Wednesday Night Live: Artist Tour with Marielle Plaisir

Important Update

Sadly, the curator/artist portion of Wednesday Night Live has been cancelled due to the death of Wim Roefs, however, artist Marielle Plaisir (South Arts 2021 Southern Prize & State Fellows winner) will lead a tour/talk on Wednesday evening. We encourage you to come out and particpate in this informative artist tour.

Roefs was the curator of the South Arts 2021 Southern Prize & State Fellows exhibition, owner of ART Gallery in Columbia, SC, and founding member of 701 Center for Contemporary Art. Click/tap here to learn more about one of the region’s most influential advocates of contemporary art.

The South Arts 2021 Southern Prize & State Fellows exhibition presents nine fellowship recipients from nine states in the South Arts region. This project meets a critical moment in which calls for more equality, equity and social justice are loud.

Marielle Plaisir is a French-Caribbean multi-media artist currently living in the United States. Plaisir's work examines the concept of social domination, and explores issues of colonialism alongside race and class, through a range of media which include painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, and performance to present intense visual experiences. She examines, in particular, the construction of identity, and she asks what constitutes our collective contemporary identity today through new reflexes and how people who were born in the struggle of domination and power behave. She underlines the common issues between U.S. Black history and Caribbean history: the labor movements, the fights for equality through literature, philosophy, and history.

Wim Roefs is an independent curator, author, art consultant, exhibition designer, and owner of if ART Gallery in Columbia, South Carolina. He is the former chair and a co-founder of Columbia's 701 Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) and was the organization's founding volunteer Executive Director from 2008 until February 2013. Roefs is the organizer, curator and catalogue editor for South Arts' annual Southern Prize & State Fellows exhibition. Roefs, a native of The Netherlands, was a member of the Art in Transit Advisory Committee (ATAC) of the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS), supervising the implementation of the light rail system's public art component. He has taught courses in contemporary art and African-American art at the University of South Carolina Art Department and Honors College.