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Can Art Save Main Street? Some Small Towns Are Staking Their Futures On It

Once home to storefronts that sat largely vacant, Lake City, South Carolina, has seen downtown retail occupancy climb from roughly 20-30 percent to 90 percent since the town began its arts-driven revitalization.

Noah Scalin, a multimedia artist living in Richmond, Virginia, had never heard of the South Carolina town of Lake City before looking online for arts festivals where he could show and sell his work. What caught his eye about ArtFields, at the time an eight-day town-wide visual arts festival in Lake City, was the best-in-show grand prize of $50,000. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s better than most other shows I enter,'” and he promptly submitted a stickers-on-panel work titled Of America: The Problem We All Still Live With, based on a Norman Rockwell 1964 image of Ruby Bridges integrating an all-white elementary school in New Orleans flanked by federal marshals. That artwork didn’t win the grand prize—he won it the following year with his stickers-on-panel Of America, September 4, 1957, which was based on photographic images of the integration of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas—but it did propel his career trajectory. He was offered a solo exhibition that year at a Lake City art space, given another solo show at a gallery in North Charleston, and the painting itself was purchased by billionaire Darla Moore, the wealthiest person ever to hail from Lake City.

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Moore did not get rich in Lake City, located in eastern South Carolina, approximately 80 miles from the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, she left for college at the University of South Carolina, then earned an MBA at George Washington University before heading to New York City, where she moved up through the ranks at Chemical Bank and eventually started a Wall Street investment company, Rainwater, Inc., with her husband, Richard Rainwater. Called by Forbes “The Toughest Babe in Business,” her specialty was turning failing companies into profitable ones, a skill she later applied to revitalizing Lake City, an agricultural town of 6,000 whose main source of income, tobacco, had declined amid nationwide reductions in smoking.

Her goal was to turn Lake City into a place where people would want to go rather than leave, which meant improving prospects, particularly for younger residents. Working with the local public schools, university and technical college, she invested millions to convert an old Walmart into the Continuum regional education center, where students may earn advanced placement credits, welding certifications and mechatronics training. She also developed scholarship programs that expand access to higher education across the state.

“ArtFields was designed to reimagine my hometown of Lake City and restore our community’s belief in itself by transforming into a living art gallery,” Moore told Observer. “The response has been beyond anything we imagined. Thousands of people now travel from far and wide to attend the festival and our year-round programs. Most importantly, young people who had left Lake City are coming back home because they see a future here for the first time in a long time.” (This isn’t her only philanthropic effort in the cultural sphere. Most recently, Moore made........

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