ON DISPLAY: April 3 — June 13, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, April 3, from 5 - 9PM
CONTINUING RECEPTION: Friday, May 1, from 5 - 9PM in conjunction with our Sulfur Street Fair
CLOSING RECEPTION: Friday, June 5, from 5 - 9PM
PANEL DISCUSSION: Saturday, May 23rd, at 2PM
Featuring local artists and friends of Preston: Marcus Kenney, Betsy Cain, Mary Hartman, and Lily Kate Conneff, Executive and Sales Assistant at Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta. Led by ARTS Southeast Programs Director and Curator, Jon Witzky.
ARTS Southeast is proud to present the work of Preston Orr. After Orr’s passing in 2022, his artwork had been entrusted to the care of artist and friend, Mary Hartman, including dozens of paintings, sculptures, experiments and errata.
Preston James Orr (1968–2022) was born in Columbia, South Carolina and studied fine art at the College of Charleston before eventually settling in Savannah. Here, he became part of a close-knit community of artists, and was known for his love of kayaking and the outdoors.
As Mary Hartman wrote, “Preston Orr remembered everything. He was a seeker in the extreme, though he also liked to talk about what he called ‘dirt’—the small, the nothing, the ordinary made extraordinary, the tedious turned sublime.”
Preston’s work expresses something ineffable, something beyond language, and yet it constantly gestures toward it. Visual signifiers hint at words: errant marks that resemble fragments of text, like spray-painted graffiti on bathroom walls. A punk spirit, grimy and fearless, pervades the work, evocative of the rawness of late 70’s New York. Laid bare in resin, Preston elevated materials that even the most adventurous artists overlook or discard: toilet paper, caviar, crack lighters from beneath the floorboards of an abandoned house.
As Preston himself wrote: “When I am in the act of making my work, I have a dialogue with myself. These dialogues usually hinge on whatever events are unfolding in my life at the present time. Invariably, I return to my youth to excavate certain memories (sometimes just faint stains of memories) to which I then assign symbols or characters which embody the essence of that memory.”
Much of the work in this exhibition was made by a process of pouring resins or using a fiberglass spray-up method. Preston would pour or spray the substrate directly on the floor of his space, embedding visual elements to the resins and glass before it cured. This method acted not only as a way for Preston to reveal the artwork, but also as a tactile reminder of the space in which it was created.
Those spaces — pre-SCAD gym Orleans Hall, a multi-story building on early aughts Broughton Street, an old abattoir turned studio on Louisville Road known as The Meat, and 2301 Bull Street, now home to ARTS Southeast — were shared by some of Savannah’s most beloved artists: Matt Hebermehl, Betsy Cain, Marcus Kenney, Zechariah Vincent, Melinda Borysevicz, Jameid Ferrin, and Mary Hartman. The artists who shared space and time with Preston form part of the same atmosphere that shaped the work presented here.
As Preston reflected: “Frankly, I do not think there is a need to find my inner child because I do not think he was ever lost. However, I do believe the preservation and revisitation of childhood for the sake of achieving essence and purity plays a vital role in the development of my paintings and myself.”
This childlike wonder that Preston describes is evident in the fearlessness and material curiosity that define his work – what Mary Hartman once summarized simply: surface is key, the more bruised the better.
