One of our favorite things about our Artist Residency Program is that we never quite know who is going to walk through the door—or what kind of work they’ll bring with them.
Our most recent artist-in-residence was Dustin Eckhardt, a muralist and illustrator from Rockford, Illinois, who came to Charleston as one of the featured artists for this year’s MELT Mural Festival. Dustin’s work is colorful, graphic, and wonderfully thoughtful, often exploring ideas of ecology, curiosity, and introspection through bold illustrative imagery.
This year, MELT took over Building 64 at the Navy Yard in North Charleston, bringing together muralists from across the country and Canada to transform walls into enormous works of art. Over several days, artists painted throughout the site, culminating in a free public festival filled with live mural painting, music, food, local vendors, and opportunities for people to experience the creative process firsthand.
We were incredibly proud to be a sponsor of MELT this year.
As gallery owners, we obviously spend a lot of our lives thinking about art that hangs on walls. But there is something pretty magical about watching art become the wall.
Murals remove so many of the traditional barriers between people and art. You don’t need to buy a ticket. You don’t need to know anything about painting. You don’t even need to intend to see art that day. You might simply be walking to work, riding your bike, heading to dinner, or driving through a neighborhood when suddenly there it is—a twenty-foot painting staring back at you.
We love that.
It’s also one of the reasons MELT feels so aligned with what we’ve always hoped to do at RLS. We believe art is at its best when it becomes part of everyday life—when it creates conversations, changes the feeling of a place, makes someone stop for a second, or simply adds a little unexpected beauty to an ordinary day.
MELT describes public art as a way to bring together people, story, place, and vision, and that idea really resonates with us.
Having Dustin stay with us during the festival made the whole experience even more special. Our residency program has welcomed artists to Charleston for years, and one of its great joys is getting to spend time with artists whose practices may look completely different from our own. A muralist thinks about scale differently. They think about architecture, neighborhoods, sight lines, weather, ladders, lifts, and how an image will live within a public space.
And yet, underneath all of that, the impulse is remarkably familiar: make something meaningful and put it into the world.
We loved having Dustin at the gallery, we loved being part of MELT, and we especially loved watching art spill beyond galleries and museums and out into the streets of North Charleston.
Because the more places we encounter art, the richer our city becomes.
And frankly, we think Charleston could always use a few more painted walls.
