CHARLESTON, SC.- The Corrigan Gallery will present the first duo show of works by Charleston’s own Manning Williams and John Hull, the new head of the studio art department at the College of Charleston. Storytellers: John Hull and Manning Williams opens in April with a reception from 5pm to 8:00pm on Friday, April 4, 2008 at 62 Queen Street, Charleston. The show will hang from April 2 – May 11. This is the first group of new paintings by Williams in several years and Hull’s first gallery drawing show.

John Hull tells stories of life passages – “a series of psychological stories filled with boredom and wonder.” He wants to show human relationships and “the individual’s struggle to find equilibrium amidst passion and doubt.” He says, "…no matter how many different series or narrative ideas I explore as a painter, I think I end up telling the same story."

Manning Williams is a storyteller of repute. Learning as a child that the great competition is to top the last story told, he practiced long and hard to trump others. This creation of tales easily found its way into his paintings. Most often telling stories of the south and the American way, Williams wants to begin a dialogue, stir up questions and create a debate – to express the comedy and tragedy of life in one visual example and to repeat the story as often as is necessary.

Both artists originally planned to use words to create their stories. They quickly found their places in the visual art world. They each also work from images in the newspaper as a basis for ideas. For Williams it is a stepping off point to an abstraction. For Hull it is a pose or gesture that attracts his eye. Neither gentleman uses photographs to work from in any direct manner. Each works in series although Williams’s series now are often contained in one painting. Williams’s early narrative works of oyster roasts, field burns, dog trails and “canoeing past” history parallel the “illustrative” sense of Hull’s current work. Hull’s baseball (Wichita Wranglers), junkyard and his in-process circus paintings tell everyday stories yet hold humanity in each brushstroke.

John Hull received a BA from Yale University and MFA from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His work is included in collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Israel Museum, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Greenville County Art Museum, the Edwin A. Ulrich Museum and Yale University Art Gallery. He has exhibited since 1981 with a long list of solo shows including 1985 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and More Gallery, Philadelphia as well as the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky in 1990. With many shows in between nationwide, the most recent solo shows were at the Wichita Art Museum in 2006 and the Alpha Gallery, Boston in 2007.

Hull’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at number of museums and galleries including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Academy of Design, Borgenicht Gallery, P.S. 1, One Penn Center, Tatistcheff Gallery and A.R.T. Resources all in New York; the Denver Art Museum, the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, The Center for the Visual Arts, Plus Gallery and Ron Judish Fine Arts in Colorado; the Neuburger Museum of Art, Purchase, New York; The National Gallery of New Zealand; the Tampa Art Museum, Florida; The Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, Montana; the New House Center for Contemporary Art, Snug Harbor, New York; Rutgers University Art Museum, Newark, New Jersey; the Butler Museum of Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Jan Turner Gallery, Los Angeles; Ulrich Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas; the Yale University Art Gallery; the Schmucker Art Gallery, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and the Greenville County Art Museum and the Halsey Institute in South Carolina.

Hull has received four National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists’ Fellowships, one from the Maryland Arts Council, the Thomas Benedict Clarke Prize for Painting in 2004 from the National Academy of Design and an Achievement Award in 1995 from American Artist Magazine. He has taught at Augustana College in Illinois, Yale University and the University of Colorado. He is now Professor of Painting and Department Chair of Studio Art at the College of Charleston.

Manning Williams was born in Charleston in 1939. He received his BS from the College of Charleston before doing graduate work at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Williams’s work has been exhibited nationally with solo shows in Charleston, New Orleans, Washington, at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Art and the Greenville Museum of Art. These shows include 1986 at the Halsey Gallery, College of Charleston, 1980 at Baumgartner Gallery, Washington DC, 1979 at the David Hamilton Gallery, Charleston, and “Landscapes 1977-1978,” Gallery at 45 Hasell, Charleston. Group shows including his work were “Second Story Show” at Piccolo Spoleto, “100 Years/100 Artists, Views From the 20th Century,” at the South Carolina State Museum, “New Figurative Art – works by Philip Pearlstein, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, Jack Beal, Paul Georges and Lennart Anderson,” Charleston and the Gibbes Art Gallery Invitational of 1973, Charleston.

In 2004, Williams’s work was featured in a show at the Gibbes Museum of Art entitled Framing a Vision: Landscapes. His solo show “Abstracting Arrogance” in early 2007 was his first major exhibition of the comic abstraction series. His landscapes, which often were gigantic and his series of Indians then trucks preceded a series of narrative paintings tackling war. The past seventeen years’ work is based on cartoon format with abstract imagery filling the boxes and the dialogue bubbles left empty. These vibrant stories without words or concrete images speak volumes about life and the viewer. The humor and tragedy of life are portrayed in an abstracted format with room for interpretation.

Williams has received a SC Arts Commission Fellowship. His best known commissions are displayed at the Charleston Airport and the East Cooper Hospital. His poster for the “New Figurative Painting” exhibition is included in “Fairfield Porter: A catalogue raisonné of his prints.” Williams produced the book jacket and illustrations for “Poems from the Scorched Earth” by James Everett Kibler (2001). His work has been the subject of reviews and feature stories, and included in the video “Charleston Art Now.” His work hangs in public and corporate collections, among them the SC Arts Commission, R.J. Reynolds Corporation, Citizens and Southern National Bank, Post & Courier Publishing Company, Kiawah Resort Association, the MUSC Contemporary Carolina Collection, Greenville County Museum, South Carolina State Museum and the Gibbes Museum of Art. Williams taught at the College of Charleston from 1983 - 1998 and is again teaching a class there.