Unseen
A body of work created by artist Elizabeth DuBose Porcher Mahoney, born in April 1908 of Porcher’s Bluff in Mt. Pleasant. Contributed by her niece, Helen Bamberg of Awendaw, SC.
This exhibit includes only a few of the many unseen works created by “Betty” predating 1940. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from South Carolina University, taught in Aiken and Columbia and held one exhibit at the Charleston Gibb’s Museum before she passed in 2001 at the age of 93.
If you’re staying safe or in quarantine we have a live virtual tour! Check out the link to the show HERE with the artist’s dear friend Lou Edens and niece Helen Bamberg.
“Betty” of Porcher’s Bluff
Elizabeth DuBose Porcher Mahoney, known to her family and friends as Betty, was born April 30, 1908, on Porcher's Bluff, South Carolina. She was the child of Philip Gendron Porcher, a descendant of Huguenots who farmed sea island cotton on Oakland Plantation, and Mary Frances Cordes Porcher, his second wife, who had been orphaned at an early age and raised in the homes of various relatives on the Santee Delta, including Harrietta and the Wedge.
Betty was the youngest of fifteen children, and she was named Elizabeth in memory of her father’s first born, who had died in childhood. Philip himself died when Betty was just a year old. Mary Frances struggled to continue farming at Oakland, turning from cotton to asparagus, but she eventually rented out the farm and moved her family, first to Mt. Pleasant and then to downtown Charleston.
Betty enrolled at the College of Charleston hoping to become an architect, but she disliked the required math courses and soon became notorious among her friends for doodling during class. During the Great Depression, while she was still a student, she was hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project to paint scenery for the Dock Street Theater. She studied on a scholarship at the Gibbes Art Gallery and worked at the Charleston Museum as Curator of Education. Eventually she resumed her studies and graduated from the University of South Carolina, where she specialized in fabric design, an influence that can be clearly seen in her striking botanical paintings.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Betty painted portraits on commission. During World War II, she was a volunteer with the American Red Cross. Later she taught art in the Aiken and Columbia school systems. Betty married John Joseph Mahoney in 1949, and together they created a successful automatic vending machine business that operated in several states. The Mahoneys travelled the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and a trip to Australia inspired many of the paintings in this show. They returned to live in the house at Porcher’s Bluff on Copahee Sound that Betty’s father had built after the hurricane of 1893 destroyed the original dwelling. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo ravaged this house and damaged or destroyed many of Betty’s paintings.
Elizabeth Porcher Mahoney died at the age of 93 in 2001. She had one major exhibit during her lifetime, at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, and except for that and a reception in her honor at the Museum on the Common in Mt. Pleasant in November, 1997, her work has remained mostly unseen. The McClellanville Arts Council would like to thank Helen Bamberg for putting this show together and Lou Edens for providing biographical information about the artist and her family.
