Beauty In Bountyland | By Dorothy Netherland

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Public Works Art Center

Art exhibition with maximalist sculpture and collage

East Gallery | November 20th — January 10th | Opening Reception: November 20th from 5:30pm — 8:30pm

Artist Bio

Originally from Alexandria, VA, Dorothy Netherland is an artist based in North Charleston, SC. What originally started as paintings on layered glass evolved over time to include mixed media on plexiglass, mylar, polystyrene and plastic packaging.

Netherland received a BA in Studio Art from the College of Charleston in 2000, at the age of thirty-eight. In 2002, after having a baby, she became of the founding member of Redux, an art and studio center created by CofC art graduates, where she had a studio for seven years.

Her early paintings on glass were represented in the 2004 South Carolina Triennial at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, as well as in Studio Visits in 2007 at the Greenville County Museum of Art.

In 2011 Netherland was named Artist of the Year by the Contemporaries of the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, SC. Also in 2011, she participated in an artist’s residency in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, Germany, which concluded with an exhibition.

In 2012 she had solo exhibitions at both Georgia College and Mercer University, and was invited to exhibit in a group show at Mississippi University for women.

In both 2013 and 2019, Netherland’s work was selected for inclusion in the South Carolina Biennial at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, a juried exhibition overview of the bet of South Carolina contemporary art. Since 2020, Netherland has continued to work in her home studio. During this time she has sought to expand her use of materials, and her work is still evolving to include installation.

She has been chosen for inclusion in the exhibition and book In This Moment, photographs by esteemed photographer Jerry Siegel of artists with ties to South Carolina, curated by Mark Sloan. These photographs will be on view at the Greenville County Museum of Art beginning in November.

Artist Statement

My work is primarily based on my experimentation with materials, and has gradually expanded to include plastic, plexiglass, polystyrene and more, often incorporating sculptural and installation elements.

My natural tendency towards visual maximalism and exploration continues in this exhibition, as I leaned even further into ideas about abundance. After I made a large installation piece a few years ago, I was left with many small frames, and one day I attached and spraypainted a plastic packaging shape onto one of them. I found the resulting object hilarious, as it reminded me of an inverted Wallace Stevens poem title, which I kept repeating to myself, “Ideas About the Thing but Not the Thing Itself.”

This led to the large piece I made for this show. I became increasingly fascinated with ideas about our connections to objects and what it reveals about our values and identities. I thought about early Americans and their search for resources, and wondered how they would view our wasteful excess. I thought about wealth inequity and aspiration. I became interested in the connection between material goods and memory, meaning, and comfort. Our emotional attachment to objects is strong and complex, going far beyond simple ownership to becoming symbols of our deepest longings, insecurities and experiences.

Human beings are meaning-makers, and the objects we covet and possess reflect our relationship with ourselves and the world.

This event happens daily from November 20, 2025 to January 10, 2026. Time: 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Timezone: Eastern Time (US & Canada)