Myrtle Beach Summer Art Exhibits Celebrate Women

June 2020
Written By: 
Grand Strand Magazine Staff
Photographs by: 
courtesy oF the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum

Eli Corbin - 2019, acrylic collage on panel, 52’’ x 24’’

This year the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum’s exhibit schedule will celebrate women in honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote. The summer exhibit Voice Lessons is part of this commemoration and will feature works by four female artists, including the piece pictured here. Eli Corbin’s With Gratitude and Admiration RBG pays homage to the great Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who has become a contemporary icon for girl power. Corbin’s work incorporates pattern and symbolism, which she uses to evoke the power and strength women can find through connection with nature, spirituality, community and belief in self.

Voice Lessons, which will focus on issues women have dealt with for centuries, is a multi-media visual-arts narrative of women’s lives—the tenacity, strength and courage demonstrated by our mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. The exhibit will shift the dialogue toward empowerment and illustrate the multi-dimensional reality of womanhood, a reality that is sexual, intelligent, powerful and feminine with emotional range.

Voice Lessons encourages empathy, tolerance and compassion among women and men as it draws together all aspects of the female experience. In addition to Corbin’s work, the exhibit will also feature pieces by female artists Fran Gardner, Lisa Stroud and Beau Wild. Gardner combines oil painting with stitchery, a traditionally female art form, to spotlight voices of women in the slippery political and cultural landscape. Stroud tells stories of feminine empowerment on canvas. She uses “the little black dress” as her bantering and sometimes whimsical narrator. Wild utilizes the concept of masking to explore the degree to which women obscure or reveal themselves as they navigate the world. The Voice Lessons exhibit will be on display through September 13.