Jasper Johns: Look Homeward

There's excitement in the South Carolina Upstate as the Greenville County Museum of Art opens an extraordinary exhibition of works by the world's greatest living artist—South Carolinian Jasper Johns.

The exhibition Jasper Johns: Look Homeward features fifty-six paintings, drawings, lithographs, silkscreens, and mixed media works that date from 1960 through 2005. It samples iconic flags, targets, and numbers as well as the intimate themes the artist has explored in works created since 1981.

Sponsored by Carolina First, Jasper John: Look Homeward showcases five important new works and examples of some thirty limited edition prints that will be acquired by the Museum through a six-million-dollar fundraising campaign. These acquisitions are integrated with the Museum's exhisting collection of early Johns works and extended with loans from private collectors and the artist himself.

The completion of the Jasper Johns collection will position Greenville's Museum among a special few worldwide with such prestigious offerings by major American artists.

More about Jasper Johns

Born in 1930, Jasper Johns grew up in South Carolina, then moved to New York at twenty to pursue a career in art. He became an overnight success in the 1950s, challenging the prevalent abstract expressionists with object-oriented mixed media paintings that paved the way for the era of Pop art.

His flags, targets, letters, and numbers are "things the mind already knows but really doesn't see," Johns has said. These forms became the basis for exhaustive experimentation and revision. The flags of the artist's earliest work often reappear in later paintings as hints and reminders.