SAVANNAH, GEORGIA — The Savannah College of Art and Design welcomes a new season of exhibitions at the renowned SCAD Museum of Art, uniting an international roster of emerging and established artists whose practices reflect vital conversations within contemporary art discourse. This season’s diverse slate of shows represents varied mediums, approaches, and contexts, and includes a major presentation of work by Roxy Paine, whose large-scale, multimedia sculptures examine intricate systems, from the biological to the geological to the industrial, ultimately engaging deeply existential themes of humanity and the natural world. SCAD MOA also proudly presents the first solo exhibitions in the U.S. for Anna Park, Maria Nepomuceno, and Shi Jinsong, whose practices each uniquely materialize the complexities and contradictions of culture within capitalistic societies, as well as the group show Aaron Douglas: Sermons in the museum’s Evans Center for African American Studies, which explores the Harlem Renaissance artist’s profound influence on creative practice today.
Many of SCAD’s top-ranked degree programs — including painting, photography, sculpture, fibers, illustration, animation, and architecture — are reflected in this season’s exhibitions and complementary events programming, demonstrating the museum’s continued mission to enrich the high caliber of education and cultural life for students, alumni, and the Savannah community and beyond.
“We are so excited to share these wonderful new exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art. This fall, we showcase a geographically diverse range of artists who create compelling works varying in media and approach. With an assortment of impressive solo exhibitions and thoughtful group shows, the museum will be buzzing with a dynamism that is sure to inspire creativity and wonder for our students and visitors alike.”
– Daniel S. Palmer, SCAD Museum of Art chief curator
Featured fall exhibitions at the university’s award-winning SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah include:
ALLISON SCHULNIK (b. 1978, San Diego, Calif.), Ominous, Crude Beauty, On view through Jan. 16, 2023
Haunting and rife with a macabre sense of foreboding, the mesmerizing stop-motion clay animations of Allison Schulnik are simultaneously brimming with compassion, humor, and hope. Akin to “moving paintings,” Schulnik’s animations are characterized by colorful biomorphic misfits that emerge from the physical nature of her painting style in which thick pigments transform into three-dimensional figures. Ominous, Crude Beauty brings together all the artist’s video works to date. Non-narrative and psychedelic in tone, they encourage close attention to motion and sound as they avoid linear narratives and didactic interpretations. In addition to the artist’s animations, the exhibition features a selection of Schulnik’s seductive impasto paintings, highly textured sculptures that bear palpable traces of the artist’s hand, and 131 drawings used to create the animation Mound (2011). Melding a deep sense of theatricality with intense emotional vulnerability, Schulnik’s honest, complex, and nostalgic work creates a dream space for us to contemplate creation, death, love, folly, and farce.