If College Lodge wasn’t the rock star of residence halls before, it certainly is now.
With a whole new image – one that is both bold and modest, brave and understated, edgy and classic, conspicuous and mysterious – the building couldn’t get much cooler.
It’s the doing of a rock star in his own right, contemporary street-artist Shepard Fairey, who tagged the face of the building as a part of his “Power & Glory” series of murals that hit Charleston last May.
The murals – which also popped up on a King Street warehouse complex, atop the Francis Marion Hotel and on the north wall of Groucho’s Deli – are all part of his collection in the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art’s exhibit, The Insistent Image: Recurrent Motifs in the Art of Shepard Fairey and Jasper Johns.
“A lot of the work in my show is about the negative side of power and glory,” says the Charleston native, who got his start with his “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” (a.k.a. Obey) sticker campaign and soared to international notoriety with his Barack Obama “Hope” poster. “But this mural is about a positive kind of power that I think is the path to future glory.”
Once again, College Lodge gets all the right kinds of power and glory.
