PICKENS — The Pickens County Museum of Art and History will be presenting two new exhibitions beginning this weekend.

The museum will host a reception from 6-8 p.m. Saturday to meet the artist featured in “Michael Brodeur: Looking Back, Looking Forward.”

Also opening that evening will be the exhibit “Keith Spencer: Recent Work.”

Both exhibitions will continue through August 14.

Brodeur is an associate professor in studio art at Furman University in Greenville. Born in Claremont, N.H., Brodeur has called Greenville his home for the past 15 years. After graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a B.A. in art, he went on to earn his M.F.A. in painting and drawing from Boston University, where he studied with Philip Guston.

When asked about the exhibition, which represents his work during the past 15 years in Greenville, Brodeur said, “At first glance my work is about many things: exacting formal balance, quality of edge, light, space and form, subtle surface and color, or abstraction through selective editing of shape, texture and detail.

“Although these surface readings are valid, collectively they create a poetic clarity through which metaphysical events occur: a tense ‘dialogue’ between two objects placed precisely on a table, a mysterious meeting at edge of shadow and light, and the resounding silence of solitude,” he said. “In particular, my work is a personal narrative. Each painting, every drawing is an autobiographical recounting. They all speak to relationship, either one with self or with others.”

Brodeur has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group shows including Contemporary Conversations, Works curated from the South Carolina Art Collection (Eleanor Heartney, curator), 701 Center for Contemporary Art, Columbia, From America, Museum of Contemporary Art, Minsk Belarus, Mostra, Cortona Italy, The South Carolina Triennial 2001, From the Studio at the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Hortt Annual at the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art, the Greater Midwest International Exhibition XX at Central Missouri State University and the second International Painting Exhibition Competition, Lessedra Gallery in Sofia Bulgaria. His work has appeared twice in New American Paintings, editions #58 and #100.

Among the public institutions that hold his work are The Emrys Foundation in Greenville, Columbia College in Columbia, LaMar Dodd Art Center at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga., the South Carolina Arts Commission, The South Carolina State Museum and the Greenville County Museum of Art.

His work is also in many private collections. He is a 1997 recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Brodeur’s teaching credits include Chair of the Foundations Program at the New England School of Art and Design in Boston and faculty at Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton, Fla. He moved to Greenville in 1999 to create and chair the Visual Arts Department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities.

To learn more about Brodeur, visit his website at http://michaelbrodeur.blogspot.com or Furman University’s photo sets at http://www.flickr.com/photos/furmanart/sets/72157626098980391.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by South Carolina Bank & Trust, Pickens Savings & Loan and Robinson Funeral Home, Crematory and Memorial Gardens. The Pickens County Museum of Art and History is funded in part by Pickens County, members and friends of the museum and a grant from the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For more information, contact the museum at (864) 898-5963 or visit www.pickenscountymuseum.org.