Mary Hinson Flower Show on view April 19, Brian Rutenberg art exhibit through June 13 at art gallery

Sumter County Gallery of Art, the Deane and Roger Ackerman Family Fund and the Council of Garden Clubs of Sumter present "Horizons" - Sumter's exhibition and flower show, featuring the mysterious and color-saturated Lowcountry scenes of artist Brian Rutenberg. The Mary Hhibition will run through June 13.

Brian Rutenberg, a Myrtle Beach native, is widely considered to be one of the finest American painters of his generation. Rutenberg has spent 40 years honing a distinctive method of compressing the rich color and form of his native coastal South Carolina into complex landscape paintings that imbue material reality with a deep sense of place. Rutenberg says especially inspiring is that point when the land meets the water and for a moment the two become blurred - the horizon. Rutenberg's paintings seethe with the familiar yet foreign components of the Lowcountry - moist, heavy air, nightcrawlers, pluff mud, ancient trees and the ever-changing South Carolina coast.

Rutenberg received his BFA in 1987 from the College of Charleston and his MFA in 1989 from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a Fulbright Scholar, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, an Irish Museum of Modern Art visiting artist program participant and has had more than 100 museum and gallery exhibitions across the U.S. and abroad. Rutenberg's paintings are included in such museum collections as Yale University Art Gallery, The Butler Institute of American Art, Bronx Museum of Art, Peabody Essex Museum of Art, Greenville County Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Museum, Gibbes Museum, Morris Museum, South Carolina State Museum and many others.

Sumter County Gallery of Art Director Karen Watson notes that the Horizons team searched for just the right artist to provide the "creative canvas" for the floral designers to respond to. She believes that the Sumter audience, with their reverence for the South Carolina coast, will gravitate to Rutenberg's work. For the second year in a row, the Sumter gallery worked closely with Jerald Melberg Gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina - one of the premiere galleries in the Southeast - to bring the art of Rutenberg to Sumter. According to Watson, Jerald and Mary Melberg and their team were a dream to work with.

The Levi-Barnett gallery will be the site of the Horticulture Division of the Horizons Flower Show and the exhibition "Family Affair, Dr. David and Linda Brown and Lindsay Brown-Dix." The Brown family are all excellent artists working in different mediums. Linda works in oils, David works in watercolor, and Lindsay, their daughter, works in ceramics. The Browns are very involved in the Sumter arts community and are longtime supporters of the gallery. Linda and David's work is seen regularly in the annual Sumter Artists' Guild Show, and Lindsay's installation "Alchemy" was juried into the 2024 ArtFields competition.

Rutenberg will give an artist talk/presentation and book signing of "Clear Seeing Place" on Thursday, May 8, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served.

This special exhibition would not be possible without the significant support of the Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, North Carolina, the Council of Garden Clubs of Sumter and our community sponsors - first and foremost, The Deane and Roger Ackerman Family Fund, Thompson Turner Construction Group, Smith Robinson Law, Carolina Concierge Care, Jones Chevrolet and Patricia & Michael Fernandez.