18.75″ x 16″ framed, 13.75″ x 11″ unframed, oil pastel on paper $5300 c. Jan 1991
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BRYCE SPEED BIOGRAPHY
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1978, Bryce Speed completed his B.F.A. in painting and drawing from the University of Mississippi in 1999 and continued his studies to eventually receive his M.F.A. in painting from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2005. After finishing his education Speed completed a six-week artist in residency program at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska. From then on Speed’s work has been included in numerous exhibitions over the past decade.
In 2006 and 2011 his work was selected for publication in New American Paintings Southeastern and Western editions. In 2014, he was part of a three-person exhibition at HERE Art Center in New York, NY, titled Suburbia: Is Anyone There? In 2015-16 he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition in Edinburgh, Scotland and at the Visual Art Exchange’s Contemporary South Exhibition in Raleigh, NC. In 2017, he held a solo exhibition at the North Wall Arts Center in Oxford, UK. In 2022 his work was curated into the exhibition A Plot, Hatched by Two at the Warbling Collective in London and his work was curated in to Art of the South 2022 at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville. He is currently represented by The George Gallery, Charleston SC and Charlotte NC, and the Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, LA.
Speed resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he has been an Associate Professor of Art in Painting at the University of Alabama since 2014. The Mississippi native previously taught at University of Nebraska at Omaha and Central Community College in Columbus, Nebraska.
Bryce Speed is a multi-medium painter whose work focuses on speaking the unspoken language of visual art through his abstract images. In a recent statement Speed said, “I create paintings that are simultaneously both abstract and representational. These works are occupied with a larger idea of structure and parts, creating an image of containment and movement. Each piece uses a personal pictogram language that is steeped in the intersectionality of nostalgia, identity, and early twentieth century abstraction. Through this visual language, I seek to classify and organize the memories and experiences that pervade the everyday.”
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WILLIAM HALSEY BIOGRAPHY
William Halsey (1915-1999) broke away from the conventions of most local painters to become a pioneer of modern art in the South. As a boy growing up during the heyday of the Charleston’s early twentieth century artistic renaissance, Halsey’s first art lessons were with one of that movement’s leaders, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner. Following two years at the University of South Carolina, Halsey pursued further artistic training at the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. There, he studied traditional line drawing with Alexander Iacovleff and color theory with Karl Zerbe. In 1939, Halsey was awarded the institution’s highest honor, the James William Paige Fellowship, for study abroad. Originally scheduled to travel to Europe with his new wife, fellow artist Corrie McCallum, the onset of World War II necessitated a change of plans. The couple set sail for Mexico instead, an experience that ignited a lifelong passion for travel. In Mexico City, Halsey absorbed the culture, color, and texture of the country. Halsey returned to the American South in 1941 and settled permanently in Charleston in 1945, convinced he “could be vastly more useful in [his] native state than any place else.” He touched countless students as a teacher at the Gibbes Art Gallery, the Charleston School of Art, and as the founder of the Studio Art Department at the College of Charleston. During his more than forty years as an educator and mentor, he was also represented by a gallery in New York City and exhibited his increasingly Abstract Expressionist paintings, collages, and sculpture throughout the country. Although Halsey departed from “the prevailing influence of the Old Charleston picturesque,” he credited his hometown as a source of inspiration: the decaying stucco buildings literally showed up in his work. He painted “furiously” on canvases built up with gesso, sand, marble dust, found objects, and fabric. Though he prized color above all else, he also appreciated the physical act of painting and often laid a picture flat on the ground in order to free his movements. During his lifetime, Halsey’s works were included in exhibitions at such noted institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, and National Academy of Design. He is represented in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the High Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibbes Museum of Art, and Greenville County Museum of Art.
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