The Museum's second and third floor exhibition galleries are currently closed. Please read our renovation notice for help in planning a visit to McKissick.

Meet USC at McKissick

November 22, 2011 – September 30, 2012
Columbia Metropolitan Airport

McKissick Museum presents a new exhibition on display at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport located in the glass display cases in the main lobby near the USO. Meet USC at McKissick will familiarize travelers with the museum's mission to foster awareness and appreciation of the diversity of the American South's culture and geography, attending particularly to the importance of enduring folkways and traditions. Besides introducing visitors to the collections and mission, Meet USC at McKissick highlights the Jean Laney Folk Heritage Awards. Created in 1986 to recognize lifetime achievement in the traditional folk arts of South Carolina, the award emphasizes individuals or groups whose work displays authenticity, significance, and excellence in folk art. The award is administered by McKissick Museum and the South Carolina Arts Commission.

Images: salt cellar, David and Robert Hennell, London, England, 1770 (top), and Gamecock glass, 1905 (right), both collection of McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina.

Install It 2

April 26 – May 26, 2012
Columbia Congaree Vista

Install It 2 marks a new collaboration for McKissick Museum with the artworks connected through material, content and location to the Museum's commitment to telling the story of southern life: community, culture and the environment. Install It 2 will be unveiled during Artista Vista's gallery crawl April 26 from 5 to 9 PM. All the installations will be located outdoors and will remain on display through May 26. The project is receiving primary support from the Congaree Vista Guild, McKissick Museum and Lexington Medical Center.

The 2012 Install It 2 projects and artists:

Khaldoune Bencheikh and Mary How, in collaboration with students and community members, are creating "Rangoli: Giant Bird Feeder" at the corner of Lady and Lincoln Streets. This giant sculpture of natural materials is based on a colorful Indian floor sculpture believed to welcome good luck and fortune. The biodegradable performance art installation aims to accentuate our relationship with nature, especially the avian variety, even in an urban environment.

By the former railroad siding at Adluh Flour, south side of Gervais on Gadsden Street, Eileen Blyth's "Seven Doors" is made by mining both the materials and the memories of the Vista. Constructed of objects scavenged from the area, "Seven Doors" connects to the industries which once dominated the area and how those that remain are still part of a vibrant, contemporary urban space.

Michaela Pilar Brown is engaged in an ongoing series exploring the notion of "home" as a repository for memories which are malleable and transient. At the loading dock area of City Market Antiques Mall, near Gervais and Gadsden is "I Have Loved You So Long." Made of kudzu, grape vine, recycled tire tread, steel and grass, the work examines the intersection of family history, memory and myth, by using familiar materials in the creation of an other-worldly environment.

Located in the side yard of the Zion Baptist Church at Washington Street and Gadsden Streets, Wendell George Brown's figurative sculpture grouping "Ascension" is inspired by African-American quilting, spirituals and burial grounds, as well as by African grave makers and wooden figures embedded with adornments for healing and protection. Through the nature of the work, its source materials and location, "Ascension" will reflect upon the African-American history and culture of the area.

Kara Gunter's "Ghost Trees" in the alleyway near Gervais and Gadsden Streets will repopulate an alleyway of stumps with trees made of layered paper and adhesive. The work will contrast the development of the area from natural to mostly man-made. While much of what we are aware of in the Vista is that which has been built there during the past 100 years, the natural world cannot be stopped and declares its ongoing power in places such as this alley.

The 20 clay pieces at 300 Senate and Gist Streets (near the Congaree River) that make up "Blue Spheres" by Virginia Scotchie are linked to the brick and tile-making industry once located in the Vista and Columbia's location on the geological "fall line."

Exhibition curator is Jeffrey Day, who organized the 2011 Install It exhibition, is an arts writer whose work has been published internationally. He has recently written essays for the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta and Hampton III Gallery in Greenville. Follow the progress of Install It 2 on the official blog.

Pisgah Forest and Nonconnah:
The Potteries of Walter B. Stephen

May 26 – July 27, 2012
Second Floor

An innovative and talented artist, Walter B. Stephen was known for his cameo wares and crystalline glazes. Stephen's American Cameo pottery was inspired by early Americans, literature and ancient history, similar to Wedgewood's Jasperware. The exhibition highlights rare examples of Stephen's Work, from the first pots he fired near Nonconnah Creek in Tennessee to crystalline vessels produced near Asheville, North Carolina.

Please join us June 21 for a reception, gallery talk, and booksigning with author Rodney Leftwich, and June 22 for The Art of Collecting Southern Pottery: Curiosity and Inspiration symposium. See the calendar of events for times and locations.

Image credits: tall crystalline vase, two handled vase with Egyptian cameo motif and turquoise crackle glaze, turquoise tall vase with carved decoration (top, left to right); and Tennessee Nonconnah earthenware vase with matte glaze and slip decoration, 1905 (right).

Natural Curiosity: The University of South Carolina and the Evolution of Scientific Inquiry in the Natural World

Third Floor

Humans possess a fascination with the natural world around them. We always have. From the 32,000-year-old cave paintings of horses in France to the giraffe stickers today's children paste into their activity books, we can see that humans are eager to see, touch, collect, and understand nature.

Natural Curiosity explores this curiosity about nature by asking questions about why we collect natural specimens and artifacts, how we display them, and what they tell us about our relationship with and obligations to the natural world. Through an examination of approaches to building and maintaining the natural science collections at the University of South Carolina, this exhibition also offers a glimpse of the impressive array of specimens collected and displayed over the past 200 years for the purposes of education, research, and even entertainment.

Baruch Silver Collection

First Floor

In 1965, through the generosity of the estate of Bernard Mannes Baruch, the University of South Carolina received an extensive collection of 18th and early 19th century British silver. This collection, numbered in excess of 450 pieces, had been assembled in the early 20th century by Baruch's wife, Annie Griffen Baruch.