AVERY GALLERIES

Galleries and Exhibition Spaces
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	Changing Gallery Houses exhibits produced and developed at the Avery Research Center from existing collections.

	McKinley Washington Auditorium This space served as the auditorium for the former Avery Normal Institute, and is named in honor of Avery friend and supporter, the Honorable McKinley Washington, a former South Carolina legislator. Public programs and temporary exhibitions are featured in this space.

	Cox Gallery The Benjamin F. Cox and Jeannette K. Cox Exhibition Gallery is named in honor of Avery Normal Institute principal (1915-1936), Benjamin Cox and his wife by their son and philanthropist, Dr. Wendell Cox of Detroit. The gallery houses temporary exhibitions of the Center.

	Classroom This space, arranged in seminar style, is used for public programs and workshops. It is also the starting point for public tours accompanied by a video on the Avery Research Center.

	Sea Island Artifacts Exhibit Area The descendants of enslaved Africans who worked the rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia are known as Gullah people. Gullah culture is a combination of West African cultures that survived on Lowcountry plantations where few Europeans lived, and where some facets of European culture were adopted and Africanized.

	Philip Simmons Area Philip Simmons was born June 9, 1912. He began specializing in ornamental iron work in 1938. His unmatched volume of decorative work in the form of wrought iron gates, window grills, balconies and fences can be found throughout the City of Charleston. Simmons was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship, the highest honor bestowed on a traditional artist in the United States by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1982. He was similarly recognized for "lifetime achievement" by the South Carolina legislature and inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Fame in 1994. He has also been recognized as a "Living National Treasure" by the Smithsonian Institution.

	Avery Room This recreated 19th century social studies classroom serves as a memorial to the Avery Normal Institute in observance of the enormous impact the school had on the education and the development of black leadership in the Charleston community, state, and nation.