SHAUN MCCALLUM ’08
McCallum fosters community for Upstate artists while giving back with an endowment and tribute to his father
Shaun McCallum’s decision to pursue an art degree was as much pragmatic as it was ambitious.
“When I went through the graphic communications program at Clemson, it had a 93 percent placement rate and an above-average starting salary. Plus, you were required to work two internships, and they paid you,” he explains. “I was like, ‘This is a really good program for someone who wants to be adjacent to the arts but is strapped for cash.’”
Shaun, who was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and graduated from Westside High School in Anderson, South Carolina, was artistically inclined from a young age but didn’t imagine he could make a career out of it until his high school art teacher, Ellen Spainhour, submitted some of his work to an art show, unbeknownst to him.
“I would doodle and stuff when I was a kid, and classmates would pay me a dollar to draw Wolverine for them,” he says. “But I didn’t take my first art class until my senior year of high school. … She believed in me, like the best teachers do.”
After graduating from Clemson University, Shaun worked in the packaging industry for a few years, specializing in color matching across a wide range of substrates. Eventually, he found himself craving a more independent work life, free to pursue his own creative visions.
Through a stroke of luck, he and his wife, Morgan McCallum, who is also an artist, purchased an office building in the heart of Greenville that had been remodeled into an artist studio. With a few months and a lot of elbow grease, they reshaped it into a space with 13 studios they could rent to local artists at minimal cost, leaving some space for their own artistic pursuits.
Every studio in the new facility, which he named Good Art Co., was spoken for within days of putting the word out. Today, Good Art Co. is a thriving nonprofit that aims to bring local artists together to inspire one another and engage the community.
“We haven’t had a space empty for more than a couple of weeks, and that’s usually because I was deciding between the applicants,” he says.
Shaun’s father, Ed McCallum Jr., was also an alumnus who earned a civil engineering degree from Clemson in 1986. To give back to their alma mater and help civil engineering students, Shaun established an endowment in his father’s name after his passing in 2013. He says he still lives by his father’s advice.
“He used to say that the most important thing you can invest in is yourself and your education,” Shaun recalls. “So, making opportunities for other people to do just that seemed like a good way to honor his memory. Both the endowment and Good Art Co. do that, and that’s very meaningful to me — and selfishly, it feels good to be nice.”
In addition to the studio spaces, Shaun opened a section of the building as an art gallery that has gained popularity and caters to artists who haven’t yet established themselves. Good Art Co. uses its gallery to host free public events and workshops throughout the year.
Shaun sees the future of art in the Upstate as spokes on a larger wheel, with Greenville as the hub.
“I think it’s going to be a lot more collaborative and less commercially focused, with more group shows and fewer solo shows,” he says. “A lot of folks all around the county with little studios in the woods and in their garages and barns will eventually get studios in the city. It’s like a gravitational pull; you need to move to the hub of the wheel to have a shot.”
