♪ opening music ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Hello, I'm Jackie Adams.

For the past 50 years the South Carolina Arts Commission has recognized outstanding achievement and contributions to the arts in our state, annually presenting the Governor's Awards for the Arts, the highest honor the state gives in the arts.

As we commemorate the South Carolina Governor's Awards for the Arts' 50th Anniversary, we celebrate the state's commitment to the arts through the lives of 9 notable artists who have received this honor.

We begin with an artist who has received the Governor's Award for the Arts twice, first in 1980 and again in 2017 for lifetime achievement.

Artist Leo Twiggs' iconic expression of his life experience as an African-American and activist, along with his unique style of working with batik, has garnered him national recognition.

♪ Every artist must develop a voice, just like you can listen to Frank Sinatra.

You know how his voice sounds.

You know, you go Bo Diddley you know how his voice sounds.

And so as an artist, I found something very fascinating about wax and dyes.

An artist through Chicago, the woman came in and she had a scarf and did a scarf much like this, you know?

We were doing them, and I just loved the color quality.

I love what happens when you take them and you put wax on them and you crush them.

[wax sizzles] So it kind of reminded me of growing up where we didn't have a lot of things.

It was dingy, but it was clean.

It kind of remind me of my existence and a lot of the people around me, all existence, really, African-Americans.

because we always had hand-me-downs and all that kind of thing.

And so I remember looking at those scarves and saying, What if I try to paint with this?

This is called a tjaunting tool, T-J-A-U-N-T-I-N-G. tjaunting.

And this is a tool that is used in Batik to make lines.

See, so that I could draw with this, I can make patterns with this.

♪ Well, if you try to paint with it, the problem you run into is control, because dye runs all over the place.

I began experimenting with different fabrics.

No silk because it's too expensive.

So I use cotton.

Cotton holds the dye in and sometimes you dip it and you dip in the wrong color and it changes the mood of everything.

So I had to throw it away.

People when I tell that story well, eventually people say, "Well, where did you throw it?"

[laughs] I found out that I could do things with it, that nobody else could do in painting.

It's my voice.

And I think people, when they see that painting, they know that was done by me.

I did a talk.

in Anderson, for a Martin Luther King Day, they had that.

And there was this thing that Martin Luther King said that I think is so important.

I have it right here and here.

I'm looking at it now.

It says, "Almost always the creative dedicated "minority has made the world better."

Because you bring into this sphere, what is there, something that is uniquely yours.

What batik does because it's wet and you have to dry.

It slows down the work.

But to me, because the medium itself forces you to slow down, then it also allows you to think about what you're doing.

To think about the feeling and about the emotion.

I react to things.

That's what happened with Mother Emanuel.

What I wanted to do was to show the transformation from the hate to redemption.

It started with the Confederate flag, Then the blood of the flag that red of the flag became less important.

And so I had to think, you know, what do I do for the last one?

And then I thought that people think that this thing is so unique that African-Americans, 9 people killed, that this is horrendous, and it's so, and yet, it's the stoney road we trod.

And so what I did was thought of, Weldon Johnson's music from Lift Every Voice and Sing.

And there's a line in there said, "We have come over way, that with tears have been watered.

We have come treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

One of the things that I always tried to do, and I've been on too many boards, but when I get on a board, more often than not, I'm the only African-American on the board.

And one of the things I try to do is persuade the board to look for other African-Americans.

I got this idea about getting people on boards from one of my professors, Mrs. Webber, who was a professor at South Carolina State.

One of the reasons I stayed in South Carolina is because South Carolina was the only southern state that did not have an art department in it's major university.

And I thought that was unfair to our students.

And so I wanted to build an art department at South Carolina State.

And that's what I'm most proud of.

♪ I never wanted to be a one hit wonder, you know?

Duke of Earl.

[laughs] I never wanted to be a Duke of Earl, because I think sustenance is so important.

If you can, success can come, but can you sustain success?

Because you can't lose that concentration, and I never did.

And I feel good about that.

♪ In 1988, pianist Wilfred Delphin received the Governor's Award for the Arts along with his partner, the late Edward Romain.

This duo of virtuoso pianists made their debut at Carnegie Hall and were a fixture at Spoleto Festival USA, during their time as artists-in residence at the College of Charleston.

They performed to sold out audiences at some of the world's most iconic concert halls like the Kennedy Center and even the White House.

♪ We maybe had the benefit of not fully realizing how important things were going to be until after we did them.

♪ Not too long ago, I was walking through Lincoln Center in New York with a bunch of students, and they were oohing and ahhing over Lincoln Center and the Met and all.

And I pointed to what was Alice Tully Hall.

And I said, Oh yeah, Edwin and I did a New Year's Eve concert there with Zubin Mehta and all.

[gasp] Really?

And I thought you know, coming from a small town, it was pretty staunchly segregated.

For me to find a teacher who had encouraged me to play Bach and Beethoven as a little kid, that was just my good fortune.

It's not like we had gone to Juilliard or Curtis or any of those conservatories where this is what I am bound to do.

We just had teachers who said, If you're going to do it, do it right.

And I guess, I guess we did because one thing led to another to another.

[piano music] Edwin and I met in college in New Orleans at this Catholic school, Xavier.

♪ We actually started doing duets as part of a class.

♪ We both went to New York to play for singers ♪ who were entered in a competition.

♪ We played for the singers and then I think maybe a friend of ours who had contact with the Baldwin Piano Company said, "Oh, you guys should play for these judges."

So the judges came to hear us play and said, "Well, you can't be in this competition because you didn't really officially register, but we'd like for you to come back and play a concert with the Orchestra of the New World.

"And we said, Oh yeah, sure, we'd love to do that.

♪ It ended up being Carnegie Hall debut.

♪ Since we were the only African-American duo under professional management.

I think maybe being African-American helped us.

Professional music is very, very competitive.

If you have something that you can use to set you apart, use it.

Edwin and I were partners on stage and off, and I think it made it easier for us to work on the kind of ensemble that we did because we knew each other so well.

♪ We were really fortunate.

The only misfortune we had is that my partner became ill and our career came to end much sooner than either of us expected.

But hey, it was great while it lasted.

(traffic sounds) The first time we were invited to Charleston to play.

It was for a city sponsored festival series, and we played here in the Dock Street Theater.

As a result of that concert.

We were invited to stay and do a residency.

♪ And as for what kept us here, I mean, who wouldn't want to stay in Charleston?

It's a beautiful place.

We had the benefit of meeting incredibly good people.

They made our transition from being newbies to feel like we really belonged here in Charleston.

And it was a wonderful thing because we were at the beginning of a professional career.

We became very involved with Piccolo Spoleto.

So for several years we had a series where every day of the festival we also either performed or produced recitals in different venues, mainly historic churches here in the city.

At that time for us it was a wonderful sort of coincidence of having a city that is just steeped in its own history and tradition.

It has a community that has the willingness and the wherewithal to support festivals like Spoleto, and Piccolo, and the Black Arts Festival, and even now the Color of Music Festival.

We had nothing but warm embraces from Charleston, so it's just an incredible time.

♪ John Acorn works as a sculptor in his studio in Pendleton, South Carolina.

His sculptures are wildly personal and filled with images and symbols from throughout his life.

Although they are unique and can speak loudly to broad themes, the tools he uses to create them are sometimes common to your typical home workshop.

♪ I don't think it's a compulsion, ♪ but I do have an interest in making things.

♪ Sculpture seem to be something that was very close to me.

I enjoyed the tools and machinery as well.

You know, to me, I have a band saw, a couple hundred feet maybe away from us right now.

[click] [electric saw whirring] And, you know, I could hug that thing because it works perfectly.

[saw whirring] And sometimes I find myself talking to it and thanking it.

♪ In the past, I was professor or teacher.

So '61 is when I accepted a position.

It was a man named Harlan McClure.

He saw an exhibition of mine and he was interested in hiring art faculty in the architecture program.

♪ It really gave a sense of the visual arts as being a developing area in the state of South Carolina.

♪ You know, there's sort of a old story about artists being removed from the rest of things.

I'm the opposite.

I'm not the artist who wishes to be in a sense of isolation at all.

I very much enjoy the idea of sharing.

So this is a charm bracelet, ♪ but everything are pistols.

..

I've enjoyed using the pistol as an object and making it into a number of my artworks.

It's so much a part of our culture.

I was born in 1937, and of course, World War Two began shortly after that.

My father read five newspapers every Sunday.

So actually, in my childhood, I experienced the photography of World War Two, as a youngster, and that has always kind of stayed with me.

So things like that have always inter- I uh, I don't want to be sadistic or, you know, dwell on death.

That's, no- but this is, this is reality.

This is not make believe.

Nobody's making this for a movie, for a stage set.

This is the real thing.

♪ Things just sort of come.

I don't go looking for them.

They just appear in a very simple way.

Like I talked about newspapers or magazines or simply driving down a rural road.

There's one of them over here that you can't see, of course, but I'll talk about it, it's Camouflage Man Near the Cemetery and all of the fabrics and the other sort of artificial flowers and things I found in the woods next to a cemetery after a serious storm.

And the storm took all the things in the cemetery and blew them into the woods.

And I was driving by and saw you know, it's kind of surreal to see this, but I just pulled to the side of the road and I just started walking my way through the woods of all, you know, sort of like, what a find.

What a gift.

Somebody somebody gave me a gift.

That's where an artwork comes from.

An occurrence that you experience, and it has the potential for being shared.

♪ As a teenager, ballet dancer William Starrett's feet had already taken him around the globe multiple times, traveling and performing with the world's most prestigious ballet companies.

For almost 50 years now Starrett has called Columbia his home, and he has dedicated his life to bringing the world to South Carolina, through the art of ballet.

Through the human body you hear the music more and through the human spirit and the human body you help tell the story.

You gain from that experience and how rich the dance experience is because it's different every time.

♪ Well, I started dancing when I was five, and I was really fascinated by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly and all those movies.

And my dad had a construction company and he had remodeled these, this family's home, but they couldn't pay their bill.

And so the wife taught dance lessons.

And so they said, to help pay your bill, we could give your kids dance lessons.

My sister and I became sort of a team together and we danced at pool parties and PTA meetings and things.

And then my teacher moved away.

♪ Then I didn't dance until I was like 14 and at a family reunion, my cousin, who lived in San Francisco, asked me what happened to the dancing, and he went back from the family reunion and contacted the dancing schools, and one of them was looking for children to be on a tour to Osaka, Japan.

I went to high school 11 days and then I went on a Thursday to San Francisco and I auditioned.

I got the part and I danced from then on.

Never, never lived at home again.

Never went home, never saw my dog again.

I performed for 40 different ballet companies in 29 countries.

When I was with American Ballet Theater, Michael Land was the ballet master and he's from Bishopville and he invited me to come to Columbia in 1977 as a guest artist to Ann Brodie, the founding director, was doing a new production of a midsummer Night's Dream.

And we hit it off magically.

And I just fell in love with Columbia, and I fell in love with the potential that Columbia had.

And so I was her assistant director for one year, and then I became the artistic director in 1986.

Well, I was seeing, was that the amazing talent we have here in South Carolina, they either had to go work at JB White's, leave South Carolina or quit dancing.

And so I really saw the need for a professional outlet.

And so I wanted the company to become professional.

What was good for me was my naivete, not understanding how difficult it would be.

♪ I knew that the talent was here and the discipline and the focus and the love for ballet from that dancer's point of view.

And the parents were supportive, but it was $100,000 budget in the early days into building an audience, and we were performing at Township and Keenan High School mainly.

So I knew we had to fill Keenan High School 12 times to fill the Koger Center.

♪ So we really worked at building the audience and building the repertoire, and it was a huge task.

You know, what can be harder than selling ballet in the Deep South?

Is there anything harder?

I do feel in retrospect that my career was really about preparing me to be an artistic director, and I really embrace artistic directing.

And I particularly loved choreographing and creating the ballets.

♪ ♪ The company had a long history of doing Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, but we brought in Swan Lake and a Midsummer Night's Dream, and then I was worried that keeping the art form fresh and alive.

So I kind of went on my Disney path for a while and I did Aladdin.

♪ And lately I'm on the trek of, sort of giving a mixed repertoire, which I did Hootie and the Blowfish Ballet.

Then I did a tribute to the Beatles, and now we're doing Motown.

So this is keeping the art form fresh at the same time, having a huge commitment to the classics.

My personal goal is to make everyone discover and love the art of ballet as much as I do.

So that is just my role on life.

That's why I'm on the planet Earth and I feel like I've been brought to South Carolina because they kind of need me.

They need that.

They need someone to really help them discover the art and discover not only the art of dance, but the amazing arts we have in South Carolina.

♪ In 2011, Mary Jackson was awarded the Governor's Award for the Arts for a craft that artisans like herself have kept alive as an indelible icon throughout the Low Country.

Her amazing sweet grass baskets are works of art that call back through generations, spanning centuries and across oceans.

♪ I consider it as an art form because craft, to me, is like manufacturing of an item.

♪ So the better you are at crafting it, then the more it becomes an art because it's it's something that you've taken then to a new level.

The handwork of weaving basket is very similar to like sewing or making a dress or something.

Some people are better at it than others.

So my goal is to be the best.

But I became bored with it.

And when I graduated from high school and went to New York to live, I didn't want to make baskets anymore.

I didn't even want to talk about it.

I grew up here, Mount Pleasant.

When I lived away for a long time.

People would ask, "Where are you from?"

Then I'd say Charleston, because Mount Pleasant was not on the map.

It was just farms and families just live close by.

And it was very kind of away from everything.

After we did all of the household chores, then we would sit in my grandmother's front yard and a group of us would sit down and learn how to make baskets from our mothers.

This art form was brought from Africa with my ancestors who were brought as slaves.

One of the things that the Europeans did to the Africans when they brought them here was to separate families that they would lose their identity.

But they kept my ancestors together because they were considered as valuable people.

My ancestors had the skill of making baskets.

A tradition that went on for generations until the plantation system was over, when families acquired land and started a new way of life.

My ancestors kept this tradition alive.

Passing it on from generation to generation.

My mother taught me.

Her mother taught her.

And I've taught my daughter.

My life changed because I got married and we had a son.

When he was 18 months old.

He was diagnosed with chronic asthma.

So I had to give up working to be home with him.

And I went back to making baskets again.

♪ I was just using the same technique and the same material and everything.

And I wanted to do something different that was never done before.

[traffic sounds] I decided I would take my baskets to the City Market in Charleston.

And that's when things changed again for me.

Local people who frequent the market all the time.

Some people would ask, "Oh, where did these baskets come from?"

or, "Who made these baskets?"

So that led me into a conversation about how I did them and why and all that kind of stuff.

So one day I was discovered by some people from the Smithsonian Craft Show.

Then everything changed again because people from all over the country would visit those shows.

I had the opportunity then to bring my work to the wider community.

And I felt that if I could bring my work, and people would see it, it would bring new attention to the art form.

My work is in many museums all over the country has been displayed in different parts of the world.

I've gotten the opportunity to sit down and have a conversation with the Emperor and the Empress from Japan, and they wanted to see my work in person and to speak with me in person.

The Empress said to me, "If you were living in our country, "you would be a national treasure."

Well, a couple of years later, I became a National Heritage Award winner, so then I feel that I'm a national treasure for the United States.

It was never my intention to become a famous basket maker.

It was all beyond my control.

[laughs] ♪ Beijing born photographer Sam Wang moved to South Carolina over 40 years ago and has made it his home.

His photographic imagery often finds its base in the nature of the palmetto state.

A unique format style and the compositions he captures are a combination of not only artful experimentation and engineering but also the artistic nature of a very keen eye.

♪ Art making is about how to look at the world, look at the surrounding, make some sense of it, and then come up with creative ways to consume it by yourself.

When you take the camera and go out, what you find is something new.

And then you start exploring and you sometimes come back with the best picture ever.

♪ You know, I'm very fortunate to be in Clemson because the forest has so many thousands of acres for me to explore.

When I first came, the arts were not noticed.

But later on the Arts Commission came about and it has contributed a great deal to the state, and so I'm very pleased that the Arts Commission from day one was not so much about professional artist.

It's about arts in education.

I think the liberal arts, the humanities, the arts usually don't get enough attention.

But we are creating people that are thoughtful, that could grow into leadership and not just plug into a hole in society.

The photographic process that I take them through did not teach just how to develop film and how to set f-stop, it's actually a sense of curiosity.

♪ ♪ When I go out, I usually don't come with a preconception, very rarely.

For example, here, I do know.

Yes, there are some vines and there are some trees that fall down.

But when I come out, I just trust my gut.

I've been interested in these 3-D cameras, and so a friend of mine and I kind of put our heads together and came out with a way to syncing two digital cameras side by side.

♪ And also these cameras have been converted to infrared.

So the pictures have a slightly unworldly, unworldly kind of a look.

[beep] [camera clicks] ♪ I'm curious about what ever is new, and the round format happened to fit my point of view.

Not for the round shape at all.

Because when I first saw the round shape, I thought, well, who wants to do that?

That's too cute.

Too, too strange.

In about 1977, '78 or so, I bought a new camera and the wide angle lens was very sharp.

From that I said, well, okay, what other territory could I squeeze out of this lens?

So when I first shot my test sheets, the whole thing was on a 5x7 camera back with that same lens in front.

So I captured everything the lens gave me.

That was a round image.

So I contact printed as round without cropping it and showed it to my friend John Acorn.

And I said, I, you know, there's something about that I really like, but I don't like the round.

He said, "Why not?

Go for it."

[laughs] One thing that I feel that we forget to teach sometimes is to develop a person's intuition.

We talk about things rationally.

We say, Well, why did you do this?

How could you do differently or whatever?

We keep firing questions that actually scares people, scares the making of art.

♪ I always feel renewed when I come out here.

Even if I didn't come with a camera and so forth, I would go home a lot happier.

I always learn something new.

That's why I do photography.

That's what nature does for me as well.

[camera clicks] Artist Tom Stanley makes work in series using recurring imagery, shapes and commonly recognized objects.

His use of graphic strategies can be found in museums, galleries and public art spaces throughout the region.

He received the Governor's Award in 2018.

♪ I think like a lot of people, I thought about my career when I was a kid.

♪ You know, I got my oil painting set for Christmas once.

I, I guess my parents realized I had a little interest in that.

And so that began the process.

And along with that, my, my brother had just given me his LP record collection.

And so I started listening to albums like Dave Brubeck's Take Five, and I also looked at the album covers, which were contemporary modern art.

For a long time, music did impact what I was doing.

One of the first series that I did when I came back to South Carolina was a series called en route to hamlet.

It was a series of small almost album size square paintings.

It almost reminded you of Burma-Shave as you drove down the road in route to somewhere.

I chose the name Hamlet not only because it's a small town, but it was also the birthplace of John Coltrane.

And en route to Hamlet on Highway 74 as you look out the right, there was an old textile mill.

It almost looked like an aqueduct with kudzu growing over the entire piece of this wall.

And to me, that symbolized one of the greatest unintentional pieces of public art in the Southeast.

I just thought it was beautiful in so many ways.

The idea of imagery has always been trying to achieve something that I've never seen before.

And indeed, it was influenced by the, you know, the limited skills I have.

[silence] My father worked in a machine shop and he would put me to work filing old blueprints, and I was fascinated by that.

So when I did have an opportunity in high school to take a mechanical drawing class, I did.

And it's basically, you know, learning how to draw something so it can be manufactured in detail with measurements using compasses and triangles and t-squares and an appropriate line weight.

I was pretty good at that.

In fact, it was one of the few things that I was good at in high school.

This is reminiscent of the target.

I use that image a great deal in the work.

I don't know what this is.

Some of the images just pop into my mind and I make them because I think they look interesting or fit within that space.

♪ I usually work in series I have for a number of years.

I'll have an idea, how can we build a series of houses.

I literally will outline all the houses before and go through them and then go through another phase on each canvas, and continue in that fashion In all cases my process is about discovering something.

I came to South Carolina in 1977 to attend the University of South Carolina.

I was working at the time on my MFA in painting and with a minor in printmaking.

[machine clangs] But I also had opportunities that the department gave me, which I think back on.

and I have to admit, helped form a lot of the ways I think.

One that I think about right now is the opportunity to teach art classes at CCI, Central Corrections Institute.

A lot of the inmates who took the class seemingly treated me fairly well, but it could be an explosive situation at any moment.

But it was also a humbling opportunity.

And so those types of situations and learning experiences really helped me develop a lot of my attitudes, I think, today.

But in 1990, I had an opportunity to come back to South Carolina.

I was the first director of the galleries at Winthrop University in Rock Hill.

[clinking] There was another faculty member of Winthrop, Carol Ivory, and she and I worked on an exhibition of Catawba pottery.

Little did I know that there was a Native American community just down the road from Rock Hill that had one of the most important legacies of pottery in this country.

The thing that was most rewarding about being in higher ed was supporting faculty who did, you know, wonderful work outside of the university or inside the university, but also students.

I just I'm amazed by what students did while they were there and also what they've done since.

And they've gone on to do pretty interesting things.

I can just throw a stone and hit them all over the state.

You know, there are faculty who are former students now at Lander at USC Upstate, or right here at the state museum.

You know, there are many, many more students as well, who've gone on to, you know, have significant careers in the arts.

♪ And, you know, I find that extremely rewarding.

They've taught me a great deal.

♪ Photographer Cecil Williams' legacy is not only that of a skilled artist.

He is also a documentarian, capturing the history of our state and nation in some of its most turbulent times.

At the young age of 14, he was a national correspondent for Jet Magazine, and documented the Civil Rights Movement, and even captured John F. Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign on film.

In 2019, Williams received the Governor's Award for lifetime achievement and continues to endeavor as a vanguard for the Black experience in America.

♪ I believe that all people have a destiny.

♪ The fact that I have become a recorder, a photojournalist, a historian of the state of South Carolina.

It is a great privilege and I feel that a part of my responsibility, having that privilege is to be able to share the thousands of images I have captured really during my entire lifetime.

♪ Because I like to scribble, and sketch, and draw cars, and houses, and trees, and people; all my life I aspired to be an artist.

At Claflin University I obtained my degree in art.

There was not a photography school.

I am a self-taught photographer.

Most of the photographic techniques that I picked up, I picked up because, again, I observed reading the great magazines of my day, Life, Time, Look, and others like that.

And I tried to imitate and take pictures from that, using the right angle, using the right light, using the right composition.

But one of the greatest moments and most memorable moments in my lifetime as a photographer was to be on the campus of Clemson University in 1963, when Harvey Gantt became the first of our race to really set foot and become a student.

Harvey, when did you first decide you wanted to go to Clemson College?

I was thinking about it for quite some time.

I believe I made a concrete decision during my first quarter at Iowa State.

Clemson, as their reputation goes, carried forth that integration with dignity.

And I was very proud to be a journalist.

My pictures appeared in Jet magazine.

I covered events all over the state.

I was so much involved in news, photography and photojournalism and I thought of myself as both a photojournalist and also a historian.

♪ During those days, I shot with film and most of the time when there was a news deadline, I had to take the photographs with my film camera, take the film out of the camera, put it in an air mail envelope, which was the fastest way of sending things at the time, and send to Jet in order to meet the deadline.

♪ 30 years ago, I started thinking about with all my experiences now what can I do with them?

How can I share these moments that I photographed?

I started putting together what became my first book, the book that I call Freedom & Justice.

Following that, I published another book called Out-of-the-Box in Dixie, and following that, I did a book which was strictly about the Orangeburg Massacre.

That tragic event on February the 8th, 1968, when 9 highway patrolmen unleashed a volley of fire towards 150 students, killing 3 and injuring 28.

I sure was lucky not to have been really one of the victims at that time.

This was originally a black and white photograph, but I painted it and of course, you see the results of that painting.

Here are the shells, by the way, we have the actual shells at our museum that actually came out of the weapons used by the highway patrolman in shooting the students.

It's in my dreams.

It's there.

It's something that's unforgettable to come that close to death.

It was such a tragedy that happened right before my eyes.

The students who were killed were my friends.

I knew them.

I had photographed them.

And so it's a thing that is with you every day to have lost in really such senseless and unnecessary.

The fact that people of color wanting merely to bowl in a bowling alley will lose their lives.

That the guardians of the status quo protecting freedom and the right to do things from other people just because of the color of their skin.

That got me to thinking, well, okay, I published these photographs and I have a record of them, but how can I maybe go a step further?

So I started thinking about starting a museum.

The idea that we needed this was bigger than me.

I already had many of the artifacts, the photographs, the documents.

So I told my wife, this is what I was going to do.

And I started putting together what has become the Cecil Williams South Carolina Civil Rights Museum.

This particular room is called the Thurgood Marshall Gallery.

In this gallery is an example of my latest project.

Composed of 100 images that I think depicts South Carolina's history.

It is so important to remember where you've come from.

If you don't know your history, it leaves you kind of aimlessly of how to handle things in the present.

So I believe that the museum I have created here in Orangeburg will serve all the people of South Carolina.

♪ Often, we think of artists from a visual perspective, however, poet Glenis Redmond creates visions with her words that conjure images of the southern experience that are as clear as any painting or photograph.

Our final artist in this showcase was recognized with the Governor's Award in 2020.

♪ I'm one of these people who loves poetry on every single level.

I love the written word.

I definitely love it in the air.

And I think I am a poet of the air because of my ancestry.

I'm Southern.

I mean we like to talk, on porches.

I'm West African in ancestry.

I come from the Grio, so of course I want to tell a poem.

Say South Carolina with some respect on it.

Darn and defend.

Remember, I came into being on Shaw Air Force Base in Sumter, South Carolina.

The 20th fighter wing.

I fight for and love my, our state.

Well, my relationship with South Carolina is interesting because I'm an Air Force brat.

And the brother before me was born in Évry, France.

So you know how that goes.

I believe it was about ten years ago when I moved back, when my mother got sick and I moved back to South Carolina.

I was living with her.

That South Carolina really started opening up to me in a different way.

Not the hometown like, I got to get away from my hometown is too small, but living with my mother, who is 85 years old, she started telling me stories that I hadn't heard before and I realized that I was born in Sumter, South Carolina, on Shaw Air Force Base for a reason to tell the stories that have not been unearthed personally, familiarly, and as a collective.

♪ My stories is an intentional weaving.

An intentional stitching.

An intentional quilting of these histories.

I am fascinated and empowered by my maternal lineage, by my great grandmother, Rachel Cunningham, my grandmother Katie Lattimore, and my mother Jeanette Redmond.

They were all seamstresses.

They work by hand.

I never picked up a needle and thread, but I do sew with memory.

(reciting poetry) What my hands say for my great grandfather, Will Rogers.

My hands say, Pick, plow, push and pull, because it learned a curve itself around every tool of work.

The muscles say, bend yourself like sky, coil blue around both sun and moon.

Listen, my back be lit by both.

My hand got its own eyes and can pick a field of cotton in its sleep.

Don't mind the rough bumps - the callused touch.

I work this ground like it's my religion [clap] and my hands never stop praying.

Some folk got a green thumb.

Look at my crop, Huh!

and you'll testify my whole hand be covered.

I can make dead wood grow.

I listen to my hand, it say, Work.

Work.

Work, Will, though it comes to mostly nothing, [clap] just nothing is what I be working for.

Come harvest time I take the horse and buggy to town.

Settle up.

This is where my hand loses its mind and refuses to speak.

Dumb-struck like the white writing page.

The same hand fluent on the land, don't have a thing to say around a pen.

The same fingers that can outwork any man wilts.

What if I could turn my letters like I turn the soil?

What if I could make more than my mark, a wavery X that's supposed to speak for me?

(poem ends) My great grandfather, Will Rogers, who came through the loudest in my latest book, What My Hands Say.

And it really was an odd experience because I just started writing, and I was inhabited writing about him.

I write about Pet Leg Bates, the one legged tap dancer from Fountain Inn, South Carolina.

David Drake the enslaved potter poet from Edgefield, South Carolina.

It's the land that seems to dictate, write about me.

It's odd because, you know, once I come back from that journey of writing, then I shift back into poet Glenis, you know, Mom, Gaga.

And it's living in different worlds.

There are days where I'm more in the introverted space of writing and creating and imagining, and then other days I'm in the more extroverted space where that's the teaching artist, where I'm going out and teaching teachers and students how to write poetry.

Working at the Peace Center as the poet in residence there, I was able to go into classrooms locally, the same community where I started writing, and it was so wonderful to see them catch the fire.

My role is not to make everyone poets, it's to find the poetry in their lives.

And that, to me, makes the world a more beautiful, a more connected place.

♪ Thank You for joining us for this special journey through and celebration of the arts in South Carolina as part of the Governor's Awards for the Arts' 50th Anniversary.

Who will be next?

Join S-C-E-T-V this May as the South Carolina Arts Commission honors the 2023 recipients during the annual South Carolina Arts Awards.

I'm Jackie Adams.

Good Night.

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