“People Reading 2017” returns as the visual preface to Deckle Edge Literary Festival (Feb. 24-26) with a month-long, multi-media art exhibition, beginning First Thursday at Michael’s Café and Catering, 1620 Main Street and lasting until March 1. 

Top tier local artists have contributed 2-D works in palette knife, oils and acrylic, watercolors and oil crayons; there are also lithographs and works rendered in graphite. Meg McLean, Carey Weathers and Judith Roberts, of Portfolio Gallery, each captured their daughters in the act of reading. Claire Farrell’s granddaughter is her subject for “Curled Up with a Good Book,” which was the award-winning piece of art the South Carolina Book Festival, 2015.

Barbara Yongue had a friend pose with a cherished book given by her late husband. Bonnie Goldberg used her signature gestural strokes to depict a female subject who always had a book in her hand. Khris Coolidge noted his mother writing down into a little book lyrics heard on a recording, then turning to the book to memorize the lyrics.

Printmaker and USC art professor emeritus Boyd Saunders pulled a Christmas card from his lithograph of a Victorian child sitting with a lapful of huge book. A former student of Saunders’, Cherie Holmes, pulled an image of a man reading the newspaper. That work is on loan from the USC Department of Visual Art and Design.

Rob Shaw used palette knife to dramatize a female subject reading in the light emitted by a huge window. Trahern Cook’s little boy reading is an illustration in “First, You Explore: The Story of the Young Charles Townes,” the 2015 book choice for the City of Columbia and Richland One’s “Together We Can Read” initiative. The late Reuben Gambrell depicted a sailor reading in the tight quarters allocated him on a WWII carrier. Pete Holland painted one of the wooden Little Free Library boxes seen around town. Holland also captured the State Library at night.

Following its February run at Michael’s Café and Catering, “People Reading” will move to the South Carolina State Museum for an extended exhibition, adding a visual component to the library’s spring programming, including Women’s History Month, March.