2023 FEATURED ARTIST - Lisa Rivers
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Every artist was once an amateur.” Beaufort-based artist Lisa Gilyard-Rivers seems to defy this sentiment. When art enthusiasts gaze upon her paintings, stroked with emotions of love and pain, stories of yesterday and today.
Although my career as an artist did not begin until the age of 52. And her career as an artist began.
Lisa’s work centers on the legacy of Gullah culture, past and present. Her art mediums include abstract, oil, and multimedia. Spectators and patrons often say that the vibrant colors that shine boldly off each canvas are what catches their attention and spark their connection to her pieces. Lisa paints with love and paints most of her Masterpieces at her home on her porch. The stories are created in her paint strokes and in each finished piece.
She owns Legacy Art Gallery at 917 Bay Street in Beaufort, SC. It is the only black and woman-owned Gullah art gallery in the area.
Her work has been featured throughout the area, including:
– Paisley Magazine – Cover Artist
– Hilton Head Art League – Upcoming Featured Artist
– Lowcountry Weekly News Magazine – Cover Artist
– Pink Magazine – Low Country Favorite Woman
– Local Life Magazine – Featured Gullah Artist, Crab Art Series
– Beaufort Art Council Exhibit – Exhibiting Artist
– Arts Ob We People Exhibit – Exhibiting Artist
– Pursuit of Opportunity and Freedom: The Reconstruction Era Art Program – Featured Artist on Permanent Display
– Black Madonna Exhibit
– Moja Festival – Exhibit Artist
2022 FEATURED ARTIST - Amiri Gueka Farris
Amiri Geuka Farris is a contemporary, multidisciplinary artist who uses a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, video, performance, and installation. As a contemporary African-American male artist, he blurs the boundaries between abstraction and representation, sculpture and printmaking, and contemporary and traditional. Farris writes of his own artistic practice, “I like to see artwork that will take one medium and use it to do something else. Artwork that is bold, expressive, and completely different.” In addition to being inspired by the materials around him to create dynamic and colorful pieces, Farris also looks to his own life as he creates works that are full of intimate personal experiences and examinations of subjects that are compelling to him, including issues surrounding diaspora, Gullah Geechee culture, memory, and perception.
Artist Biography
Amiri Geuka Farris is a contemporary, multidisciplinary artist whose wide range of work encompasses painting, drawing, video, performance and installation. Farris received his MFA in painting, with his BFA in illustration and graphic design, from the Savannah College of Art and Design. Farris’ academic appointments include Professor of Fine Arts Foundations and Graphic Design at Georgia Southern University, at the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art and Professor of Fine Arts, at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort. Farris’ work has been featured in more than 50 solo exhibitions and juried museum exhibitions across the country, including the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. and the Smithsonian.