George Clinton, Love Letters and Good Hair: What’s On at SCAD Museum of Art
The Savannah College of Art and Design is more than just another school with a museum—it’s the realization of a visionary dream that transformed the historic city of Savannah into a thriving hub for creativity on multiple levels. It all began with Paula Wallace, then a 29-year-old elementary school teacher, who envisioned a school dedicated to creative disciplines, embracing cutting-edge technology long before it was mainstream. She sold everything she had, including her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and with the help of her parents, May L. Poetter and Paul E. Poetter, founded SCAD in 1978. The following spring, they acquired and renovated the Savannah Volunteer Guard Armory, establishing what is now one of the most prestigious schools for the arts. Today, SCAD boasts campuses in Savannah and Atlanta, as well as a seasonal location in Lacoste, France. Globally recognized for shaping top talent across film, fashion, design and animation, SCAD’s influence is reflected in everything from the visual arts to fashion to the silver screen. The beloved saber-toothed squirrel Scrat from the film Ice Age traces his origins back to the college, where he holds a special place in its history, commemorated by a hazelnut trophy.
Recently, SCAD Museum of Art unveiled a dynamic lineup for its 2024 fall exhibitions, ranging from a surprise survey of Funkadelic frontman George Clinton’s art to a major exhibition of Dan Flavin’s light installations, realized in collaboration with the Dia Foundation. This bold roster reflects the museum’s ambitious vision; curator Daniel S. Palmer told Observer that the museum hosts about ten exhibitions annually, designed to inspire students and “change the creative life trajectory” of those who visit. The debut was marked by the presence of the featured artists, creating a rare and convivial moment in the art world. It’s a testament to how this museum, housed in one of the nation’s oldest surviving railroad complexes, continues to attract global talent while enriching the local community. The museum now holds a collection of over 5,000 works, underscoring its role as a beacon of urban regeneration and cultural revitalization. The group exhibition “No Simple Matter” showcases just a slice of this collection, with works that explore materiality between Minimalist and Op Art, revealing beauty in austerity and pushing the boundaries of how color, line and shape can redefine the ordinary.
George Clinton emerges as a visual arts star here, radiating his signature histrionic spirit and visionary artistry. “Clocked in A Cloud” is his first solo exhibition, showcasing Black culture through a series of psychedelic paintings, visionary drawings, album covers, vibrant garments and memorabilia that channel the electric energy of his musical universe. Palmer noted during our walkthrough that Clinton’s artistic journey began in the ‘90s when a fan asked him for a drawn autograph, prompting him to break convention with every subsequent artwork. “I started doing the dog as a signature, and then it ended up on the album covers,” Clinton recalled later during his talk. Only in recent years, during the pandemic, did he commit fully to an art practice, hiring a manager and actively promoting his work. This exhibition at SCAD is the first comprehensive survey of his visual art, and it highlights his endlessly expansive creativity. Accompanying his psychedelic and futuristic works on paper and canvas, the show includes two fantastical spaceship installations—Motherships—that perfectly encapsulate Clinton’s Afrofuturist vision. His vibrant palette defies expectations, considering that Clinton suffers from a rare form of color blindness. “That’s why they’re all about shades, tones and gradients,” Palmer said. A section of the exhibition is dedicated to Clinton’s profound influence on contemporary art, featuring pieces by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, Eddie Martinez, Mickalene Thomas and Rashid Johnson that were inspired by his dynamic style and message.
A nearby gallery houses the Indian artist duo Thukral and Tagra’s explorations of digital glitches in nature through their show “Arboretum.” The exhibition, marked by meticulously rendered paintings on dynamically shaped canvases, engages both the physical world and the metaverse. It addresses a critical question of our times, as the boundary between physical and digital spaces blurs: “If a tree falls in the Metaverse, does it make a noise?” The tension between the labor-intensive techniques of these hyperrealistic works, which take months to complete, and the rapid flow of virtual data they interpret further complicates the relationship between canvas and screen, offering a thought-provoking dialogue on how sensory experiences translate between the tangible and the digital.
SCAD also unveiled “Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter,” a celebration of the passionate, creative synergy that defined Ruben and Isabel Toledo’s legacy and love story. Despite being named after Isabel, the exhibition spotlights the deep bond that shaped their extraordinary vision. As Ruben Toledo told Observer, it was “love at first sight,” and the two Cuban-born designers collaborated as a single creative force, revolutionizing women’s fashion with their unique blend of structure, balance, gravity and flow. Together, they engineered shapes and patterns to wrap the body, combining comfort, elegance and fluidity—all executed with their hallmark craftsmanship and artistry.
Next in SCAD’s Fall exhibition lineup is Holy Quarter, an immersive dive into the mythopoetic and sci-fi video art of artist Monira Al Qadiri. The film and sculptural installation reimagines the legend of a Western colonizer’s search for the lost city of Ubar, using it as a lens to examine the Persian Gulf’s cultural and historical complexities, spanning from its pearling economy to its oil boom and uncertain future. True to her style, Al Qadiri’s work bridges past, present and future, unearthing hidden stories from the Gulf while probing what might come after oil. “There is so much of pre-Islamic history, as well as the rich history of the land, its geology,” she told Observer. “Just above Kuwait is the city of Uruk, one of the oldest cities in human civilization. I find it strange that people can easily dismiss all of that and say that the history of this region only started with oil because oil has tainted the region’s history in such a way that people think nothing existed before it. Therefore, I tried to create this historical arc, using geological time in my work.” The video installation at SCAD, set against the haunting alien presence of black pearls or meteorites scattered on the floor, becomes a powerful exercise in mythopoiesis, blending postcolonial reimagination with ecological critique and conventional narratives to offer an unsettling vision of history and its fractured interpretations.
The SCAD museum is also showing works by Anthony Akinbola, who presents one of his most ambitious durag installations to date: the 48-foot-long Camouflage, which transforms into an entire environment, infusing the space with vibrant colors radiating from its materials. The work draws inspiration from the atmosphere of Nigerian churches in New York. “Scaling a material like that, in this grandiose way where it takes up space, it just becomes about the work, and it’s less about the object,” the artist told Observer. Opposite this sprawling composition, a group of Black hair products are arranged on shelves, forming painterly assemblages in The Price of Oil, a piece that interrogates the fraught history of Black hair in the American economy while exploring how everyday objects can serve as platforms for abstraction and commentary on consumer culture. Akinbola later explained that his practice transcends formalist abstraction to unpack the complex sociopolitical meanings embedded in these products: “There’s an association with them, culturally. There’s another level, but they all come from a commercial, mass-produced space; however, with those associations, they become artifacts.” Titled “Good Hair,” the exhibition delves into the communal space of Black barbershops, examining how notions of “good hair” intersect with subjectivity, respectability and the politics of identity.
The final piece in “Good Hair” is In Spinnin (2024), two barber poles that unexpectedly appear side by side, twirling in tandem: removed from their usual context, they create improvised painterly compositions and, at the same time, link to a more conceptual and post-minimalistic aesthetic, functioning as a perfect connection with the last, but not least, exhibition on view.
A major show of neon works by American minimalist artist Dan Flavin takes over the rest of the museum’s galleries, divided into rooms where single installations influence the space and visitors’ perception. Using commercially available fluorescent tubes as a fundamental building block, the artist explores a rich vocabulary of possibilities and infinite variations of composing and painting with light in a way that shifts the experience of the space and transforms both the people and objects within it.
Organized in collaboration with the Dia Foundation, this exhibition spotlights seminal works by Flavin, sourced directly from Dia’s prestigious collection. It opens with one of Flavin’s earliest and rarely seen pieces—a painted black box with neon overlay—that serves as a precursor to his later, more refined explorations of light and space. This work hints at the radical path Flavin would take in redefining the boundaries between sculpture and painting, craft and industrial production. Using ready-made, commercially available objects, Flavin challenged not only the interactions between light, space and perception but also the way we categorize material reality, inviting viewers to reconsider the language we use to assign value to everyday objects.
Notably, this major exhibition features thirteen out of the thirty-nine pieces from Flavin’s celebrated Monument series, inspired by Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International. The hieratic yet hyper-ephemeral neon structures stand solemnly in a row along the museum’s red brick corridor—once part of the historic cargo railway station—creating a breathtaking sequence that fuses light, space and history into a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
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Despite the diverse themes and tones of the current shows, SCAD Museum of Art’s fall lineup underscores the institution’s larger ambition: to build a program that not only inspires students on campus but also attracts visitors to the city. Savannah is a jewel of history and nature. With its neoclassical architecture and oak-lined streets draped in Spanish moss, the city exudes a charm that blends seamlessly with the contemporary creative energy radiating from SCAD’s campus. This vibrancy has spilled into the local scene, transforming many of the new restaurants and hotels with top-notch design and style. It’s the perfect weekend destination for art lovers looking to pair culture with Southern hospitality.