After the gallery

The Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery opened at Coker University in Hartsville, South Carolina in 1978. For several decades it gave artists in and beyond the Pee Dee region a place to show contemporary work outside the usual commercial circuit.

The physical gallery has since closed. This site is not the university's current gallery office, and it does not speak for Coker University. It continues from the gallery's record: the exhibition notices, artist references, calls for work, and small pieces of public documentation that are still scattered across artists' sites and local arts pages.

The gallery showed painters, sculptors, printmakers, and installation artists at different points in their careers. It ran open calls, advertised nationally, and juried submissions with faculty and occasional outside critics. The work was selected, not simply routed in from the studio art department.

Artists like Kathleen Thum, Kim Henigman Bruce, Natan Diacon-Furtado, and Morgan Craig showed here. Some were early in their practices. Others brought larger or more difficult work to a room where the audience had no commercial stake in the outcome. That kind of room is easy to lose.

The publication here is a continuation, not a reopening. It keeps the name attached to writing about contemporary practice, regional exhibitions, artist applications, materials, and the parts of art life that do not always make it into larger magazines. The focus is still on work that does not fit neatly into the market's current categories: regional practices, long careers, difficult objects.

For current Coker University gallery information, contact the university directly. For this publication, correspondence can be directed to the editorial office.