Sweet Home Spartanburg

What makes a home? More than space and materials, “home” evokes connection above all—connection to loved ones, connection to place, connection through time. While a house, apartment, town, or landscape might host us briefly, or even for many years, its elevation to the status of a home depends on a perception that is deeply personal. Connection can be difficult to measure or specify.

This exhibition explores the interweaving concepts of home and hometown and questions what traits and limits define their scope. If a location other than one’s birthplace can become a hometown, how late in life can that perception change? Can memories of a temporary residency strengthen a sense of home in hindsight? What echoes of home resound in the long-ago home of a loved one? What familiar qualities of home are most critical during times of great change?

Several artists included here have a lasting local influence and share Spartanburg as a hometown. In other works, we find themes that resonate with Spartanburg’s history and landscape, such as Wenonah Bell’s Peach Packing, Spartanburg County, and Elaine Wagner’s depiction of Spartan Grain, formerly a feature of downtown’s west end. But while these externalities characterize our hometown, the qualities that speak most to “home” are found across a wider range of works, reflecting traits that might be more universally understood. We recognize home in Robert Lawrence’s backyard bird feeder and in the craft traditions of wreath-making. Something of home comes through in Claude Howell’s depiction of textiles on a clothesline and William Halsey’s Third Floor Light.

Spartanburg is experiencing its largest growth in a century, and much of it is in the midst of transformation. For both longtime residents witnessing a changing skyline and for the over two dozen transplants who move to Spartanburg per day, home is in a state of flux. Buildings and familiar scenes, heirlooms and memories, people and community: all weave together in the fabric of how we experience home and our hometown.

Guest Curated by: Abigail Hoffman of IntheBurg and Brad Steinecke, Spartanburg Historian