With Charleston’s lowcountry cuisine highlighted recently, how can Charleston’s creative community stay top of mind? Well, while we keep doing what we’re doing, here’s an idea: The New York Times travel section is now taking submissions for “Show us Your City.”  Readers have the opportunity to send in a video highlighting three favorite spots that are local “must sees” in their hometown. So grab your video camera, invoke your inner tour guide, turn on the charm, and put Charleston into the national spotlight once again. What are your favorite spots in Charleston?

One of the most important issues facing the Charleston area is school funding. On November 2nd we will vote for a Six Year One Cent Sales Tax to fund major educational infrastructure. As creative’s we need to support the tax and build the North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary School.

The North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary School project will be the design and building of a partial magnet school at the Berry Campus to support an art-infused program with a 600-student capacity.  The school will provide a unique option for North Charleston parents who seek an arts-infused education for their child. Students who start at North Charleston Creative Arts Elementary are likely to transition successfully to the School of the Arts for their grade 7-12 education.

Please support the 6 Year Sales Tax!

Patrick Bryant is Managing Partner for Go To Team, a broadcast video production company based in Charleston and Co-Chairman of the Citizens for Community Improvement.

The idea for Twitpic was simple: create a way to share photos on Twitter. What began as a side project in February 2008 quickly became a trial-by-fire lesson in scaling under the pressure of unexpected and massive growth. As a one-man show, Noah Everett single-handedly grew the site from inception to a service now used by 10 million users, including celebrities, politicians, and his mom. Twitpic become a source for breaking news after photos of the downed plane on the Hudson appeared first on the site. Today Twipic serves billions of requests every month.

Born in the South and raised in Oklahoma, he was too young to get into college when he finished high school at age 15. Instead, he spent 15 hours a day online, teaching himself the mechanics of the internet and laying the groundwork for his later calling as a web developer.

He recently relocated to Charleston, SC, where he continues to grow Twitpic while tweeting about subsisting on Frosted Mini-Wheats.

There are a few things it takes to have wonderful Pecha Kucha nights. A creative town. Creative presenters. Awesome audience. So, we’ve got all three lined up for the May 19 PKN night. Charleston. You and the following presenters and emcee.

• Jonathan Miller (emcee)
• Kevin Harrison (PDA Video)
• Karen Myers (Director of Redux)
• Geoffrey and Noel Richardson (owners of Lava Salon)
• Ashley Reid (fashion designer)
• Noah Everett (Twitpic founder)
• Joel Parker (Painter)
• Todd Richardson – (Landscape architect)

Bios and pics will be posted to the blog in the coming days. In the meantime, be sure to get your admission ticket. As of this morning, there were only 50 remaining. They’ll go fast and you know you want to be in the audience to see and hear the presentations these super creatives will give.

Born in Corning, New York, Kevin Harrison spent early years in Malaysia and Singapore.  Malaysian mother, American father who met in the Peace Corps.  He spent a year in Australia when his family moved as part of a teacher exchange program.  They lived in a city called Geelong, on the southernmost tip of the continent. (45- minutes south of Melbourne)   In 1993, while working as a multimedia developer and TV news graphic artist, Kevin met Cathy O’Hara, an investigative reporter and television News anchor for an ABC affiliate.  Cathy had moved from KCBS in  Los Angeles to WCIV in Charleston, and then to WSOC in Charlotte, NC.  In 1996, Kevin and Cathy married in Charleston, S.C., while still living in Charlotte. 

While working as a freelance marketing director for several national & international companies including: UNILEVER, AXE, DEGREE GEL, SKY VODKA and RED BULL his fine art as well as his video work continued to grow both in quality and in scale.  Kevin’s got his start in the national marketing world by being hired to create the marketing concept as well as shoot and edit 3 short internal marketing films for GMR Marketing (a national, Chicago-based marketing firm).  These were shown at the W Hotel at Chicago’s City Center on May 6^th,  2002 as part of a UNILEVER national product release meeting for AXE line of men’s body sprays.  He was hired to create an event that included a live mock Riot in the streets and inside the Lobby of the W Hotel using actors & agency models.  There were professional lighting crews, video teams, production engineers, and 12 giant Plasma Screens displaying the eye-candy, animations, & short films that he created.  He was the floor director for the live event.

The 1 million dollar-2-day event was so successful that UNILEVER hired him again for the release for a Degree Gel antiperspirant event in the Cayman Islands.  He hosted the event attended by over 250 national sales reps in Georgetown, Grand Cayman which included the band Garbage as the finale playing live on an iron beach.

Kevin says the 4 secrets to his success are:

1-     Go with your strengths

2-     Trust your own instincts

3-     You gotta find your own reasons to believe

4-     Surround yourself with quality people

So when he isn’t inciting riots, creating Flash animations, doing graphic design work, creating short films, photographing funky New York weddings, painting sky-room murals, and engaging in guerrilla marketing tactics, he manages to paint in his studio and sell thru galleries in St. Augustine, Fl., Charlotte, NC, Asheville, NC, and Charleston, SC.  His work has been commissioned all over the US including, New York, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and of course, Charleston as well as Berlin, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and London, UK..

Karen Ann Myers is an artist, educator and curator. She received her MFA in Painting from Boston University and her BFA in Painting, Graphic Design and Art Education from Michigan State University. She is currently serving as the Executive Director at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, SC. She was instrumental in coordinating the Boston Young Contemporaries Exhibition, which has continued to be an annual exhibition at the 808 Commonwealth Gallery in Boston, MA. Myers has exhibited extensively throughout the country. Her paintings and prints exist nationally in private collections and have most recently been exhibited at the Robert Steele Gallery in NY, NY, at the Commonwealth Gallery in Boston, MA, the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC and Scoop Studios in Charleston, SC.

To learn more about Karen Ann Myers, please visit www.karenannmyers.com and www.reduxstudios.org

Husband and wife team, Geoff and Noel Richardson, own Lava Salon – an upbeat, non-traditional hair salon located in the Avondale area of West Ashley.  

 Geoff has lived most of his life in Charleston with a side stop as a child in France. He graduated from USC in 1995 and started a career in Advertising in Atlanta, GA.  In 2000, he returned to Charleston as a Business Development Manager for his father’s Meeting Planning company.  In 2001 he met Noel – who eventually helped him realize his purpose and fulfill his entrepreneurial dreams.  He has been cutting hair since 2004.

 Noel grew up in Mobile, AL.  After a long illustrious career as a temp, she finally decided to try her hand as a cosmetologist.  She attended and trained at an Aveda Share Institute in Mandeville, Louisiana.  Upon becoming licensed in 2000 and looking for a fresh start, she literally closed her eyes and picked a spot on the map, letting fate choose her destiny. She has been cutting hair in Charleston, SC ever since. 

 Geoff and Noel were married in 2004 and opened Lava Salon on September 18, 2006.  They have two beautiful boys, Cason & Kyler.

Joel Parker, born in Lexington, Virginia, attended the College of Charleston where he received degrees in Art History, Historical Preservation and Community Planning, and Studio Art. At the College of Charleston he studied with Cliff Peacock and Robert Russell.

After graduating, he spent a year working at Alkyon Arts and Antiques Gallery while volunteering for InterVarsity and preparing a portfolio for Graduate School. He was accepted into Washington University in St. Louis where he received his MFA in 2009 in Painting and was awarded a Paris Study Abroad Scholarship at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

 He currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina where he continues his work and furthers his Gallery experience as an artist in residence. He is presently working on an upcoming show with Scoop Studios this August.

After being born and reared in Charlotte, NC, Ashley Reid attended UNC-Chapel Hill where she earned a BA in Anthropology and studied global cultures, focusing on Kenya and Western Samoa.

Consistently drawn to the body adornment of the local people in these areas, Reid began to develop her own vision of designing clothing, which she honed while earning her MFA in Fashion Design from SCAD. After graduating, she went on to design her own line of custom jewelry, to intern with CFDA-nominated design team Costello Tagliapietra, and to win an International Fashion Design Competition through GenArt in NYC.

In 2008 she was selected as one of Charleston Fashion Week’s first ‘Emerging Local Designers’, and had the opportunity to show a collection on the runway, boosting her to launch her own sustainable clothing line, Clewis Reid, which is currently in its second season. Reid is also an Instructor at The Art Institute of Charleston in the Fashion Retail and Management program, where she has been teaching for close to two years.