Pawprints everywhere

By Cindy Landrum  

SEPTEMBER 19, 2011 1:43 p.m. (0)

Artists with ties to Clemson University are making their marks on Greenville, from the iconic “Mice on Main,” nine rodent-sized statues that comprise one of city’s most popular public art projects, to the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

“Over the last 15 years, Greenville has transformed itself in terms of cultural identity,” said Denise Woodward-Detrich, director of Clemson’s Lee Gallery. “And in terms of the city’s art scene, Clemson alumni have made a big contribution.”

An event Friday night at the Wyche Pavilion beside the Reedy River downtown is designed to make Greenville residents aware of those contributions and to raise awareness for the Center for the Visual Arts at Clemson.

ArtReach will feature “The 3 Screen Gallery,” an interactive digital art exhibit in a gallery without walls, an exhibit at the Riverwalk Gallery that features painting, animated video and 3-D work by current and former Clemson art students and street artists.

In addition, an impersonator of Thomas Green Clemson, the founder of Clemson University and an artist himself, will make an appearance to symbolize the tradition of art at Clemson, said Joan Gaulden, who chairs the ArtReach committee. Clemson’s president, Jim Barker, an architect and a painter, will also be there.

Tickets to ArtReach are $25. The proceeds will go to support Clemson student artists.

Greenville artist Jeanet Dreskin earned the first masters of fine art degree awarded by Clemson in the 1970s.

Dreskin was teaching art classes for graduate credit at the Greenville County Museum’s School of Art when the University of South Carolina told her she couldn’t teach graduate classes without an MFA.

That was the push Dreskin, who had a graduate degree in medical illustration from Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, needed. She had wanted to go back to school to study painting.

The timing was perfect, both for her personally and for Clemson, which was starting an MFA program.

“It was a wonderful experience because I was working with my peers,” said Dreskin, who was awarded in 2004 the Elizabeth O’Neil Verner Lifetime Achievement Award in the Arts, the highest artistic recognition given by the state of South Carolina.

Dreskin has been a working artist in Greenville sine 1950.

“So many of the artists in Greenville have had training at Clemson either at the undergraduate or graduate level,” she said. “They have played a very significant part of the large growth of the arts in the Greenville area.”

Zan Wells has more than 30 commissioned sculptures around South Carolina, including those of two of Greenville’s historic figures – Joel Poinsett and Charles Townes – but she’s best known for the “Mice on Main.”

“Mice on Main” was a high school senior project by Jimmy Ryan, a student at Christ Church Episcopal School. He raised the money and commissioned Wells to create the mice and storybook of his favorite children’s book.

A bronze sculpture of the book and one mouse is mounted on the fountain in front of the Hyatt and the other eight mice are installed along the stretch of Main Street between the Hyatt and the Westin Poinsett hotels.

Among other Clemson art alumni are Joe Thompson, who chairs the visual arts department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, and Shane Howell, chairman of the art department at Greenville Tech. The former chair of that department, Blake Praytor, is also a Clemson graduate.

Many of the art teachers in Greenville County Schools have Clemson ties as well.

Woodward-Detrich said Clemson now has about 100 undergraduate art students and around a dozen enrolled in its MFA program.

Greenville’s growth has been key in keeping many of the graduates in the state, she said.

“In terms of an economic driver, it’s really been key,” Woodward-Detrich said. “The arts scene sets the emotion and flavor of a city.”

Dreskin said Clemson has had a big economic impact on Greenville.

“A lot of the art you see in Greenville is influenced by Clemson just simply because so many artists finished Clemson as graduates and undergraduates,” said Fleming Markel, gallery manager for Riverworks and Clemson MFA graduate.