The Bowie Arts Center at Erskine College is honored to present, “Of Beauty & Backbone,” an exhibition developed in collaboration with Erskine alumna Glenis Redmond ’85, Poet Laureate of Greenville, S.C. This carefully curated collection of poetry and visual art invites viewers into a profound dialogue between language and image—a space where beauty and backbone, vulnerability and strength, converge to tell the stories that define us.
Through her words, Redmond reclaims and honors the beauty woven through her lived experience—a Black woman rooted in Southern heritage, shaped by ancestral wisdom, and fortified by the unbreakable backbone that runs through her family’s story and her own. Her poetry is a testament to how heritage becomes voice, how struggle becomes strength, and how beauty emerges not despite our hardships, but because of them.
In this intimate curation of poetry and visual art, we witness Redmond’s journey from the landscapes and legacies of the South to the truth that connects us all. Her words speak to resilience, dignity, and the quiet power found in claiming one’s story. Join us, April 18- June 5, 2026, to celebrate a voice that carries the weight of history and the hope for today.
PRAISE DAVE
First time I see a jar rise up,
I be midwifed into life.
Understood how these pots and I be kin
— dismissed to what’s under foot.
I learned to turn and turn —
people the world with pots.
I pour my need into the knead
until forty thousand around me crowd,
but everything I love, I lose
so I want what I mold to hold.
Even my empty pots
be full. One say:
I wonder where is all my relations
Friendship to all – and every nation.
There are lanterns in my words —
every story got another story.
Some call me Dave the slave, if that’s all they got,
I say leave the rhymes to me.
When people look at me, a slave be
the first excuse they use not to see me.
I say praise me. It won’t fall on deaf ears.
I catch praise like most people catch naps.
I am a 6-foot vessel of anything, but ordinary
a one of a kind with a Carolina shine.I stepped out of the rows of cotton
to master the potter’s wheel.
I take the wind out of can’t.
with my mark, I make a mark.
I sign my name Dave.
I don’t write slave.
See if my pots and me spin history.
See if we hold hold hold
Glenis Redmond reading of her poem, Praise Dave
7 gallon pot attributed to Dave Drake
c. 1850 stoneware with alkaline glaze
15″ x 14 3/4″
AFRO CAROLINIAN
With Carolina on my lips, I sing a quilt,
a crooked stitch that weaves its way around
my pie-shaped state that conjures food—
too sweet like amber iced tea or cake, red-velvet rich.
Too sweet, like the words I was raised on, words that say,
If you don’t have nothin nice to say, lace it with sugah.
There’s always more in the South, like the twos and threes
coming out of grandma’s mouth, Hush your mouth, chile.
These words not a command for silence but a signal
for the teller to keep on spinning cause her words hit bone.
Grandma’s words were codes—lit lanterns:
We gwine down yonder in the merrnin—
Not a pronouncement to a destination
but a place where she’d teach a lesson
at her favorite fishing spot. By her foot,
a coffee can full of night crawlers,
in her mouth, a cigarette she barely puffed,
in her hands, a homemade fishing rod,
line steeped in the water waiting for hook tug.
She never said the word patience
just stood live oak–like,
grounded in her own wisdom,
a Baptist Buddha woman teaching
Be Here Now.
Her uncanny ways taught me
how to wait on the spirit.
Hunched in her favorite recliner,
King James Bible on the left—
her eyes forward, soaking in wrastlin.
Her faith rooted in the Lord and Ricky Steamboat.
I was rapt in how she’d contort herself,
as if she were head-locking demons,
choke-holding them in Jesus’s name.
Simultaneously burning tufts of her hair in a glass ashtray,
raked from her comb, so no one could work a root.
Grandma taught me the truth was a complex helix rising.
From her I learned how to watch as well as pray,
and how the shackled speak in double tongues.
As second daughter of a second daughter, I began life
as a shame-faced girl too shy to string together words.
I did not open my mouth until I had something to say.
I was busy looking in grown folks’ mouths,
collecting the old ways, placing them on my tongue.
My first language was scratched from the land:
sweet potatoes, collards, and black-eyed peas.
As a second daughter of a second daughter,
I straddle the abyss of the diaspora and the church pew,
where I learn to speak Afro Carolinian fluently.
Some call it a backwards tongue.
I call it a knowing, a spiritual
that will carry you forward
if you listen and learn how to sing it.
Glenis Redmond reading her poem, Afro Carolinian
Installation of Gullah Baskets from the Lowcountry