On Oct. 24, the 701 Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) opened a new exhibit titled “Eye to Eye: The Roefs & Waddell Collection” that showcased over 100 works of art from one of the largest art collections in South Carolina.
The collection was started by a married couple Wim Roefs and Eileen Waddell. Waddell, a USC journalism instructor, said her and Roefs were both art lovers before meeting one another and, together, they grew to love the idea of owning art. They also enjoy meeting the artists who compose the pieces they purchase.
“There's price tags on those pieces. That means you can own it. You don’t have to go to a museum like we’ve been doing our whole lives. You don’t have to look in books like we’ve been doing our whole lives. You ... do it yourself. You know you can go buy it and it's local, and you might get to meet the artist, and they might be interesting,” Waddell said.
When Waddell and Roefs began collecting, they did not have a lot of money. However, they would purchase what they could afford and steadily began building their collection.
“You don’t have to have money to collect art, ” said Waddell. “We were young and we were poor, so we bought what we could afford ... and as we made more money, we could go out into the world and buy more art.”
"Eye to Eye: The Roefs & Waddell Collection" at 701 Whaley St. Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia, SC on November 10, 2024. The exhibition is open to the public until December 2024.
The title of the exhibit refers to the similarity in taste that both Waddell and Roefs share in different artworks. Waddell said they held similar taste for about 80-90 percent of the time and even established veto rules for each purchase they made.
“Now I can tell you truthfully, if one of us wanted it really badly, the other usually gave in because they wanted to, you know, make them happy,” Waddell said.
Roefs was a key pillar of the art scene in Columbia, serving as a co-founder of the 701 CCA said Harriett Green, an art curator and co-founder of 701 CCA.
“Wim (Roefs) would become a very important gallerist in Columbia, an independent curator and worked on projects, a lot of projects in-state, and he was working on some projects outside of the state. So very important person in the arts in South Carolina,” Green said.
Green was the curator for the exhibit and said the collection can be seen as a type of blueprint towards understanding how Waddell and Roefs began collecting.
“When they started, they just didn’t have a lot of money to buy art. And so one could look at their collection and notice that there are a lot of works on paper. Works on paper historically have been easier to buy because it's work on paper. And so you will see that reflected in their work,” Green said.
The curation process for this exhibit was like “doing a snapshot versus a deeper dive” due to the array of artists contained within the collection and the fact that over 100 pieces of work are featured, Green said.
Some of the artists included in the exhibit are Tyrone Geter, Leo Twiggs, Edward Rice, Peter Lenzo and Mike Williams.
Mike Williams is referred to as the "house artist” by Waddell as her and Roefs own a lot of his works. Williams has been an artist for 34 years mainly painting and sculpting.
Williams said he began by painting signs and creating murals because he felt painting on a variety of surfaces would improve his art. It was not until he began taking art history courses at USC that he began to find his style.
“I became aware of everything from cave painting to contemporary art and found that the abstract expressionist and the avant-garde movement around the late 40s, 50s and 60s in America, mostly New York ... that was what appealed to me,” Williams said.
Displayed art from "Eye to Eye: The Roefs & Waddell Collection" at 701 Whaley St. Columbia, SC on November 10, 2024. Stoneware, nichrome wire, glazes, porcelain slip & found objects, The Lamb Laid Down with the Lion, Cycles of Grief Pain and Celebration Speeded Up and Out of Order 2008, both by Peter Lenzo.
Waddell said Williams and his work was among the best in the abstract style of any artist in South Carolina.
“He's just natural with a brush, it’s kind of scary,” Waddell said.
The opening of the exhibit saw one of the largest attendances for 701 CCA, with around 200 people coming out to visit.
“I was by myself, and I thought about all the people who couldn't be there, people we’d lost, people who were stuck where they were out of town and couldn’t be there, most notably Wim (Roefs),” Waddell said.
However, when people began showing up, Waddell said it felt like home because she personally knew most of the 200 guest that arrived and was glad to see them.
The exhibit is currently open through December 2024 at the 701 Center for Contemporary Art on the second floor from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Thursdays through Sundays. The exhibit is free of charge and more information can be found at www.701cca.org.
Correction: A previous version of this story included an incorrect number of the artwork featured in the exhibit.