Laura Spong

Laura Alice Miles was born in Nashville, Tennessee, one of three daughters of Thomas Edwin Miles, Sr. and Mary Jared Bryan.[1] She graduated cum laude from Vanderbilt University, where she majored in English and first took drawing classes, in 1948, married later that year, and moved with her husband to Columbia, South Carolina. Between 1949 and 1959 Spong had six children.[2]

Beginning in the mid-1950s Spong took art classes at the Richland Art School of the Columbia Museum of Art.[3] Among her instructors there were J. Bardin and Gil Petroff, two of the modern artists who introduced New York School paradigms to mid-century Columbia.[4] Spong became a member of the Columbia Artists' Guild and in 1957 was one of three winners of the guild's spring exhibition at the Columbia Museum of Art. From that year Spong was an active member of the Columbia art community, her work often recognized by inclusion in juried exhibitions and awards in the region.[5] After her husband's death in 1973, Spong worked for the Columbia Department of Parks and Recreation for ten years, but continued to paint and exhibit. It was not until the mid to late-1980s, however, that Spong became a full-time artist. She took a studio space at Vista Studios in downtown Columbia in 1991. She was enormously productive thereafter, with her work seen in many solo and group exhibitions, receiving awards, and being acquired for public and private collections.[6] She was active to the end of her life, completing works shortly before her death.[7]

From the beginning of her career, Spong worked mostly in a vernacular associated with Abstract Expressionism. Her mature style developed gradually, moving away from geometric to more organic gesture in the late 1980s and early 1990s.[8] According to Mary Bentz Gilkerson, Spong's mature work has more affinity with the paintings of Robert Motherwell and Joan Mitchell, than with Jackson Pollock. "Line in her work," according to Gilkerson, "moves between calligraphic and pictographic, alluding to, without ever specifying, representational images."[9]

• “Laura Spong: Fragments of the Whole.” University of South Carolina, Sumter, 2000
• "In Retrospect: Laura Spong, 1950-2006." McMaster Gallery, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2006
• "Laura Spong." Francis Marion University, Florence, SC, 2007
• "Laura Spong." Spartanburg Art Museum
• “Abstract Art in South Carolina, 1949-2012.” South Carolina State Museum, 2012
• "Laura Spong: Paintings." Young Harris College, Young Harris, GA, 2012
• "Stalwarts: Carl Blair & Laura Spong." Florence County Museum, Florence, SC, 2012
• "Independent Spirits: Women Artists of South Carolina." Columbia Museum of Art, 2015
• "Laura Spong: Once in a Green Moon." Sumter County Gallery of Art, Sumter, SC, 2017-2018

Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, SC Arts Commission, 2017[10]

• Columbia Museum of Art
• South Carolina State Museum
• Greenville County Museum of Art

• The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg
• The Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston
• Midlands Technical College, Columbia
• Metropolitan Convention Center, Columbia
• South Carolina Arts Commission

• Roefs, Wim, ed. (2011). Laura Spong, 2006-2011: Age as an Administrative Device. Columbia SC: if ART Gallery
• Roefs, Wim, ed. (2016). Laura Spong at 90: Six Decades in Painting. Columbia SC: if ART Gallery

• Laura Spong, American, 1926-2018