The SCAD Museum of Art Celebrates 10 Years with Diverse and Immersive Exhibitions – ARTnews

The milestone anniversary at SCAD Museum of Art highlights international artists and themes spanning a wealth of geographies, backgrounds, and generations.

Immersive installations have dominated the art scene for decades, across myriad disciplines. Think: Olafur Eliassons The Weather Project, The Rain Room by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass, and Yayoi Kusamas Infinity Mirror Rooms.

True, installations have also been made into utterly mundane mass-market attractions, thanks to those themed experiential rooms found in major cities, which have turned them into pop-culture punchlines.

The SCAD Museum of Art, in Savannah, Georgia, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, has reinterpreted the immersive trend while staying faithful to its own curriculum as an eminent institution of art, design, and fashion. The word immersive elicits an immediate relation to the body, the way one inhabits and navigates a space, and the capacity to blur the division between self and place, says Kari Herrin, executive director of SCAD Museums and Exhibitions. It resonates with todays audiences, who seek visceral experiences in a digital age. Many of our exhibitions have a natural immersive quality, due to our emphasis on the environments in which works are displayed and [on] the experiences they facilitate.

Some of the exhibitions are uncanny and surreal, fully resonating with the current zeitgeist. Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist Hein Koh, for example, creates transhumanist works. In her Hope and Sorrow, shes fashioned a surreal garden of crying flowers made of spandex, velvet, and satin, resting on Astroturf and illuminated by a cartoonish sun with a gazing eye painted on the backdrop. Hein Kohs surrealism humanizes natural elements to communicate complex narratives and emotions, says Herrin. A site-specific installation, as well as Heins first museum show, the exhibition is installed in the museums Jewel Boxes, spaces that mediate the interior and exterior of the museum with an explicitly public function.

Similarly, painter Izumi Katos large-scale paintings feature spectral figures with bulbous heads and thin bodies reminiscent of primeval beings, embryos, or aliens. Kato paints directly with his hands, and at times even frees his creatures from the constraints of rectangular canvas wall hangings, suspending them from the ceiling and attaching to them canvas cutouts of elongated torsos and limbs.

Artists also focus on the natural world and the environment. With El lecho del Bosque, Colombian artist Nohem Perz reflects on the social and political components of environmental issues by painting large-scale, detail-rich charcoal drawings of endangered species of trees alongside minuscule figures of birds, dogs, and humans. Patrick Dougherty combines fine art and design as well, weaving tree saplings and sticks to create imposing sculptures that celebrate both natures beauty and its ephemerality. His stickwork also has an interactive on-site component, as hell collaborate for three weeks with SCADs staff and student body to create site-specific works. And in experimental theater director Robert Wilsons immersive installation A Boy from Texas, cast, truncated pyramids are interspersed among deer made of handblown glass, evoking the time he spent hunting with his fatherwhile not a hunter himself, Wilson relishes natures stillness and spectral silence.

Of course, the beauty of nature often stands in stark contrast to the brick, glass, and steel of city spaces. In Urban Visions, Mexican photographer and SCAD alum Arturo Soto explores the themes of site, theory, and image in photos taken in Savannah and London, as well as in Oxford, England, where he delves into how the city is dealing with the aftereffects of Brexit.

Because our current environments extend beyond the physical world into the digital realm, SCAD has included a meditation on the way the digital component interacts with contemporary visual culture. An experiential sculpture by Spanish visual artist Ira Lombardawho defines herself as a visual ecologist who is moved by the desire to understand the theoretical and practical implications of digital visual cultureprompts the observer to reflect on the ephemerality and dematerialization of the object. In her show, the viewer can physically recreate Yves Kleins Leap into the Void by literally jumping from a custom-built structure.

A fashion exhibition adds a purely joyful dimension to this lineup of solo shows. Fashion designer Christian Siriano, who rose to fame after winning the fourth season of the TV competition series Project Runway and is known for his bold, high-octane eveningwear, is at SCAD with his first solo exhibition. Titled People Are People, the show features some of his most flamboyant creations while also celebrating his inclusive take on couture.

Two group projects have a more diachronic focus. SCAD MOAs Evans Center for African American Studies presents Elizabeth Catlett: Points of Contact, juxtaposing Catletts prints and sculptureswhich reflected on the Black American experience by combining abstract and figurative influences, and also drew from African and Mexican traditionswith pieces by contemporary Black American and Mexican artists whose creations reveal strong connections, and often direct references, to Catletts work. This exhibition makes an argument for examining Catletts dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship, which has been overlooked by previous exhibition projects, says Herrin. And in its inclusion of contemporary artists from both countries, it reveals lineages between Black Americans and indigenous Mexican peoples. Catletts impact as a bridge between two nations extends beyond art, and the exhibition unfolds the complexity of her identity, [which] she very much wanted to be acknowledged.

By contrast, the other group exhibition, Ring Redux: The Susan Grant Lewin Collection, examines the tradition of ring making by showcasing 100 avant-gardestyle rings, demonstrating how the art of jewelry reflects aesthetic developments in art, design, technology, and craftsmanship while also conveying the complexity of human relationships, from the highly personal to the universal.

At the intersection of these two modes, solo/contemporary and group/historical, is Mehryl Levisses White Wig, an artistic-cum-curatorial project juxtaposing Rococo-era portraitureinstalled, salon-style, on a warm-pink wallwith brightly colored wigs created by contemporary Parisian drag entertainers. Levisse examines the use of hairstyle and dress as markers of status and identity that have historically been separated into the strict binary of man and woman.

Beyond the sheer artistry of the project, what emerges in this 10th-anniversary celebration is SCADs intention to showcase an international roster of artists whose work will broaden viewers horizons beyond the United States. From the very beginning, the SCAD Museum of Art was conceived as an international cultural center with the intention to enrich the lives of SCAD students and to engage with different communities both near and far, says Herrin. This is representative not only of our international body of students, who come from all parts of the world, but also of the need in this region for a contemporary art museum that catalyzes dialogue and shared experiences through art and design.

The Fall 2021 season is now on view at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia.

Follow SCAD on Instagram at instagram.com/scadmoa.

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The SCAD Museum of Art Celebrates 10 Years with Diverse and Immersive Exhibitions - ARTnews