Special Art Exhibitions

Pluff Mud and Red Clay

Mary Glenn Keadle, winner of the 2026 North Charleston Arts Fest Poster Design Competition, will display her winning piece, Looking North, along with a collection of paintings that explore rural South Carolina and its small towns as both a physical landscape and a remembered one. Through paintings and sketches, Keadle focuses on spaces that exist just beyond attention—quiet back roads, working land usually overlooked by Southern lifestyle magazines, a worn sense of home, and the structures and spaces shaped by use and time. At the kitchen table, the grit of the field meets the warmth of the home, a place for pause and sharing stories.  On the farm, the passing of time is measured in the way a barn leans just a little further into the earth every season.  Together, this work considers how rural spaces hold history without spectacle. Working in watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, Keadle balances nostalgic memory with lived experience.  This exhibition explores the rural character woven throughout our state – from the pluff mud of the Lowcountry to the peach farms of the Sandhills to the red clay of the Piedmont. Structures that hold memory appear throughout the work, including ink sketches of iconic mills that have closed over the past few decades as well as historic sites that have been repurposed or revived.  Rather than idealizing the rural South, the goal is to treat it as layered and unresolved—beautiful, worn thin, personal, and still very much alive. The public is invited to meet the artist at the gallery on Saturday, May 2, during a free public reception from 5-7pm.

On view: April 29-May 30, 2026
Public reception: Saturday, May 2, 2026, 5-7pm
Gallery hours: Wed.-Fri, 10:30am-5:30pm, Sat. Noon-4pm