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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 27, 2011 MEDIA CONTACT Bonnie Hargrove, Director 843.521-4145; bhargrov@uscb.edu

USCB Center for the Arts hosts local artists’ works in Abstracts, Mixed Media, and Portriature

The University of South Carolina Beaufort Center for the Arts invites you to come in out of the heat and enjoy four incredible local artists’ works this summer. Artists Susan Graber, Cabell Heyward, Mary Jane Martin, and Joan Templer offer a wide variety of styles incorporating abstract, mixed media and portraiture with diverse color palettes, textures, and subject matter.

Susan Grabner is best known for her portraits of some of Beaufort’s leading citizens and fellow artists.

Cabell Heyward combines his degrees in industrial design and fine arts to create distinctive works of art.

Mary Jane Martin visualizes her subjects in several series of paintings depicting experiences and experimentation. Joan Templar is an internationally acclaimed artist with works ranging from paint to mixed media to graphite and photography. In her retirement she has returned to her large, textured abstracts inspired by her earlier experiences.

The Center for the Arts is located on USCB historic campus at 801 Carteret Street in Beaufort. The show is free and open to the public Monday through Friday 9 AM – 5 PM throughout the month of July.

Artist Bios: Susan Graber grew up in southern Connecticut, met her husband, Scott, while at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and then moved to Beaufort almost immediately after marriage. She spent her early days in Beaufort teaching school on St. Helena Island, and then spent the next two decades working as a real estate paralegal in her husband’s office. Early 1990’s, Graber left her job as a paralegal to devote herself full-time to painting.

Cabell Heyward came to Beaufort in 1998. He earned an undergraduate degree in industrial design from Georgia Tech in 1983 and a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of Georgia in 1997. He held exhibits for the Atlanta Biennial at the Nexus Contemporary Art Center in 1997; the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Ga., in 1998; the Peninsula Fine Art Center in Newport News, Va., in 2002; and at the Circular Congregational Church in Charleston in 2003. Here in Beaufort, he has exhibited at the Charles Street Gallery in 2001 and 2002 and taught classes at the Shed. A versatile artist, Heyward began as a painter and has also emerged as a creator.

Mary Jane Martin is developing her own style by trying new and different techniques using water media.

She loves to see and experiment with “what if” in creating her work. Currently, she is working on three series, one paying tribute the many birds that frequent the marshes and is also influenced by the recent oil spill in the gulf. The second series came from happy daydreams of red flowers. A third series is very nonobjective. One can see forms reminiscent of realistic images that seem to emerge from the background to give one pause, to observe and then look more closely. This series focuses on the study of color, texture and shape.

Joan Templar draws from her subconscious mind for subject matter when painting her abstracts. She does not set out to paint anything specific. As the painting develops, she gets a clearer picture of the context. Then she will enhance it together with her concentration on the esthetics of what she is doing. The influence in her work comes from natural phenomena, and from her life experiences in Africa and America.

ABOUT USCB Located in the heart of the Carolina Sea Islands, the University of South Carolina Beaufort (USCB) is a senior institution of the University of South Carolina system serving the southeast coast of Georgia and South Carolina. USCB has been the fastest growing baccalaureate institution in the USC system since becoming a four year university in 2002.The university has two campuses which serve a diverse student body of more than 1750 students. The Historic Beaufort campus, located on Beaufort’s downtown waterfront, houses an innovative baccalaureate studio arts program in close proximity to Beaufort’s many art galleries. The Hilton Head Gateway campus in Bluffton, S.C., offers cutting-edge Computational Science and Nursing laboratories and is the home to Sand Shark athletics. USCB offers students an exceptional place to learn and live in an environment focused on growth, preservation and opportunity. For more information about the University of South Carolina Beaufort, please visit www.uscb.edu online or call the university’s Office of Public Information at 843-208-8030.