After the fire: rebuilding a home and a life
One night in May 2020, a blaze on Turner's Rock erased a lifetime of collecting in a matter of hours. The marshfront house at Pojo Point, where Charlie Ellis lived and curated a sprawling array of found and outsider art, burned to the ground. Thousands of pieces—built, painted, scavenged, and saved over decades—were gone by morning. "It's all gone," he said. Three words, heavy enough to bend the air.
For Ellis, nearly 80 and still in go-mode, the loss was not just about value on a spreadsheet. The objects had a heartbeat, the kind you only notice when it stops. Outsider art is made by people who didn’t wait for an invitation—yard sculptors, sign painters, tinkerers, makers with no gallery plan and no patience for rules. Much of it lives outdoors, sun-faded and storm-tested, which made his collection feel alive. The fire didn’t just destroy a property. It stripped a local archive that had grown in plain sight.
He did what he’s always done: he went back to work. On the same footprint where the house stood, Ellis is building again. Fresh framing. New siding. Wiring pulled and inspected. “It’s all-new. We’re still working on it, but the electricity and heat are on,” he says. It sounds simple, but that line carries months of phone calls, material runs, and the kind of patience learned only through long, stubborn practice.
Rebuilding at the marsh is not a weekend project. It means engineering for wind, humidity, and salt. It means balancing what insurance covers against what the heart wants back. It means starting early to beat the heat and stopping late because, well, what else are you going to do—quit? Age, in his case, looks more like mileage than a limit. People who know him talk about the same thing: that even-tempered, glass-half-full rhythm he brings to long jobs.
The personal hit still hovers. The collection had stood on the edge of the water like a small, stubborn museum. There were no velvet ropes, no plaques, no docent whispering rules. Just an open-air reminder that art can be both fragile and hard to kill. That dual truth sits behind his rebuild. The walls are new, but the idea—making space for art and for artists—hasn’t budged.
His circle has watched him bounce back the way he always does—quietly, without speeches. Friends and colleagues say his optimism has kept them steady through more than one rough patch. The fire could have ended the story; instead, it shifted the plot. The worksite hums, the lights come on, and there’s another calendar item: the Savannah Local Artist Market, better known as SLAM, returns next month.
SLAM returns: a market that keeps the arts community moving
SLAM is an outdoor market built to make art easy to find and easy to buy. It’s free. It’s open to everyone. You don’t need to know anyone to walk in and look around. Artists set up under the sky; families browse; food trucks idle nearby; and the day runs on a simple idea: artists need customers, and customers need to see the work in person.
Ellis is helping steer the third year of SLAM while managing the house rebuild. That’s a tricky balance—construction in the morning, vendor calls in the afternoon, a dozen logistics in between. But if you’ve met him, you get it. He likes the puzzle. He likes the push to make things happen. The market isn’t a side project; it’s a way of keeping the ecosystem healthy after years when galleries tightened and many artists went online out of necessity.
What can visitors expect? Rows of tents with paintings, prints, ceramics, metalwork, and the kinds of odd, joyful pieces that only show up when makers are left alone with time and tools. Prices that let you take something home without a second mortgage. The casual conversations that turn browsers into buyers and buyers into future regulars. Food trucks help the day feel less like a transaction and more like a neighborhood block party with better lighting.
For artists, a one-day market can be the difference between limping through a month and hitting stride. Direct sales matter. So do contacts, commissions, and the moment when a stranger says, “Your work is exactly what I was looking for.” Markets also keep skills sharp: you learn what stops people in their tracks, how to talk about your process, and how to price work without apologizing for it.
SLAM has another purpose that’s easy to miss if you’re only counting transactions: visibility. Not everyone is ready for a formal show. Not every series fits a white-wall gallery. Outdoor markets absorb the edges of the scene—the emerging, the experimental, the in-between. That’s a feature, not a flaw. It’s where a community sees itself as it is, not as a label.
Ellis’s roots help explain why he keeps doing this. His grandfather is the namesake of the Charles Ellis Montessori Academy, a point of pride locals know well. That legacy is less about buildings and more about showing up. Education, service, art—different lanes, same road. SLAM fits that pattern: open the door wider and let more people in.
Back at Pojo Point, the rebuild keeps a steady beat. Cabinets will follow wiring. Paint will follow drywall. The first framed piece will land on a new nail. After losing thousands of objects in the fire, Ellis isn’t trying to re-create a past that can’t come back. He’s making room for what’s next—new walls, new work, new stories to set against the marsh.
There’s a larger lesson in his year-to-year persistence. Disasters don’t just take stuff; they take context. They edit local memory. Rebuilding restores more than shelter. It puts a stake back in the ground and says: this is still a place where people make things, share them, and argue about which piece is best while the food truck line moves slow.
That’s the energy heading into SLAM’s third run. The market will be free, the food trucks will be there, and the artists will show up because they know the crowd will, too. If you’ve watched Ellis work, you know how this goes. He flips a switch—electricity and heat are on—and then he keeps going. House first. Artists next. The rest follows.
