Artists Say 'Yeah, That,' to Greenville, S.C.

Greenville, S.C. is drawing domestic in-migrants of all ages and household types from all around the U.S. with its affordability and a reinvigorated arts scene that is breathing new life into the city overall.

The former mill town has been steadily working to reinvent its identity into Portland, Ore. 2.0 since roughly 2012, though its reputation as an art-centric small town in 2005, with the advent of its award-winning 3-day Artisphere festival that now has an annual budget of $2 million and 144 participating artists, up from 48 a decade ago. Realtor.com reports that Greenville's artist community is mainly peopled by established artists, rather than of the up-and-coming-young-starving-and-broke variety in other artists' communities, and as a result, newcomers are buying homes on the higher end and are building studios.

Keith Grace, a mixed-media painter, and his wife, Shari, a graphic artist and stained-glass sculptor, came from Rockford, Ill. Renowned printmaker Kent Ambler and his wife, Peggy, came from Roswell, N.M. And Yuri Tsuzuki, a sculptor and painter, relocated from Bogota, Colombia.

“We came looking for artists,” says Mr. Ambler, who is 47. He and his wife wanted to live somewhere warm, but California was too expensive and they didn’t think Florida was a good fit for his artwork. When a teaching job opened, they moved in 2000 to Seneca, S.C., about 30 miles west of Greenville, and bought a 1,800-square-foot studio for $88,000, selling it seven years later for $210,000.

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