreground and what the eye sees overlying it. The depth of her work creates an experience by asking those viewing it to come closer and unveil what is buried beneath.
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    Pittman grew up in Montgomery, Alabama and was raised by an artistic family who acted as an inspirational staple throughout her childhood. Her mother, an encaustic artist and art therapist, was the first to really introduce her to the world of art. With her family’s support, she quickly began evolving as an artist and went on to study painting at Huntingdon College, receiving her BFA in May 2015.Pittman moved to Charleston, South Carolina after being accepted into Redux Contemporary Art Center in August 2016 where she continues to work out of her studio as a full-time artist. Sara held her first solo exhibition at Mitchell Hill of Charleston in 2016.
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    She recently had a two-person exhibition, “Paintings by Jeffrey Cortland Jones and Sara Pittman,” at Matthew Rachman Gallery in Chicago, IL. Her work can be found in over 40 regional and national private collections and has been included in projects such as renowned French designer Jean-Louis Deniot’s Miami house for Elle Decor. Pittman has been published in both national and international publication.

• Poe: A Play In The Dark at Queen St. Playhouse
  • An original music and movement exploration of the haunting recesses of Edgar Allan Poe’s mind upon the conception of his masterwork, “The Raven,” “Poe: A Play In The Dark” will feature a score composed and performed by Andrew Walker, Co-founder and Director of the Charleston Arts Festival, and movement choreographed by Sara Sumner, Starla Kurtz, Stephanie Burg and Jenny Broe, Chief Mad Scientist and Owner of Dance Lab. A thrilling, quirky and peculiar story, Poe will transport you into his study and onto his page while illuminating his obsessive nature, rich with madness yet full of beauty. This madness brought on by the premonition of his lost love ignites his brilliance and gives birth to his most amazing work. Through narration, music and dance, the play unfolds Poe’s tremendous undertaking and exploits the outright war he fights with himself to complete such a masterpiece. The question is, will he possess the courage, wisdom and strength to emerge from his mind’s darkest corners alive or will he be trapped there “nevermore”?

• Myth Of An Atom at Queen St. Playhouse
  • MYTH OF AN ATOM is the brainchild of New York-based duo, visual designer Christian Hannon (NON Visuals) and musician/producer Fallen Atom. Eclectically fusing elements of hip hop, R&B, future bass, and electronic soundscapes with fluid, sound reactive imagery, this audiovisual performance explores the nature of light, sound, and the cinematic experience with a live band. Atom and Hannon are accompanied by other musicians behind a translucent screen that is projection mapped by Hannon’s visuals, creating a holographic effect. The visuals and music are of a modular nature, making each show a unique adventure for the viewer and the performers.Hannon and Atom are Charleston natives, who debuted their project locally at the inaugural Charleston Arts Festival Finale in October of 2016

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