GOOD NEWS: Ladybugs to fly free at Magnolia Gardens

The ladybug street tile is a symbol against “senseless violence” in The Netherlands and is often placed on the sites of deadly crimes, according to Wikipedia.

More than 150,000 ladybugs will fly free July 25 at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens during the Lowcountry’s largest release of the environmentally-friendly insect.

A red Volkswagen beetle, resembling a gigantic ladybug, will arrive at 10 a.m. to signal the start of the ladybug release. Hundreds of children, some dressed in ladybug costumes, will scatter throughout gardens to find the perfect spot to release their share of ladybugs.

Prizes will be awarded for the best ladybug costumes. Categories will be children under two, three to six and seven and older. A face painter will attend the event. Car pooling and early arrival is encouraged. The event ends at 1 p.m.

The popular ladybug is a natural predator to harmful insects such as aphids, scale insects and other small insects.

Some of the groups that will setup nature displays include:

Audubon Center at Beidler Forest; Clemson Master Gardeners; Cypress Gardens, butterfly display; Grice Marine Laboratory at the College of Charleston; Keep Charleston Beautiful, an anti-litter campaign; Keeper of the Wild, a wildlife rescue center; Native Plant Society; Reptile Innovations; and Turtle Survival Center.

A $15 adult general garden admission is required to participate. The admission for children six to 12 is $10. Children under six are free.

In other good news:

Memorial poem. S.C. Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth, who coordinates the monthly Palmetto Poem for Charleston Currents, offered a moving tribute the victims of the Charleston church shooting in Sunday’s wrap-around memorial pages of The Post and Courier. Watch Wentworth read it for BBC.

Contemporary art finalists: The Gibbes Museum of Art and Society 1858 last week announced the names of six artists who are finalists for the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art, an annual award that has a cash prize of $10,000. More than 275 artists submitted applications. The winner will be announced September 17.

“Seeing the prize grow this year—not only in the number of applications, but also in the level of diversity and range of artistic medium—has been like a dream come true for Society 1858,” says Society 1858 President Jamieson Clair.

Finalists include:

• Aldwyth, a South Carolina artist who has worked in relative seclusion for several decades. “She creates intricate collages and assemblages, often monumental in scale, from found objects, appropriated images, text, and other elements.”
• Andrea Keys Connell, a Virginia sculpture and assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who “creates figurative works that challenge conventional notions of monuments, statuary and figurines”
• Kevin Jerome Everson, a Virginia filmmaker whose work uses scripted and documentary footage to examine the everyday lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent.
• George Jenne, a video artist who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., who “combines moving images with the spoken word to create uniquely narrative films.”
• Deborah Luster, a New Orleans photographer who has “created thousands of powerful, haunting portraits of prisoners housed in Louisiana.”
• Ebony G. Patterson, a mixed-media artist born in Jamaica who lives in Lexington, Ky. She “investigates the complex relationships between gender, politics, beauty, race and ritual in contemporary Jamaican culture.”