On the afternoon of Thursday, August 27, 2026, the Columbia Museum of Art will host a half-hour gallery tour that feels less like a standard museum program and more like the closing of a very long circle. Collection Spotlight: All Familiar Things, led by CMA trustee Joseph Bruce, will be the last guided look at the exhibition Jasper Johns: All Familiar Things before it comes off the walls on August 30. The tour will focus on Jasper Johns's remarkable series Four Seasons (1987), widely regarded as one of his most autobiographical works and a rare personal glimpse into an artist long known for his privacy and emotional reserve. Free with membership, South Carolina residency, or general admission, the program is supported by the Art Bridges Foundation's Access for All initiative and by a grant from the Dominion Energy Charitable Foundation.
The scene could hardly have been imagined in the 1950s. The man whose name now draws audiences from around the region once occupied a single room inside the old museum on Taylor Street, tending to a small satellite space called the Fort Jackson Gallery. Jasper Johns worked at the CMA while studying at the University of South Carolina and then again while stationed at Fort Jackson. That the artist at the center of this exhibition lived here before any of that fame, worked in the museum's employ, and attended the University of South Carolina just down the street is a fact the museum never tires of retelling.
Jasper Johns was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1930 and raised in South Carolina. He attended three semesters at the University of South Carolina, where he built lifelong friendships with his teachers. He was then stationed at Fort Jackson from 1951 to 1953, the same period he served as curator for the museum's Fort Jackson Gallery. He exhibited around town and, in 1953, moved from Columbia to New York to seriously pursue a career as an artist. There he became fascinated with ordinary symbols: numbers, flags, and targets. Those symbols, he later said, existed as clear facts "not involving an aesthetic hierarchy." This radical attitude changed the art world and led to such pivotal movements as Minimalism and Pop art.
He did not forget Columbia. In 1999, to mark the CMA's 50th anniversary, Johns, persuaded by his old friend and former USC teacher Dr. Robert Ochs, gifted the museum with a collection of works on paper from his personal holdings. These are by Johns himself and by artists he admired, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. The exhibition All Familiar Things, curated by David Walls, former curatorial assistant, with the support of Hollis Josey, former curatorial intern, draws on that gift and other CMA holdings, tracing the artist's major themes: ordinary objects, the history of art, and personal reflection.
The exhibition's title comes from Johns's own 2021 observation: "All familiar things can open into strange worlds." The exhibition displays that idea with a selection spanning his long career. But it is Four Seasons, completed around 1987, that the museum singles out. The series, widely regarded as one of his most autobiographical works, offers a rare personal glimpse of an artist long known for his privacy and emotional reserve. It combines all three of his thematic concerns—everyday objects, art history, and personal reflection—within a single arrangement. As the artist once remarked, "In my early work I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions, but eventually it seemed like a losing battle." Four Seasons is the battle openly fought.
For visitors, the tour is a final invitation to experience a homecoming. Columbia is the place where Jasper Johns, one of America's most important contemporary artists, learned to make art and worked at the museum. Now, on the last week of an exhibition that carries his name, a trustee will stand among the flags and seasons and retell the story one more time before the lights dim on the gallery. For the museum, it is a way of saying that the art from a small southern city can open into the strangest and most beautiful worlds of all.