Clemson University art alumni have created and installed powerful public art pieces across the Southeast. From the abstract to the whimsical and historical, the connecting thread is how they all spark interaction, foster local pride and serve as backdrops of everyday life.
On the lawn of Sirrine Hall beside Fernow Street, a strange blue creature stands 10 feet tall, anchored amid the ebb and flow of a particularly busy corner of Clemson University’s main campus. From some angles, it looks like a microscope. From others, a Picasso-esque figure striding briskly toward the Chick-fil-A across the road. Or maybe it’s a ballet dancer.
What the steel sculpture is depends on who’s looking at it, says Joey Manson ’94, principal lecturer in the Department of Art and the artist behind the abstract form he named “Shift-Ascend.”
“I tell my public art students that it’s our job to spark some sort of discourse, either discussions between people or simply thoughts in their heads,” Manson says as he pays a short visit to his creation on a bustling campus day. Students walk on the sidewalks beside his sculpture as he reminisces about installing it in 1999. Most of them don’t seem to notice it.
“People may have to walk by it for six months before they start wondering what it is,” he says, a twinkle in his eye betraying that was always the plan. The wondering means it’s working.
For nearly two decades, “Shift-Ascend” has towered over students hustling to and from classes on the sidewalk between Fernow Street and Sirrine Hall. Some days, the sculpture barely catches a few glances; others, it attracts curious guests. One year, students sewed a hand-knitted costume onto it. Another year, students registered it as an official Pokémon Gym. People still bring their phones to it to play the game.
“I think that’s fantastic,” says Manson, an affable sculptor who earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Clemson and accepted a position at his alma mater in 2002, three years after the installation of “Shift-Ascend.”
“Interaction gives life to public art,” he adds.
Manson has spent the last 25 years sharing his knowledge and love of art with his students. Along with being an accomplished sculptor in his own right, with installations in New York, Chicago and Atlanta, to name just a few, Manson and his colleagues in the University’s Department of Art have launched a small legion of fine artists who have gone on to add their distinct creative touches to public spaces across and outside of the Southeast.
“Students who get art degrees from Clemson go on to the most interesting, diverse and creative careers you can imagine,” he says.
Clemson art students have forged extraordinary careers as muralists, sculptors and administrators of public art, and it’s not hard to find them. Jump behind the wheel of a car parked on campus, point the hood in any direction, and public artworks involving alumni can be discovered within a few hours’ drive.
Columbus, Georgia:
Chris Johnson ’08
In Georgia’s second-largest city, an 85-foot-tall mythical woman materializes when driving down Broadway Street through the revitalized city center, just as the pavement turns to cobblestone. Painted on the side of the five-story Heritage Tower, she moves forward yet looks back over her shoulder. Her gaze points toward the Chattahoochee River; her dress falls to the ground in flowing folds.
Men from a construction company sit at her feet in big white work trucks, enjoying their lunches under her silent gaze. At the same time, students across the street at Columbus State University’s Saunders Center for Music Studies carry their instruments in and out of class, seemingly accustomed to her presence. Out-of-town visitors, on the other hand, gasp when they catch sight of her.
The mural, titled “Lady Columbus,” was created by Chris Johnson ’08 and is one of hundreds of murals he’s painted in small towns and cities all over Georgia.
“I love that gesture because she’s looking out toward the frontier, and Columbus was a frontier town,” explains Johnson as he looks up at his magnum opus on a bright afternoon. The mural took Johnson and an assistant 10 days to complete, working 14- to 15-hour days between rainstorms.
Today, the mural has become a centerpiece of Columbus. People have their wedding engagement photos taken in front of it; school buses stop on field trips; and the local news uses it as a backdrop for weather broadcasts.
“It’s become bigger than I could have ever imagined,” Johnson says. “At this point, it’s not mine. It belongs to the city, and that’s the essence of public art.”
Growing up, Johnson was the artsy kid whom others would ask to draw posters and T-shirt designs, but he never really considered making a career out of it. He was originally going to major in biological sciences at Clemson, but that didn’t last long.
“Biology and art were kind of right next to each other during Orientation,” he says, “so I was easily drawn into the art program.” (No pun intended.)
Johnson graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art, with a concentration in printmaking, and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts at the University of South Carolina. He then secured a job as the director of the fine arts department at Andrew College, a small school with about 450 students in Cuthbert, Georgia.
One day, the mayor of Cuthbert approached him and asked if he and his students would paint a mural of legendary American jazz musician Fletcher Henderson and scenes from Cuthbert’s past on a vacant building in town. Johnson agreed, and the mural attracted so much attention that mayors of nearby towns approached him, asking him to do the same thing in their communities. Eventually, he resigned his teaching position to paint full-time.
Despite the challenges of painting large exteriors, Johnson loves the interactions that come naturally from creating huge works in public.
“When you’re a gallery artist, your workspace is kind of sanitized and enclosed, but there’s no hiding when you’re doing public art,” he laughs. “I love it, though. I love sharing the work and talking with people. Sometimes, they bring me drinks or snacks, and they share their own stories with me.”
Johnson says murals are like tattoos — once a town gets one, it immediately wants more.
“Most of the towns I do one in, I wind up doing multiple in,” he says. “Murals can draw visitors in and, if they’re done right, make an impression that will leave with them when they go.”
Atlanta:
Emily Sorgenfrei ’13
Near downtown Atlanta in historic Grant Park, three 12-foot-tall mirrored stainless-steel obelisks sit on a cobblestone deck, reflecting the world around them in infinite shapes and patterns.
The casual observer might wonder what they are and how they got there. Or maybe, like the students briskly walking past “Shift-Ascend,” passersby are too busy to notice them at all.
“They’re my babies,” says Emily Sorgenfrei ’13, gazing up at them during an early morning stopover on her daily commute while a blanket of mist slowly dissipates from the park grounds as the day breaks.
As a public art project manager for Atlanta from 2022–2025, Sorgenfrei was part of a team that shepherded more than 50 public artworks. None of them put up more of a fight than this particular installation, “Things Just Happened to Him,” by English artist Ryan Gander.
As the three colossi stand sentinel over distant joggers and stroller-pushers while the park awakens, Sorgenfrei describes how she had to arrange transport for the three huge objects — which Gander designed to resemble chess pieces — from the United Kingdom to Atlanta via ship, train and truck and finally into place with a forklift. It was an arduous process full of paperwork, negotiations and contracts. Sorgenfrei beams with pride as she tells the tale.
“The pieces are arranged in a checkmate formation,” she explains. “But their biggest admirers are not chess players.”
It’s children who love the shiny mirrored sculpture the most, she says.
“They run around touching them and looking at their reflections, like they’re carnival mirrors,” she laughs. “I love it. Public art doesn’t get better than that, and I am so proud to have been a part of it.”
Sorgenfrei graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art, with a concentration in sculpture, and was in the first cohort of the public art Creative Inquiry program, an undergraduate research project overseen by Manson that positions students for roles in public art administration. Her first job after graduating was in a small art gallery where she was the only employee and did everything from hanging the art to painting the walls.
“It was good for two things,” she says. “Figuring out if this is something I really want to be doing and making contacts.”
Those contacts helped her secure other jobs in the Atlanta art world, which ultimately led to her being offered a position as Atlanta’s public art manager in 2022. In that position, Sorgenfrei helped execute the city’s public art initiatives by reviewing, selecting and approving artists’ proposals and allocating bond funds to fund their projects.
Buying a giant statue is one thing, Sorgenfrei says, but getting the necessary approvals to permanently install it in somebody’s neighborhood can take years.
Despite that, she says she loves the sense of community that surrounds the process of installing works of art in public spaces.
“Art is inherently subjective, so things can get spicy,” she laughs. “But it’s better when people are spicy because that means they’re engaged.”
Sorgenfrei says that public art is not always as conspicuous as “Things Just Happened to Him.” Sometimes it’s much more subtle, like the nine tiny rodents scattered around Greenville, South Carolina, in its “Mice on Main” installation. Either way, public art is everywhere, she says.
“We wouldn’t know what the world would look like without it.”
Charlotte, North Carolina:
Hilary Siber Edwards M ’15
In East Charlotte, North Carolina, you don’t need a DeLorean like the one driven by Marty McFly in Back to the Future to drive through time. Drivers approaching the intersection of Bamboo Street and Pierson Drive are transported back to the 1960s as the retaining wall for the newly renovated Ervin Building coils up and around the corner, covered in deep red and orange patterns that part to reveal an industrial skyline.
A little farther along, the striking black-and-white figure of 15-year-old Dorothy Counts-Scoggins, one of the first three African American students to attend high school in the city in 1957, walks straight out of the painting toward the street.
Pull around the corner, and the curved wall grows steadily outside the car window until it is 30 feet high and butting against the East Independence Boulevard overpass. The images painted on it usher the viewer through the neon magentas and buzzy cacophony of the 1980s, the sparkling yellows and reds of the electric 1990s, and, at its highest, the dark blues and smooth light trails of the digital 2020s.
The 5,500-square-foot work of art was painted by Hilary Siber Edwards M ’15, who has made a name for herself as one of Charlotte’s premier public artists.
“I think that mural is probably my most impactful so far because it gives a sense of place to an otherwise overlooked space,” says Edwards, who, at six months pregnant, paid a visit to the site on a blustery afternoon.
The Ervin Building was one of the first office buildings in Charlotte and stood derelict for nearly a decade until real estate investment company Gvest Capital stepped in to restore it. They hired Edwards and fellow artist Eva Crawford to design and paint the gigantic mural. The project took two years of planning and six weeks to paint.
“East Charlotte is a part of the city where there are a lot of marginalized communities,” says Edwards. “The fact that somebody was willing to invest in it gave encouragement to a community that had long felt ignored.”
Edwards grew up in Canton, Ohio, and came to Clemson to earn her Master of Fine Arts degree after earning her undergraduate degree at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. She knew she wanted to be an artist since third grade, but the thought of trying to make a living as one was daunting.
“I was intimidated to become a professional painter because I didn’t know how I was going to pay off my student loans,” she laughs. “But I’ve been able to be a full-time artist since I graduated Clemson, and that’s something I’m really proud of.”
For Edwards, creating public art is a dream job because she’s a problem solver. Figuring out each site location, dealing with weather, textures and materials, and the physicality of going up and down ladders and lifts all day are just a few of the logistics that come with the gig.
“I like all of that,” she says. “I like those challenges — those unknown parts of creating and all the systems that support it. I love the large scale of it, that it’s immersive, and that it’s not one owner.”
Like Johnson and Sorgenfrei, Edwards loves the interactions that creating public art invites and the way people get to see and experience it while it’s happening. She says that while they were painting the Ervin Building mural, she and Crawford would receive daily encouragement from drivers and pedestrians who passed by, thanking them for filling the huge concrete wall with beauty.
“Public art can help dignify a space,” she says. “When you see a building that has a beautiful mural on it, you know somebody invested in that place, and that’s meaningful.”
The great French Impressionist artist Edgar Degas once said, “Art is not what you see but what you make others see.”
Manson, Johnson, Sorgenfrei and Edwards represent the scores of gifted Clemson art alumni who have manifested that notion, each of them using their God-given creativity and talent to transform the sides of buildings, obscure corners of public land and stark industrial landscapes into cathedrals that alter the perceptions of the people who move through them.
Their efforts show that great public art does more than decorate a place. It can educate, entertain, add meaning, spark debate and invite joy. The greatest public art can define cities, states and nations: Think of the Gateway Arch, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty.
A lot of stars must align for a work of art to become part of a community’s identity, but ask anyone who has studied art at Clemson, and they’ll tell you it’s always possible with the right vision, commitment, artistry … and a little Clemson magic.
Ken Scar is a senior writer in the Division of Marketing and Communications.
