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The League of Extraordinary Artists

Richardson Family Art Museum, Wofford College, Spartanburg, SC
September 3, 2024 – December 13, 2024

Since its inception 150 years ago, the Art Students League of New York has been a leader in defining and nurturing American art. Many of the country’s brightest luminaries have been formed in its Manhattan halls, and it remains a prestigious proving-ground for artists. Eschewing formal degrees or a standardized curriculum, the Art Students League instead employs the classical atelier method, where instructors mentor and collaborate with students in small studio groups.

Artists with ties to the American South have been pivotal in building the brand, the reach, and the reputation of the Art Students League. For example, at a time when formal arts instruction was largely barred to artists of color in the South, North Carolina-born Charles Alston sought artistic freedom in New York, becoming a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance and the first African-American instructor at the League. Reciprocally, the imprimatur of the League helped propel the careers of many practitioners, who in turn established their own art institutes and academic departments across the American South. Edmund Yaghjian, for example, who was first a student and then an instructor at the League, eventually migrated to the South to become the longtime chair of the art department at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, bringing from New York the sensibilities of celebrating local vernacular to our region.

Spanning a period nearly as long as the life of the League itself, the twenty-five paintings featured here—selected from among the hundreds of League-related works in The Johnson Collection—celebrate the legacy of the Art Students League and the dynamic exchange it has historically facilitated between Northern and Southern art communities. This exhibition offers a cross-section of the diversity, longevity, and reach not only of the Art Students League but more broadly of the extraordinary impact of American art.

Featured Artists: Sigmund Abeles, Charles Alston, William Artis, Carroll Cloar, Josephine Couper, Sidney Dickinson, Lamar Dodd, Jeanet Dreskin, Gilbert Gaul, Anne Goldthwaite, Lorrie Goulet, Marie Hull, Rockwell Kent, Margaret Law, Blanche Lazzell, Norman Lewis, Blondelle Malone, Mabel Pugh, Haywood Rivers, Oli Sihvonen, Theodoros Stamos, Eugene Thomason, Helen Turner, Edmund Yaghjian, Rufus Zogbaum