The City of Anderson Economic Development Office hosted a lunch and learn session about public art on August 22. Members of the Anderson Artists Guild were among those in attendance. The speakers were Kimberly Spears, the city’s Economic Development Director (and former Executive Director of the Anderson Arts Center) and Beth Batson, who works for the city in various capacities. They spoke about the role of public art, examples of public art in Anderson, the Church Street Her

Donna Persinger always wanted to be a special education teacher. It just took a while to reach that goal. Born in New Jersey, she moved with her family at age seven to Aiken, South Carolina, where her father, a mechanical engineer, had been transferred by his company just before it went out of business. Then he got a job with Michelin, and the family spent six months in France before settling in Anderson. Persinger wanted to study special education, but her parents were not s

Even for the photographers in the audience, Jane Allen offered many helpful tips on taking pictures with cell phones at the Anderson Artists Guild meeting on Sept. 10. One of the simplest but most surprising was how to access the camera quickly by pressing the button to wake up the phone and then swiping from right to left. Allen also suggested asking someone else to take your picture instead of taking a selfie and shooting at eye level instead of up at your face to get more

Jane Lewis Allen can’t remember not having a camera. “My dad was an architect, so we always had cameras at our house,” she said. Her first one growing up in Florence, S.C., was a box camera. “In those days it was very expensive to buy film, so I had to be very judicious about the pictures I took,” she said. “We didn’t have a lot of money to spend on that. It was only after I retired and started doing digital photography that I was able to experiment with lighting and post-pro