By DENNIS QUICK
Senior Staff Writer

To help lure passersby into the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston is erecting “The Mask,” a 30 by 30-foot canvas at the museum’s Meeting Street entrance.

The canvas will serve as a screen for art projections and as a kiosk to announce museum events and programs. Begun more than a year ago, it will be unveiled in May, just in time for the Spoleto festival. However, the project has yet to be fully financed. “We need less than $10,000,” says Robert Miller, the Clemson Architecture Center’s director. All told, the project will cost about $47,500.

Miller implemented a program in which 30 local businesses donate $500 a piece to raise $15,000. The remaining amount needed to finish the project should be secured through this program. So far about $7,500 has been raised.

Businesses and individuals who donate money will be credited by having their names listed on a temporary sign outside the museum and in a gallery inside the museum explaining the story behind “The Mask.” The project has involved the efforts of more than 40 people, including students and professors from the American College of the Building Arts, Trident Technical College and the Clemson Architecture Center in Charleston, plus local architects and engineers.The project’s purpose is to make the Gibbes Museum more noticeable, Miller says.

“Some people can’t find the museum, and they walk past it without realizing it,” he notes.

So determined is Miller to raise the remaining funds that he will not comment on the project’s fate should fundraising efforts fall short.

“I’ll get the money,” he says.

Dennis Quick is senior staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dquick@crbj.com.

Making contact: To support the Gibbes project, call Robert Miller, director of Clemson
Architecture Center in Charleston at 723-1747, ext. 2, or e-mail him at miller@clemson.edu.

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