Meet the artists to be featured at Columbia airport in 2024

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The Columbia Metropolitan Airport (CAE) has revealed the Midlands-based artists that have been selected to have their works featured in individual exhibits in 2024-25.

Anthony Lewis, Brandi Roberts, Ozon Wilson and Brenda Peake will each be featured on a quarterly basis throughout the 2024 calendar year and into the first quarter of 2025, according to a news release.

“We are thrilled every year to have the response that we do from Midland’s artists interested in participating in this now coveted program,” said Kim Crafton, vice president of marketing and air service development at Columbia Metropolitan Airport, in the release. “CAE’s Art in the Airport program, managed and run by Marketing Manager Samantha Kingsmore, allows for us to provide a warm welcome from the region to our passengers as they land in Columbia, SC. It creates an immediate sense of place, while also adding eye catching, one-of-a-kind art to the walls of the airport.”

Below are bios for each of the artists selected to participate in the 2024-25 Art in the Airport program:

Anthony Lewis (March-May 2024)

Anthony Lewis is an abstract figurative painter and photographer. He graduated from the University of South Carolina, where he studied at the School of Visual Art and Design and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Studio Art with a concentration on painting. He likes the use of different techniques and mediums such as acrylic, oil, charcoal, mixed-media, assemblage, and black and white film photography. He merges small scale vintage black and white photographs and larger scale paintings of black people in his paintings to form a collage. In his work, he likes to explore the good the bad and the injustices around African-American experience in the United States such as, mass incarceration, black on black crime, police brutality, mental health, suicide, the beauty of being black and the everyday struggles of the black man, woman, and child dating back to the early 1900s throughout the great black migration, Harlem Renaissance and well up into the 70s.

Brandi Roberts (June-August 2024)

Brandi Roberts is a full-time artist and creator of Fantasy Floorplans — a career she “invented” based off drawing floorplans of fictional homes. She has a bachelor’s degree in interior design and drafts her art the “old-fashioned” way — with pen and paper. Her love of drawing, pop-culture, and television is what inspired her career. To date, she has created 100+ floorplans for fictional television homes (featuring everything from The Andy Griffith Show to Downton Abbey)  and has been featured on NBC’s “The Today Show,” in Family Circle magazine, on Entertainment Weekly’s website, in the National Post, and many more. When she’s not drawing a new floorplan, she enjoys watching television or “conducting research” as she calls it.

Ozon Wilson (September-October 2024)

Ozon Wilson — born and raised in Columbia — is a self-taught avant-garde visual artist and photographer. He uses his artistic ability and imagination to create wildly imaginative surrealist art. This type of artwork allows him to create and explore boundaries or inhibitions, as his work is a combination of thoughts, experiences, imagination, and dreams. He refuses to conform to artistic norms, which he believes allows him uninhibited creative freedom.

Brenda Peake (December 2024 – February 2025)

Brenda Peake — also born and raised in Columbia — is a painter, who primarily works with oils. Once a bakery owner alongside her mother, Brenda has since retired from the bakery and focuses on her true passion: painting. She initially started working with watercolors, but soon found herself drawn to oils and is fascinated by the way pigments react to each other, so she is constantly experimenting with new color combinations. She is a proud member of the American Impressionist Society and the Crooked Creek Art League.