The Sumter County Gallery of Art is excited and honored to present new work by Leo Twiggs including a large-scale 3-D installation, and new works from two of his most recent series. Twiggs has a tendency to work in series. The works submitted here are beginnings and endings of a couple of them. “Targeted Man”, which comprises much of the Sumter show, explores the times in which we live. Terrorism has changed how we view each other and blurred the line between the hunter and the hunted.

Leo Twiggs was born in St Stephen, S.C. He received his BA, Summa Cum Laude, from Claflin University, later studied at the Arts Institute of Chicago and earned his MA from New York University. He was the first African American to receive a Doctorate in Art Education from the University of Georgia.
As Professor of Art at South Carolina State University, he developed the I.P. Stanback Museum and established the University’s first Art Department. He was Director of the Museum and Chair of the Art Department until he retired in 1998. Twiggs was named Professor Emeritus in 2000.

Twiggs creates art using the ancient process of Batik. Twiggs’ paintings are the result of several years of experimentation and development of a unique and innovative technique using a traditional medium. Though the process is old, Twiggs’ subject matter is contemporary and challenging, ranging from historico-political themes, including his infamous Confederate flags, to the spiritual. Twiggs states: After almost 40 years of experimenting, developing and using wax and dyes as a painting medium, I still find the process fascinating. I feel that I have come to the place in my career where I am not just experimenting with a medium I developed, but an instrument that has become a part of my thought processes. The medium is as much a part of my message as the message itself. It is an exciting place to be in my life as an artist.

Leo Twiggs has had over 75 one-man shows and his work has received national and international recognition, with exhibits at the Studio Museum and the American Crafts Museum in New York, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, Cornell University and in U. S. Embassies in Rome, Dakar and Togoland, and Sierra Leone. In 2001 the Georgia Museum of Art organized a major retrospective of his work, which toured the Southeast.

Twiggs has won numerous awards and national recognition. His work has been widely published in art textbooks and featured in several television documentaries. Notably, he was the first visual artist to receive the Verner Award (Governor’s Trophy) for outstanding contributions to the arts in South Carolina. In 2001 and 2008, he was selected to design an ornament for the White House Christmas tree. Twiggs received the Medal of Honor in the Arts from Winthrop University in 2004 and the Leadership Award from the Governors School Foundation in 2007.

Presently, Twiggs is Distinguished Artist-in Residence at Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C.

Twiggs’s artist’s statement: Every artist must create out of his own being, out of his own encounter with the world. I was born in the South, and the things I remember, the scents the atmosphere, all act to shape the imagery I use in my paintings. Often people ask why I chose batik rather than more traditional techniques. I saw the web-like patterns and mottled surface as expressive of an aging process, the struggle to survive- not just the world but time itself. All of my works have deep roots in my experiences growing up in the South but my intent, as always, is to explore the human condition. It is this exploration, I believe, that makes art endearing and enduring