THE CREATIVE JUICES ARE FLOWING STRONG IN Summerville, South Carolina. In July 2025, Art on the Square Gallery planted its easels and opened its doors, marking with the debut a journey that brings the gallery full circle. Familiar to many as Art Central, the artists’ co-op had moved from its original downtown location to Nexton, a nearby award-winning community that draws homeowners and development with a mixed-use, all-inclusive lifestyle design.
“It was mid-2019. Nexton was coming up, and a walkable town square was being developed,” explains Art on the Square Gallery founder Renee Bruce. “While we really enjoyed being a part of Summerville’s downtown community, we had a lot of PR and educating to do to help the public understand our mission, the purpose of a co-op. After two decades, some of us were ready to retire, and some of us were ready for something new. When we learned that Nexton Square was accepting tenants, we launched ourselves into this new venture. That’s when we became Art on the Square. We had a big, beautiful gallery with over three dozen members. It was a really good move. And the lease was five years.”
After five years in Nexton, many of the core group began to feel the pull of their roots and started planning a return to them. “During our absence, Summerville had become more and more vibrant—with businesses, with support from the community and their attention to the arts through DREAM,” notes Bruce. “When Art Central was born in 1998, the downtown was boarded up, desolate. The leader of DREAM—a cohort of local businesses that supported a mission dubbed Downtown Restoration, Enhancement and Management—called a meeting of the creatives. She said the arts can turn this around.”
Bruce and her cadre of artists responded, establishing one of Downtown Summerville’s first galleries and investing their own funds and over 20 years of time and effort to build a presence and appreciation to attract foot traffic and new business to the area.
“Now, in 2025, we find the arts did indeed play a role in revitalizing downtown,” muses Bruce. “It’s a fun place to be. There’s theater, boutiques, restaurants—there is always something going on.”
Bruce credits Carla Hood for being instrumental in the process of locating the co-op’s new space on Hutchinson Square—a search that took nine months, followed by a three-month rehabilitation of the building. “138 South Main is our new home, and we are thoroughly enjoying our time on Hutchinson Square,” says Bruce, all smiles. “We consider this our permanent home now.”
And in the short time since relocating, Art on the Square Gallery has established itself as a thriving entity, with a full roster of South Carolina-based participants and a list of artists waiting for an opportunity to join the group.
“Everyone is an owner, and everyone works to make the place run,” explains Bruce. “We are very lucky to have people from a wide variety of backgrounds—finance, marketing, IT—and people who are able to care for the building itself. We all work in the gallery, do the maintenance, and we all love it. One of the big benefits of being a cooperative gallery is having the artists on-site every day, meeting people and introducing them to our art.”
The direction of the gallery has evolved away from primarily realistic, representative art to more contemporary, abstract painting styles characterized by a bold, free use of color. Bruce’s art developed as a way of expressing the beauty of the landscape. After a lot of studying and exploring of different mediums, she found painting with oils and sketching with pastels suited her impressionistic style the best.
A major part of Bruce’s collection on display at the gallery is her Path series. She says it has been a central part of her focus for a while, expressing both the landscapes she has a passion for and the steps she takes through them. “I’m so intrigued by paths,” she says. “I’m not sure visually what draws my eye to a path, but I know what it is spiritually—I feel I’m on a path; that’s life, and the journey is the destination. My background is Christian, but I have a deep appreciation for any, or no, religion, and it has manifested in that moving forward and moving toward something beautiful and filled with light. Light, falling across a path, is especially intriguing for me; it can be in a forest or on a river. It calls to me all the time, so that Path series is an ongoing project.”
The fact that Bruce and her artist partners are now able to thrive in Summerville’s Hutchinson Square is both fulfilling for them and important for the community. “We are contemporary artists who can now show our work in the town in which we live,” she emphasizes. “We’re responding to what we experience here—the land, the people, the relationships. And we’re responding with color and joy.”
The co-op also welcomes its neighbors into the gallery with a host of workshops, some that take place in a series over time and some that are daylong. Among them are classes in oil, watercolor or alcohol ink. Larry Alexis, the Junkart Dog, turns trash into treasures, like roses created out of copper sheeting.
“Our new building has a back room we immediately envisioned as a workshop space,” says Bruce. “We’re painting a mural of Summerville there now on an enormous wall that only people attending a class can view. We’ve had a great response to the program.”
After almost three decades in the making, Art on the Square Gallery remains fluid, evolving to meet the needs of changing times. “We’ve had a series of successes that got us where we are today,” notes Bruce. “We do have the occasional challenge, like deciding who we want to be. But we know the town is ready for an art gallery like ours. We are so excited to be in this place at this time.” *
Wendy Swat Snyder is a Charleston-based freelance writer (sweetgrassandgrits.com).
