Welcome to The Red Piano The Red Piano Art Gallery is South Carolina’s oldest professional gallery of fine art. Located in the historic Red Piano building at 220 Cordillo Parkway, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, the gallery is an American fine art firm specializing in representational drawings, paintings and sculpture by the nation’s leading artists. Gallery owners since 1994, J. Ben Whiteside and Lyn Whiteside acquired Morris & Whiteside Galleries in January 2015 and combined gallery operations under the Red Piano Art Gallery firm with which they have been associated since 2002. The nationally recognized gallery features works by Joe Bowler, Elaine Coffee, Jane DeDecker, Kim English, Glenna Goodacre, Jonathan Green, Walter Greer, Michael Harrell, Clark Hulings, Karin Jurick, Michael B. Karas, Milt Kobayashi, Dan McCaw, Dean Mitchell, Pino, Sandy Scott, Linda St. Clair and Stephen Scott Young, among others. Whiteside is a Member of the National Sculpture Society, a member of the Low Country of South Carolina Foundation Public Art Committee and is a licensed South Carolina auctioneer with over twenty years of fine art experience in South Carolina, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. History of The Red Piano The Red Piano Art Gallery has been the premier art gallery on Hilton Head Island for over thirty-two years. Established in July 1969 (just after the first Heritage Golf Classic), the gallery is located in a romantic hammock of palmettos and pines at the intersection of Cordillo Parkway and South Forest Beach Drive, near Sea Pines Plantation ocean gate. Gallery founders Alan and Mary Palmer were avid collectors and jazz enthusiasts. Alan – a former illustrator for Coca Cola – played the saxophone, and the early years of the gallery featured works by Ralph Ballentine, Joe Bowler, Joe DeMers, Ray Ellis, Jim Palmer, Walter Palmer, George Plante and Coby Whitmore with champagne receptions around the famous “red piano”, a symbol of hot jazz. Sales during the early days of the gallery were sparse and the Palmers often referred to the business as the “piano in the red.” Later, the gallery became a weekly meeting place for the historic Round Table, a group of prominent artists who brought in guest artists that included Ben Stahl, Reuben Tam and others. The gallery has also presented works by Andrew Wyeth and subsequent owners have embraced important 19th and 20th century American paintings for serious collectors from throughout the world. In August 2002 the gallery was acquired by Morris & Whiteside Galleries, Inc., also of Hilton Head Island, and has since specialized in representational paintings and sculpture by the nation’s leading artists.
