Art in the Airport

NOTCE: Due to ongoing construction in the connector with our terminal expansion project, we have decided to pause Art in the Airport for 2025. We are currently looking for other areas around the terminal to display artwork and continue the program, and will announce any updates as soon as we can.

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In 2020, Columbia Metropolitan Airport launched its “Art in the Airport” program – which showcases works of art created by artists right here in the Midlands. The art program is also intended to enhance the travelers’ experience while creating a sense of place within the airport. Below are the selected artists, thus far.

2024-2025 Artists

Top left to right: Anthony Lewis and Brandi Roberts. Bottom left to right: Brenda Peake and Ozon Wilson

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-November 2024)

Ozon Wilson – born and raised in Columbia, SC – 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, SC – 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.

2022-2023 Artists

Top left to right: Cait Maloney and Laura Rohlfing. Bottom left to right: Marie Boyd and Emily Ward

Laura Rohlfing 
Laura Rohlfing lives in Leesville, South Carolina. She and her wife are both retired and spend several months out of the year traveling and exploring new places. Rohlfing attended Harris School of Art in the early 80’s for two years, and studied oil painting- but over time, learned that she much preferred working with graphite. She likes shades of gray and the effects of shadows and light on a picture… and the fact that she is able to erase.

Cait Maloney 
Cait Maloney is a published illustrator, award-winning graphic designer, muralist, and experienced exhibition artist. In 2008, she earned her bachelor’s degree with a focus in illustration from Syracuse University. She is currently senior art director at Columbia, SC based integrated communications firm, Flock and Rally. Alongside that, she also manages Cait Maloney Creative focusing on specialty illustration, design, and mural projects, working locally, nationally, and sometimes internationally.

Marie Boyd
Marie Boyd is a writer, illustrator, artist, educator, and scholar. She creates quilled illustrations and art. She collects colorful paper and then cuts it into narrow strips, which she uses to create modern, bold, colorful images that literally come off of the page. She loves spending time outdoors and draws inspiration from the natural world.

Emily Ward
Emily Ward is an acrylic painter in Columbia, SC where she lives with her husband Travis and their dog, Dexter. Emily’s passion for all things art related began in kindergarten with an incredible art teacher who inspired and encouraged her to create. After she was awarded 1st place at the SC State Fair, it became her lifelong dream to be a professional artist.

2021-2022 Artists

Top left to right: Harold Branham, Sonya Diimmler; Bottom left to right: Christopher Garvey, Ija Charles.

Harold Branham
Harold was born and currently resides in Blythewood, South Carolina. His interest for art was piqued by his first set of crayons that he received in grade school. After graduation, Harold was employed at one of the South’s major sign companies as a sketch artist. While employed with the sign company, Harold also learned to paint signs, but always wanted to be able to paint what he saw, felt and loved. His hometown may now be home to red lights, fast food stops and motels but the artist’s favorite subjects remain old farmhouses, country stores and pastures.

Sonya Diimmler
Award winning artist Sonya Diimmler paints colorful South Carolina lake and landscapes. Sonya’s work has earned awards at the SC State Fair, Union County Arts Council and Crooked Creek Art League. She has participated in a number of community art projects including her popular “Ship of Drools” sailboat from The Arts Sail into Chapin. Sonya paints full time from her home studio in Columbia, South Carolina.

Ija Charles
Ija Charles is a self-taught artist and entrepreneur from Columbia, South Carolina. The muses for her art range from everyday people to diverse, samplings from her surrounding community, lived experiences and culture. These visual impressions are then reimagined and reconstructed in her own creative way through multiple mediums.

Chris Garvey
Chris Garvey was born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1979. He grew up outside of Memphis and spent his early years experimenting in making art, but never truly pursuing a career in painting. In 2001 he joined the Navy and spent 10 years living overseas in various parts of Italy. Being honorably discharged in 2009, Chris works full-time and paints in his free time, while raising his daughter Charlotte.