The SCAD Museum of Art has unveiled an exciting fall season filled with thought-provoking exhibitions that promise to engage visitors in unique and culturally significant experiences.
This season brings together a range of compelling works, spanning various mediums and approaches, all centered around the themes of identity and human potential for transformation, triumph, and joy.
One highlight of the upcoming season is the debut of artist Tyler Mitchell’s ambitious exhibition. Mitchell, an ascendant talent, showcases his creative prowess in a collection of photographs and sculptures that explore the realm of the domestic imaginary. This marks a significant moment as it’s his first solo museum exhibition in his home state of Georgia.
Another intriguing exhibit comes from Nina Chanel Abney, this year’s Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecturer. Abney uses large-format collage works to delve into the realms of Black queerness and masculine-of-center womanhood through coming-of-age narratives.
Iconic artist Erwin Wurm’s viewer-activated exhibition offers a glimpse into his wide-ranging practice and his connection to fashion. Meanwhile, influential painter Yu Hong takes audiences on a captivating journey with epic works and small studies that draw inspiration from canonical art history while infusing her memories and contemporary experiences of a shifting Chinese culture.
Multidisciplinary artist Nevin Aladağ’s site-specific commission explores the concept of belonging and hybridity, adding another layer of depth to the museum’s offerings. Digital aesthetics and technologies take center stage in artist and game developer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s exhibit, which aims to provoke a more conscious understanding of the Black trans experience.
M. Florine Démosthène, a leading artist, weaves aesthetic and spiritual influences into a new body of cosmological mixed-media works and experimental sculpture. Emerging photographer and SCAD alum Xiwen Zhu delves into the hidden meanings within modern society, seeking dreamlike glimmers in the darkness.
“We’re so excited to share this premier group of exhibitions with guests of the SCAD Museum of Art. This season has something for everyone and a visit is sure to be a meaningful experience, with nine new exhibitions by the world’s most important contemporary artists and the debut of new artworks in all media that are sure to impress,” said Daniel S. Palmer, Chief Curator at SCADMOA.
These exhibitions, while showcasing artistic talent, also reflect the depth and relevance of SCAD’s renowned degree programs, ranging from painting, photography, and sculpture to fashion, fibers, industrial design, interactive design, game development, and visual effects.
“SCAD offers students and our hometowns four of the finest teaching museums in the world, and this fall’s exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art prove that claim in plenitude. Visitors will luxuriate in the playful whimsy of Erwin Wurm’s sculptures, reflect on gender and politics in Nina Chanel Abney’s collage works, and find truth and power in the photography of Tyler Mitchell, the first Black photographer to lens a cover of Vogue. The SCAD Museum of Art reifies the museum of the future, and the best part is you can see it all right now,” said Paula Wallace, SCAD Founder and President.
For more information, visit scadmoa.org
Featured exhibitions:
GROUP EXHIBITION
Likewise: Artists Portraying Artists
On view through Dec. 18, 2023
Unpacking the complexities of artist portraiture, Likewise: Artists Portraying Artists delves into the genre’s unique capacity to immortalize intimate moments previously only shared between portraitist and muse. The exhibition offers insight on the depicted artists, while paying keen attention to the portraitists, who delicately balance rendering the likeness and character of the sitter with their own perspectives and creative vision. Drawn from the SCAD Museum of Art Permanent Collection, the featured paintings and photographs present a diverse array of creative figures captured individually or with others in scenes that represent their daily lives and practices, revealing the frequent blurring of the two worlds. Each work also makes visible artists’ intertwined networks, recording romantic, amiable, parasocial, or professional relationships. Ultimately, Likewise exposes the ways in which these works are as telling of the portraitist as they are the sitter, preserving an exchange of admiration, inspiration, or complication between artists.
TYLER MITCHELL
Domestic Imaginaries
On view through Dec. 31, 2023
In his most ambitious exhibition to date, Tyler Mitchell (b. 1995, Atlanta) displays photographs innovatively printed on textiles in an immersive installation alongside new “altar” sculptures. Strung from a zig-zagging clothesline, Mitchell’s latest iteration of the iconic form stretches nearly 300 feet. The hanging prints depict pastoral scenes and Black bodies, drawing inspiration from Gordon Parks’ photography and the landscape of the southeastern U.S., where Mitchell was born and raised. Complementing this dramatic, enveloping experience, Mitchell’s sculptures reference historic domestic objects, evoking memory and belonging in ways that are deeply personal. The exhibition’s poetic nature articulates an attentiveness to the quieter moments of life and the potential for beauty and transformation in things that may otherwise seem ordinary. Combining installation, sculpture, and photography, the artist invites us to consider our own relationship to the image, our environments, and each other.
M. FLORINE DÉMOSTHÈNE
Mastering the Dream
On view through Jan. 8, 2024
M. Florine Démosthène (b. 1971, New York) presents a new body of work that continues her exploration of enigmatic human forms in collage and experimental sculpture. Démosthène’s practice centers the Black female body in abstractions that engage themes of human transformation and collective experience. Rendered in translucent applications of paint, ink, and glitter on Mylar, the artist’s silhouetted figures are cut and assembled into amalgamations of bodies on voids of white. The resulting forms — swirling, celestial beings that transcend immediate readings of identity — encourage otherworldly readings of Démosthène’s oeuvre. Demonstrating recent spiritual influences on the artist’s sculptural work following a period of living and working in Ghana, the works on view reference shrines of the Fon people of Benin and Ewe people of Ghana, merging aesthetic cultural traditions with cutting-edge 3D printing technology.
NEVIN ALADAĞ
Refraction
On view through Jan. 15, 2024
Nevin Aladağ’s (b. 1972, Van, Turkey) major new site-specific commission for the SCAD Museum of Art includes her largest works to date, expanding on her Social Fabric and Pattern Kinship series. The artist’s Social Fabric works connect disparate pieces of carpet from around the world into complex collages of amalgamated hybrid forms. Her Pattern Kinship works are composed of overlapping laser-cut plexiglass layers, juxtaposing a wide array of architectural motifs and ornamentation styles including various patterns referencing Savannah’s historic buildings. In both series, the artist’s animated use of line, color, and diverse sources reflects a playful exploration of hybridity and belonging as an expression of her experiences as an immigrant. Aladağ’s inclusive, optimistic approach to art-making demonstrates how objects from different cultures and geographical origins can be united to create a collective sense of vibrancy, beauty, and meaning for us all.
ERWIN WURM
Hot
On view through Jan. 15, 2024
Erwin Wurm (b. 1954, Bruck an der Mur/Styria, Austria) rethinks the tenets of sculpture in works that focus on the relationship between the human body and everyday objects. In this two-part exhibition, Wurm presents an overview of his practice and an in-depth look at his ongoing relationship to fashion. The first section of the exhibition includes works in a variety of media that test assumed parameters of authorship, participation, materiality, legibility, and permanence. This experimental thinking is most clearly exemplified in the artist’s One Minute Sculptures, which invite audiences to pose with specific objects, and in doing so, complete the artwork. The second section focuses on Wurm’s collaborations with fashion brands and magazines. In cheeky reimaginings of the uses of high fashion, the artist transforms elegant garments into strange distortions of the human form. With these works, Wurm unveils the ways that fashion shapes — and is shaped by — our bodies and culture.
DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY
GET HOME SAFE
Sept. 7, 2023–Jan. 7, 2024
For the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) presents an immersive and interactive installation that centers the lived experiences of Black trans people. GET HOME SAFE consists of virtual, digital, and physical components: video portraits, vinyl wall graphics, and a video game designed by the artist that draws on the history and aesthetics of online role-playing games. In the game, viewers explore what it means to walk home at night in certain bodies, while the physical installation further personifies the navigation of these realities. The artist’s unique style in the works on view is characterized by drawing with text, rearranging recorded data into new legible forms.
XIWEN ZHU
Soft Shell
Sept. 13–Dec. 26, 2023
In Soft Shell, the artist’s first museum exhibition, SCAD graduate Xiwen Zhu (b. 1989, China; M.F.A., photography, 2015) presents striking images that depict dreamlike dioramas staged at the artist’s studio in Shanghai. Each constructed scene consists of found items intermixed with photographic materials such as snapshots and cut-outs of stock photos. Obscuring the threshold between image and object, Xiwen Zhu plays with dimensionality in an allusion to the undulating boundaries of private and public space. Through long exposure techniques, the artist captures soft glimmers and moody shadows amid her assemblages, transfiguring any sense of time and place while also hinting at hidden messages that may lurk in the darkness. With this body of work, Xiwen Zhu comments on the effects of modern society: under watchful eye, individuals seek seclusion and protection within their own armored shells yet must ultimately remain malleable — and open to interacting with and experiencing the outside world.
NINA CHANEL ABNEY
Big Butch Energy/Synergy
Sept. 21, 2023–Jan. 29, 2024
In Big Butch Energy/Synergy, Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago) presents recent large-format works that examine Black identity and queerness through coming-of-age narratives. Abney broaches these subjects playfully, focusing on her personal experiences as a masculine-of-center woman, while expanding on understandings of collegiate storylines that have centered white hetero characters in popular films like Animal House. Executing these works primarily in collage, the artist streamlines the picture plane with a bold, graphic style that highlights the subtleties of the expressions and poses of her figures. With these massive works, Abney invites viewers to experience their rich pictorial spaces on the scale of history painting. Offering glimpses into the group dynamics and formative life events of her invented crew of characters, who present signifiers of both maleness and femaleness, she celebrates those who reject normative presentations of gender.
YU HONG
Night Walk
Sept. 21, 2023–Jan. 29, 2024
In Night Walk, preeminent painter Yu Hong (b. 1966, Xi’an, China) weaves together her personal experiences and memories with significant collective shifts in contemporary China, portraying epochal transformation within sprawling compositions. In six large-scale, richly detailed paintings and three small studies of hands, Yu Hong evokes classical art historical motifs drawn from the Italian Renaissance, particularly Michelangelo’s contorted forms, as well as traditional Chinese painting tropes from the culture’s many-centuries-long heritage. The artist’s psychologically rich subjects exist within a riotous tumult of dramatic, otherworldly scenes, establishing a nuanced dialogue between the individual figure and a surreal setting. The disquieting nature of her groupings evokes human fragility and the ever present social tensions between isolation and togetherness. Yet they also speak to an insistent resilience and the eternal hope that can be found in a landscape of the imagination.
This article appears in Connect Savannah | September, 2023.