Success Of ArtFields Spawns Fall Counterpart Exhibition In Lake City, South Carolina

Spaghetti on a wall.

That’s how Darla Moore describes the process by which she and a small group of Lake City, South Carolina residents landed on a contemporary art festival as a solution to help resuscitate their collapsed small town. Someone among the housewives, pharmacists and business owners assembled had heard about ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI and suggested the same in Lake City.

It was worth a try. Almost anything was worth a try. If it failed, they’d move on. Other ideas had failed before.

Moore was born in Lake City in 1954. Her family had been there for generations.

“I couldn’t wait to get out,” she told Forbes.com.

She wasn’t the only one.

In a story repeated endlessly across an urbanizing nation in the latter half of the 20^th century, the best and the brightest left small towns for greater opportunities in big cities. Few were better or brighter than Moore.

She eventually landed in New York, entering the banking and finance sectors. There, she became a billionaire.

She was the first woman to appear on the cover of “Fortune” magazine in 1997 with the publication calling her “The Toughest Babe in Business.” In 2012, she, along with former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, were the first women members admitted to Augusta National Golf Club, home of The Masters tournament.

Moore had little to do with her hometown during her rise to becoming one of the most powerful businesswomen in the world–one of the most powerful businesspeople, period. In the 2000s, little Lake City, population 7,000, started calling her back.

Her father took ill. So did her husband, Richard Rainwater, a leading investment manager.

She’d “done” New York.

Moore found herself in Lake City more frequently and what she found there was startling.

“During the decades I was in New York, the town, like all other small towns in America, and particularly the agrarian towns, their economies collapsed,” Moore explained. “The agriculture, and particularly in this region, which was major tobacco, this whole eastern part of South Carolina and North Carolina, it was dominated by tobacco, and over time, cultural, economic, social–all reasons–it collapsed. It was not an overnight thing. It was decades of decline, decline, decline.”

Lake City had done fine surviving off produce in earlier eras. When growing stuff you could eat was replaced by growing stuff you could smoke, it thrived like never before, but when that market went belly up, so did the town.

This was the scene the most powerful woman in business found when she returned to Lake City. The pits.

“Coming down and seeing what had happened, I said, ‘good heavens, somebody’s got to do something,’” Moore recalls.

She would be the somebody.

The first something she tried was policy. She looked at South Carolina as a whole. Lake City wasn’t the only place struggling. What could be done at a macro level–tax reform, reform of government agencies, education reform, pension reform.

She established the Palmetto Institute public policy think tank with the purpose of raising the state’s per capita income.

“Over time, it became evident that was not going to get a lot of return,” Moore admits. “We did a lot of good things, but I said, ‘I think I want to do this on an applied level, take the policy to the ground,’ and the town had continued to collapse.”

Spaghetti on a Wall

“How does none sound?”

That’s Moore’s response to a question about her interest in the arts prior to helping spearhead and fund ArtFields, the annual contemporary art fair Lake City has held since 2013, an event credited for turning around the town’s fortunes.

Despite decades spent in New York with all its museums and theaters and concerts, the admitted policy wonk’s engagement with the arts amounted to piano lessons as a kid.

Still, she was never skeptical of the potential for arts sparking Lake City’s turnaround. Heck, if it didn’t work, they’d just try something else.

“I bought in and said, ‘we’re gonna’ do it, we’re gonna’ try it, we’ll do the best we can, we’ll pull in as many people as we can.’ My thing was, we’ve got to do something, and if we’re going to try this, we’ll go whole hog on it,” Moore remembers with a thick Southern accent. “None of us knew anything–most notably me–about anything like (organizing an art festival), but we went at it, and I mean to tell you, the first year we were highlighted as the most interesting thing to do in South Carolina.”

ArtFields’ instantaneous success signaled Lake City was onto something. Hindsight has allowed Moore to understand why it worked there.

The businesswoman who excelled at financing companies going through bankruptcy realized the same principles applied to her hometown.

“When you look at these things, you do have to step back and say, ‘what are the assets?’ What can you build off? What was valuable,” Moore said. “(Lake City) had a couple things. One, we had cute architecture that was never torn down because we were too poor to do anything about it. It was spit and taped together from around the 1920s. It was falling down, but we were cute. Number two, we had access, you can get here from there. We got three big highways and we’ve got interstates close.”

Lake City sits about halfway between the state’s capital of Columbia and Myrtle Beach.

Moore also credits Lake City’s strong banking system for support, but the key asset was the town’s people.

“You could never do what we did in a bombed-out textiles town,” Moore said. “In this region, people own their land, they produced their commodities, and we made a market. So, you’ve got a character of people, black and white, that are entrepreneurial in their nature.”

Citing a huge manufacturing plant in Lake City to rescue the town, as has been done elsewhere in South Carolina, wasn’t going to work there. Lake City needed a project it could take ownership of, not just become someone else’s employees.

ArtFields offered that opportunity, the annual competition transforming the town into a multi-sited gallery with local businesses displaying hundreds of artworks and artists competing for a $100,000 grand prize.

The event has been so successful, for 2023, it’s spawned a fall counterpart, a city-wide exhibition mounting the works of 42 artists from across the South in what will be one of the largest public displays of contemporary Southern art to date.

“Southern Voices/Global Visions”

“Southern Voices/Global Visions,” on view from September 23 through December 3, 2023, features more than 100 works, including sculpture, photography, collage, printed work and more.

In an inaugural partnership, ArtFields joins forces with South Arts to celebrate recent winners of their two regional award programs for artists, ArtFields’ annual visual arts competition, and South Arts’ Southern Prize and State Fellowships for Visual Arts.

South Arts’ mission is advancing Southern vitality through the arts. The nonprofit was founded in 1975 to build on the South’s unique heritage and enhance the public value of the arts.

Which raises an interesting question: did Lake City value the arts prior to ArtFields?

“Absolutely not,” Moore said. “Nobody did visual arts down here. We were too poor to buy paints and all the equipment, canvases and all that stuff. The South, we are performing people, if you got a bucket and a spoon, you can make music.”

Jazz, blues, country, bluegrass, gospel, and rhythm and blues all trace their origins to the southern United States. Not so the successful visual arts movements birthed in this country: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism.

“Visual arts were not part of the culture down here, so that was a challenge,” Moore said.

Doubly so that it was contemporary art.

“The expectation of the people when you’re going to have an art festival, art down here was a wood duck and a lab,” Moore said, referencing South Carolina and the region’s penchant for sporting art–wood ducks being chased by golden labs over a marsh with a hunter secluded nearby in a blind. Charleston, South Carolina annually hosts the nation’s premier sporting art festival. “Suddenly, all this social messaging, political messaging started coming in in the form of art and the people were startled.”

Moore recalls a local owner of an insurance company in the early days wanting to sponsor a prize for “art I understand.”

“He didn’t get any of it,” Moore said, chuckling. “You had to educate the people; what is contemporary art? But you come here today and everybody in the town, they’ll tell you where the art is, what it is, where (the artists are) from. They'll explain it. It's been an amazing transformation, culturally, of the people and their understanding of art.”

South Arts President and CEO Susie Surkamer experienced that for herself on her first ArtFields visit.

“The work during ArtFields is in basically every store and those store owners, they’re so excited and so proud of the work that they choose for their environment,” she told Forbes.com “Being in a restaurant and talking to the waiter or waitress and they say, ‘oh yeah, we’ve got this artist, look at it over here,’ the excitement of it, it’s a great example of what can happen. How do you distinguish your community. How do you involve the arts. How do you utilize the arts as part of economic recovery.”

Lake City’s economic recovery is hardly complete.

“I looked at this and said, ‘this is a 30-year project,’” Moore remembers thinking when she returned home. “You don’t go in and build a museum, put your name on it and say, ‘didn’t I do good.’ This was chipping and chipping and struggling and persistence with the view of a 30-year time horizon. We just hit the 15-year mark; we’re starting our second 15 years.”

That second 15 years debuts a new program, “Southern Voices/Global Visions,” a fitting moniker unintentionally also suited perfectly to the woman with a southern voice and a global vision who created an arts destination in a most unlikely place.