North Carolina collectors Ray Griffin and Thom Robinson have been patrons of FCM’s collection since 2012 and have engaged with the arts through philanthropy at numerous museums and institutions in the Southeast.

This exhibition will tell the story of how their relationships with artists, museums, other collectors, and each other provided the foundation on which the collections were built, with an emphasis on Southern contemporary and Outsider art.

Edward B. Gay (1837 – 1928) was a prolific and widely exhibited American landscape painter best known for his luminous scenes of the New York countryside. Gay was an active lifelong member of the National Academy of Design, achieving full Academician status 1907.

After 1898 Gay made numerous trips to South Carolina to visit his daughter Vivien, who had married James Lide Coker, Jr. of Hartsville. Several years later, his son, Duncan, also married into the Coker family. Because of these intermarriages, many of Gay’s paintings became dispersed into private and museum collections in the South.

The purpose of the proposed exhibit would be to chronicle the artist’s stylistic development, and focus on its parallels with emerging philosophies in American art from the late 19th to early 20th centuries.

The competition aims to highlight the best contemporary art in the Pee Dee region. One of the state's oldest juried art competitions, the first competition dates back to 1954 where the competition was held at the former Florence Museum on Spruce Street in Florence, South Carolina.

Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893 – 1967) is one of the most unique figures in 20th century American art. His paintings, which occupy a rare niche between naturalism and abstraction, are almost a genre unto themselves.

Following a review of his work by famous Regionalist painter Edward Hopper in 1928, Burchfield became the first artist to be given a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In 1918 he was drafted into military service and stationed at Camp Jackson, Columbia. Charles Burchfield’s work as an Army camouflage designer became a catalyst for important developments in his later personal and artistic life.

This Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) traveling exhibition will feature paintings from the collection of more than 1,000 works by William H. Johnson given to the SAAM by the Harmon Foundation in 1967. This is the first-ever curated major exhibition of Johnson’s Freedom Fighters, a series of paintings created in the mid 1940s, focusing on individuals integral to African American activism, influence, progress, and achievements.