To help artists affected by the coronavirus pandemic, 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C., will offer several paid residencies of four to six weeks. Artists will be invited to shelter in place at CCA’s live-work loft apartment and create art.

The center’s first Covid-19 resident is Greenville, S.C., painter and sculptor Kymberly Day.  Day started her residency on April 25 and will work at CCA through May 20, 2020. Day will be holding a social media takeover of CCA accounts from May 6 to May 13. She will show how she creates her work, so followers can gain an understanding of her process. The public can follow 701 CCA on Instagram, Facebook, and/or Twitter to view this takeover.

“I make realist narrative figure paintings set in dreamlike Western vistas,” Day said. “Saturated cloudscapes and tropes of the Old West become littered with absurdly displaced objects like takeout food . . . I hope for the paintings to compare the rugged individualism associated with the American cowboy or frontiersman to the solitary nature of spiritual exploration.”

Day’s painting process includes the development of a digital photo collage as reference, from which she creates a black-and-white underpainting. The richness and depth of her painting comes from the translucent layers of color placed on top of the original black and white values, building saturation layer by layer.

“As an organization, we have been looking for ways in which we could directly help artists — at least a few artists,” CCA executive Director Allison Cicero Moore said. “Because we already had to cancel our summer youth workshops due to the coronavirus pandemic, our artist-in-residence space became available for the summer months. We decided to invite artists and provide them with resources including a workspace and a stipend.”

Day was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1991 and grew up in Georgia and the Carolinas. She received her BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and an MFA from Clemson University with a concentration in sculpture. Day twice won the portrait contest at the annual ArtFields event in Lake City, S.C. Recently, she completed a winter residency at The Bascom: A Center for Visual Arts in Highlands, N.C., and taught drawing and painting at Clemson and Lander Universities. Day recently moved to Atlanta, Ga., but temporarily lost her studio when the studio complex,  MINT Artist Studios, was closed as a precaution during the current coronavirus crisis.

“We are excited to welcome Kym as our first resident in this particular program,” Moore said. “She is among the outstanding young talents to emerge in South Carolina in the past few years, and she found herself suddenly without a studio space and with several cancelled art festivals where she could have sold her work. Like many other professional artists, she lost her workspace and faces lost income because of the pandemic. Without a place to make their work, and with fewer venues available to sell their work, many artists are looking toward an increasingly challenging future. ”

Residency: April  25-May 20

701 Center for Contemporary Art

701 Whaley St., 2nd Floor, Columbia, SC 29201

For more information, Contact:

Allison Cicero Moore, Executive Director

(803) 319-9949 | director@701cca.org

www.701cca.org