Elizabeth White Collection &
Selections from the Permanent Collection
Elizabeth White exhibition
Large collection of late Sumter artist’s works anchors next gallery show
By Ivy Moore
Item Features Editor (Original Article)
The Sumter County Gallery of Art has been building its permanent collection for some time now, and the cornerstone of that collection, works by Sumter artist will go on exhibit June 5. It’s the first time in more than 15 years that an exhibition of this size of White’s work has been seen at one time, and the first time at the new gallery in the Sumter County Cultural Center.
Gallery director Karen Watson said more 46 of White’s etchings, paintings and prints will be on display, along with many other artworks in the permanent collection.
“We probably own about 75 to 80 works, but many of them are rough sketches or not ‘exhibitable,’” Watson said.
The White exhibit will fill the Ackerman Gallery and the Williams-Brice-Edwards Gallery, while works by other artists in the collection can be seen in the Levi Gallery.
White worked in many media, which will be reflected in the show.
“Only three are reproductions,” Watson said. “They are photo-lithographs, but that’s OK. They’re scenes of Swan Lake or the church at Stateburg, so they are important to include.”
She is excited about some of the other works she and show curator Mark Mcleod found, too.
“We went through some of the work that had not been framed or restored, and we are framing-slash-restoring 11 new pieces that people have not seen before. They include watercolor, some oils, portraits, a nude.”
Watson noted that, although “White rarely worked big, ‘The Edge of Sumter’, which a lot of people are familiar with, is probably the biggest piece” at a little less than 3-by-4 feet.
In her research into White’s life and career for the Sherman Smith lecture to the Sumter County Historical Society, Watson said, “I learned a lot about her from archival materials, including newspaper reviews. (One critic in 1987) wrote that ‘Miss White’s life as an artist was long and prolific, but it was not much of a career.’”
The artist was a wealthy woman, Watson said, “so she didn’t have to depend on her art to make a living. She signed, dated and titled very few of her works. In terms of posterity, that’s very unfortunate.”
White’s career flourished during the 1930s, however. In South Carolina and Sumter, in particular, there is more known about her life than about her work, Watson said.
The daughter of prominent Sumterites William and Elizabeth Howard White, the artist was born in 1893. She spent most of her life in the family house on Main Street, where she converted the old free-standing kitchen into a studio.
White received a certificate of art at the College of Women in Columbia and, after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, returned to Sumter to teach in the public schools and later at the University of South Carolina.
A trip to Europe in 1927 provided fresh inspiration and a practical outlet for her creativity, and she began producing postcards depicting Southern landscapes and architecture. These postcard etchings led to an invitation to study for several summers in the 1930s at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H., where she worked with the writers Willa Cather and Thornton Wilder. Here she cultivated her talents and created such works as Birches and Pines, now housed in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Primarily known today for her etchings, White also worked in pastels and watercolors.
During a brief stay at Laurelton Hill, the Tiffany Foundation’s artist colony in Oyster Bay, Long Island, White produced Rhododendrons in Tiffany Vase. This oil was judged best flower painting in the Southern States Art League show in Houston in 1932.
White continued to grow as an etcher. She studied with Alfred Hutty of Charleston and Frank Nankivell of New York, and learned softground technique and worked in drypoint. These studies brought her into a movement known as Regionalism. The realist modern American art movement was popular during the 1930s. The artists of this school disdained city life with its tecnological advances, concentrating instead on rural life. At its height from 1930-1935, some of Regionalism’s best known practitioners were Grant Wood of Iowa, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and John Steuart Curry of Kansas. As its period was roughly equivalent to the years of Great Depression, the work became very popular because its idyllic images were so reassuring of the American way of life.
In 1939, White was honored with a solo showing of her etchings at the Smithsonian Division of Graphic Arts in Washington D. C. That same year, her work was included in the New York World’s Fair Exhibition of Contemporary Art.
Watson noted that “All God’s Chillun Got Wings,” which is “arguably one of her finest works, was one of five pieces selected from South Carolina for the fair’s exhibition of contemporary art. In 1940 that piece went to the Venice Biennale, but the Nazis ransacked the American pavilion, and that piece was destroyed. It was an etching, though, and I understand the original is in a private collection in Sumter. We have an etching that we will display.”
She is most impressed with White’s independence, Watson said.
“She never married, she never had to answer to anybody, and in the ‘20s and ‘30s, women artists had very little support from family or spouses to follow an education in the arts or to attain a higher degree,” she said. “She was one of only a handful of women artists that knew the art of etching. That really impressed me. Etching is dirty sort of way to produce art. She was very expert in all forms of etching, and we will see that in this exhibition.”
Sumter resident Jim Eaves has fond memories of his family friend. At the time of the last exhibition of White’s work in 1993, he said, “When I came to Sumter in 1959, she made her presence known to me. She would have me over for tea. And she loved my wife and children. They would eventually come to think of her as a grandmother and would regularly spend the night with her.
“She was just a wonderful person,’ he continued. “Intellectually brilliant, well-educated, well-read and well-known nationally and internationally.”
After her death in 1976, White’s home became the Sumter Gallery of Art for 25 years, regularly exhibiting local and national artists and offering art classes for children and adults. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Today, it’s a private residence, having been sold when the county built the new Sumter County Gallery of Art in the Sumter County Cultural Center in 2003.
“We have in the last three years made the modest step forward to be a collecting institution,” Watson said. “We’ve got the Elizabeth White works, but to really be a museum of distinction, you have to be a collecting institution.
“This provides the community a place to go and study works by local, regional, even national artists. We have had two scholars come in in the past three months to study our Elizabeth White collection.”
Other artists whose works have been collected include Ray Davenport, Deane Ackerman, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, Susan Harbage Page, Juan Logan, Jonathan Green, Ronald Gonzalez, Janet Orselli, Walter Thompson, Tarleton Blackwell, William Lester Stevens, Corrie McCollum and others. Both two- and three-dimensional works comprise the collection.
The Elizabeth White Collection and Selections from the Permanent Collection can be seen at the Sumter County Gallery of Art on June 5-July 19, beginning with an opening reception on Thursday, June 5. Admission is free.
For more information call the gallery at (803) 775-0543.