By Dennis Quick
Senior Staff Writer

In an art class at North Charleston’s R.B. Stall High School, juniors Quentin Chaplin and Jacqueline Liggins are hard at work on their paintings.

Chaplin carefully applies some blue to his canvas while Liggins touches up a colorful close-up portrait. Both students aspire to become professional artists some day, and the Charleston Fine Art Dealers’ Association is helping them.

The association, which includes 14 galleries, will hold its Eighth Fine Art Annual, a visual arts exhibition, on Nov. 3–5 in the association’s member galleries and in Charleston’s Washington Park. Among the event’s highlights are a gala and silent auction at the Harbour Club. Tickets cost $70 per person, $125 per couple, and the proceeds, including money raised from the auction, will go toward funding existing art programs in Charleston County High Schools.

In the past two years, the association has raised close to $60,000 for the schools, according to Joe Sylvan, the association’s president and the owner of Sylvan Galleries on King Street.

In addition to helping local art students achieve their career dreams, the funding helps the Lowcountry build its creative arts cluster, one of five industry clusters the Angelou Report recommended for the Lowcountry to develop, Sylvan said.

The report also recommends that the region develop bioscience, aerospace, automotive and advanced security clusters.

South Carolina’s Education and Economic Development Act, which requires high school students to choose academic courses in at least one of 16 careers tracks and which must be fully implemented statewide by July 1, 2011, lists “arts, audio-visual technology and communications” as one of its recommended career clusters. 

Thanks to the association’s fundraising efforts, Chaplin and Liggins are working with better art supplies. They say the higher-quality paints, papers and brushes are a far cry from what they had to use previously, and the supplies inspire them to do better work.

Before receiving the association’s financial aid, Stall’s art supply budget was limited to $500 a year, and some of that came out of the pocket of the school’s lone art teacher, Dayton Colie. Of the high school’s more than 900 students, about 150 are taking art classes, Colie added.

Colie now uses a $3,000 gift card from the association to purchase supplies for his students.

“Before, our supplies were minimal and very basic,” Colie said, adding that the items at his disposal—tempera paints, crayons, cheap watercolor and drawing papers, Elmer’s glue, papier-mâché—were more suited for an elementary school art class than for a high school.

With the association’s gift card, Colie now can afford to buy acrylics, oil paints, canvas, better papers and other items that help raise the quality of his students’ work and their appreciation for art, he said.

Stall is one of nine area high schools whose art programs are supported by the Charleston Fine Art Dealers’ Association.

Exposing students to art and helping them produce it is a worthy cause, Sylvan said. “It helps create the whole person.”

Asked if South Carolina high school students receive enough exposure to the arts and if high school art programs receive enough fiscal support, Laura McFadden, president of the 600-member S.C. Art Education Association, answered both questions bluntly: “No.”

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

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