Meadow IV
The City of North Charleston’s Cultural Arts Department is pleased to announce that mixed media works by the current North Charleston Artist-in-Residence, Ester Araujo, will be on display at the Park Circle Community Building from March 21-28, 2025. A free public reception will be held on Friday, March 21, from 5:00-8:00pm. Admission is free.
Ester Araujo was selected as the first of four Artists-in-Residence (AIR) for the City of North Charleston Cultural Art Department’s Quarterly AIR Program at the Park Circle Community Building. Her three-month residency began in January and concludes at the end of this month. The City’s AIR serves as a visual art ambassador for the North Charleston community. Along with creating new work in the 270 sq. ft. AIR Studio located within the Park Circle Community Building and hosting weekly Open Studio hours, Ester has offered two free classes and a spinning wheel demonstration during her residency in collaboration with the City’s Cultural Arts Department. Her gouache landscape painting classes for adults and children in February and March presented unique opportunities for artistic engagement for North Charleston citizens.
Ester’s exhibition, Escape to Nowhere, will feature a collection of mixed media works that explore how fantasy and romanticism function as both tools to find meaning in life and means of escaping it. In addition to the new body of work, Araujo will display prints of her past Meadow series, as well as two of her fiber artworks.
Ester Araujo is a multidisciplinary artist based in the Charleston area. She received a BFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2020, where she learned intensive textile processes and techniques. After graduating, Araujo worked as an artist for Kohl’s Inc., designing prints and graphics for mass market apparel. In 2022, she left the corporate world to pursue her own studio practice. In her recent gouache paintings, she creates vibrant landscapes and nature vignettes, immersing viewers in dynamic tactile environments. Araujo is infinitely inspired by the resiliency and complexity of the natural world and she explores connections between rhythms in nature, woven patterns, and mark making. Her knowledge of textiles and painting inform one another in their repetition. Like building a textile thread by thread, her paintings layer hundreds of brush strokes to emulate undulating blades of grass and the movement of fabric. She continues to experiment with blending an array of mediums in her artistic process. Araujo has exhibited her works in many public art shows and markets in the southeast and a collection of her paintings were recently acquired by MUSC to be displayed in the BMT clinic. Learn more about the artist at www.esteraraujo.com.
The Park Circle Community Building is located at 4800 Park Circle in North Charleston. The building is open to the public Monday-Friday, 9:00am-5:00pm. More information about the City of North Charleston Cultural Arts Department’s AIR program, as well as the department’s other programs, exhibits, and events, can be found on the Cultural Arts section of the City’s website at https://culturalarts.
