South Plaza Sculpture Exhibit 2006

C e d a r's F o g
(Steel)
Size: 15 feet high

Artist
Stephen Chesley

Stephen Chesley, born in 1952, is primarily known as a painter. Sculpture is
relatively new art form for Chesley, a Columbia, S.C., resident who has developed a strong and loyal following throughout the Southeast as a painter of landscapes, cityscapes, and beach scenes. Most of his sculptures are of scrap metal and combine geometric and organic forms.
Chesley grew up in Virginia Beach. In 1975, he received a BA in urban studies from Richmond’s Virginia Commonwealth University. In 1980, he earned an MA in urban regional planning from Clemson University’s School of Architecture. After a brief stint as a planner, Chesley turned to painting, building on a lifelong love of drawing and a somewhat belated realization that his talent was out of the ordinary.
Chesley was included in a juried, 1987 exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He also has exhibited in Kaiserslautern, Germany; at Florida’s Orlando Museum of Art; Kentucky’s Owensboro Museum of Fine Art; the Montana College Gallery at Dillion; Alabama’s Montgomery Museum of Fine Art and Opelika Fine Art Center; and at Georgia’s Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was part of two nationally juried exhibitions.
In the Carolinas, Chesley has been in exhibitions in Charlotte and Salisbury, N.C. He has shown in the city art museums in Charleston, Greenville, Anderson, Spartanburg, and Columbia, in several more than once. His work is in the Columbia Museum of Art and many institutional collections. It is also in the collection of the state of South Carolina.

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