On a previous trip -- three years previous in fall 2018 -- we had gone much further south to Murrells Inlet explore Brookgreen Gardens, an expansive outdoor sculpture garden and wildlife preserve, and were very much impressed. It is so expansive, in fact, that we needed two visits to see everything we wanted to (Your $18 admission ticket gives you access to seven consecutive days, thankfully, so going back was not a financial hardship).
The museum is compact; it is inside what appears to be a large transformed two-level home residence (see photo leading off the post). It is right at the point where Ocean Boulevard terminates by dovetailing into the more-heavily traveled U.S. 17, known locally as Kings Highway. Being near Ocean Boulevard, it is also a short walk from the beach, which Lee Ann and I would take advantage of after our visit (a future post will be devoted to this). Below is the visitor entrance, which is obscured from the highway by large shrubs and trees.
To view a full gallery of images from my visit to the museum, follow the link in this sentence.
We got there just a few days before artist Chellis Baird's "Tethered" exhibit was about to end and just a week and a half before the end of the Reynier Llanes "Where There Is No Frontier" exhibit. Llanes' works of oil, watercolor and coffee were displayed on the lower level and were from his most recent years of creativity. According to the museum's description of the exhibit, the works stem from Llanes' "fascination with the creation of parallel universes as we escape into our imaginative worlds, seeking respite and comfort from our eve-changing and sometimes daunting realities."
The 26-year-old Llanes emigrated to the United States from Cube in 2007 and settled first in Naples, Fla., before moving to Charleston, S.C., where he was an artist in residence at the Jonathan Green Studios. In 2015, he relocated to Miami, where he lives today. The Myrtle Beach art museum featured an exhibit of Llanes' espresso coffee works (coffee us used as paint) in 2013.
The 28-year-old Baird, who is from Spartanburg, S.C., but now resides in New York City, uses fabric, paints and woods to create tangled weavings, most of which are monochromatic. If the works on exhibit at the Myrtle Beach museum are an accurate indication, Baird favors whites, beiges and blues.
According to the museum's introduction of Baird's exhibit, "Tethered beckons viewers to explore their winding and intrinsically meditative compositions." It says Baird "hopes viewers will immerse themselves in the facility of the human hand and spirit, with enough space to fill in and release their own emotions."
I enjoyed both exhibits, but was a bit challenged -- while editing my photos in post-processing -- by the tungsten lighting used in the exhibit rooms. It was difficult to remember exactly the true colors in each art work, so I might not be representing them accurate in the photos shown in this post.
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