SAVANNAH, GEORGIA — The SCAD Museum of Art is proud to announce the fall 2024 season of exhibitions, uniting works by forward-thinking creators who represent varied identities, viewpoints, and artistic movements. Reflecting on the legacies of history while engaging directly with contemporary culture, the nine new exhibitions attune viewers to the power of the human experience — and the dynamic expressions of artists seeking connection to the world around them.
"The SCAD Museum of Art serves as a bold and brilliant beacon for lovers of visual ideation across the globe. The space draws you in, irresistibly. Our fall shows feature a charismatic lineup of contemporary artists from India, Italy, Kuwait, and beyond — and we welcome back SCAD alum Anya Molyviatis for her debut solo museum exhibition in the SCAD MOA Alumni Gallery. If you’re ready to see the world with new eyes, join me at the SCAD Museum of Art this fall. No passport required!"
— Paula Wallace | SCAD President and Founder
SCAD MOA is thrilled to welcome George Clinton to Savannah for the first solo museum exhibition of his wildly unconventional paintings and drawings that defy expectations with an imaginative Afrofuturist aesthetic centering improvisation and joy. Clinton will also present this year’s Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecture, placing his work in context with the lineages of African American storytelling. The museum is further honored to partner with Dia Art Foundation on a focused exploration of the innovative practice of Minimalist artist Dan Flavin (1933–96), whose pivotal works established a defining formal language of light and space.
In new and recent works, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola critiques the commercialization of culture while uplifting the nuanced roles of everyday objects within Black life and individuality. Blending myth and purported fact in an evocative, grounding installation, multidisciplinary sculptor and filmmaker Monira Al Qadiri explores the complexities of the Persian Gulf’s past and future. In her debut solo museum exhibition, SCAD alum Anya Molyviatis (B.F.A., fibers, 2021) merges technology and craft in intricate weavings that augment perception. Artist collaborators Thukral and Tagra contemplate the intersection of the digital and natural worlds in hyperrealistic paintings marked by analog pixels and glitches. Examining the connection between image-making and identity, Pop- Deco illustrator Olimpia Zagnoli transforms her graphic designs into bold portraits for a site-specific installation in the museum’s public-facing Jewel Box vitrines. Beloved fashion designer Isabel Toledo is also celebrated with a posthumous exhibition of her work curated with her husband, artist, and fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo.
"This new season of exhibitions at the SCAD Museum of Art will be unparalleled in the institution’s recent history. With creators from across the globe working compellingly in nearly every medium, audiences are sure to be astonished by the art on view. Ranging from a historically significant display of American Minimalist Dan Flavin’s most important series to the first solo museum exhibition of P-Funk cultural icon George Clinton’s paintings and dynamic installations from Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, Monira Al Qadiri, Anya Molyviatis, Thukral and Tagra, Isabel Toledo, and Olimpia Zagnoli, these exhibitions are certain to amaze and inspire."
— Daniel S. Palmer | SCAD Museum of Art chief curator
The museum’s fall exhibitions season reflects the prestige and relevance of SCAD’s top-ranked degree programs — from painting, photography, and sculpture to fashion, fibers, industrial design, illustration, and film and television. Students, alumni, and visitors can engage with the artists and curators at complementary programming, including an opening celebration, artist talks and conversations throughout the week, and an electrifying performance by George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic. The opening celebration takes place Thursday, Sept. 26, 6 p.m., at SCAD MOA, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Ga. For more information, visit scadmoa.org.
FEATURED FALL 2024 EXHIBITIONS
GROUP EXHIBITION
No Simple Matter
June 26–Nov. 18, 2024
No Simple Matter groups modern and contemporary artworks with seemingly straightforward compositions and humble materials to reveal their complex underpinnings. Exhibiting a mastery of restraint, the artists divest from excessive modes of expression to show the beauty in austerity and elicit new interpretations and experiences with art. The works on view evoke the visual languages of iconic 1960s art movements like Minimalism and Op art, incorporating geometric configurations, unadorned ephemera, and bold, often monochromatic color palettes. Featured Op art painters render linear, illusionary designs to confound viewers’ perceptions, while Minimalist-inspired sculptors underscore the aesthetic qualities of everyday items. Select artists also reimagine these styles, investigating the capacity of abstract forms and impersonal objects to reflect identity. Attesting to the power of color, line, and shape, the exhibition demonstrates that the simplest artworks can bear the greatest meanings, from explorations of self and society to interrogations of art histories.
OLIMPIA ZAGNOLI
Multifaceted
July 31–Dec. 23, 2024
Artist and designer Olimpia Zagnoli (b. 1984, Montecchio Emilia, Italy) is world-renowned for her iconic Pop-Deco illustrations that frequently appear in major magazines, books, merchandise, and advertisements. Zagnoli’s process begins in the sketchbook, where her drawings take inspiration from her everyday surroundings and happenstance encounters, sharpening into stylized shapes imbued with vibrant colors that enhance their communicative power. For her site-specific installation in the museum’s public-facing Jewel Box vitrines, Zagnoli transposes her bold images from their two-dimensional format into large-scale sculptures with careful consideration of every line, angle, and hue. Zagnoli populates each space with a portrait of an invented character enshrined in a layered composition that plays with the rules of the grid. Inviting passersby into her technicolor universe, she creates a trail of graphic vignettes along the museum’s façade, imparting the impact of image-making while celebrating the elasticity of our identities.
THUKRAL AND TAGRA
Arboretum
July 31–Dec. 30, 2024
"If a tree falls in the Metaverse, does it make a noise?" Posing this question in their ongoing project Arboretum, artist collaborators Jiten Thukral (b. 1976, Jalandhar, Punjab, India) and Sumir Tagra (b. 1979, New Delhi, India) contemplate the intersection of the digital and natural worlds. The series was sparked by the global isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent escalation of virtual mediation between people and their physical world. Amassing a collection of digital images of flora in their immediate environment, the artists used select photos as the basis for hyperrealistic paintings on shaped canvases. The resulting works resist the instant gratification of digital technology, favoring hands-on, labor-intensive techniques that require months to complete. By incorporating analog representations of pixels and glitches, the artists remind the viewer of the inescapable intervention of data and algorithms that inform our daily choices and the ways we see and interpret the world.
ISABEL TOLEDO
A Love Letter
Aug. 14–Dec. 16, 2024
Honoring beloved Cuban-born, American fashion designer Isabel Toledo, A Love Letter is a posthumous homage to the enduring resonance of her work, curated in close collaboration with her husband, artist and fashion illustrator Ruben Toledo. An innovative spirit, Isabel engineered shapes and patterns to cocoon the body, providing comfort, structure, and ease of movement. Her designs were guided by emotions, rather than concepts, which she translated into elegant, impeccably crafted garments — radical in their construction yet supremely wearable. For more than three decades, the Toledos intertwined their creative processes, acting as each other’s muse, advocate, confidant, and collaborator. The friction between Isabel’s impassioned functionalism and Ruben’s fantasy-prone humor was inspirational, pushing both to greater heights. A Love Letter features a selection of Isabel’s designs displaying her mastery of technique, fabric, shape, and color, complemented by new works by Ruben created exclusively for the exhibition and a short film highlighting Isabel’s practice and memorializing their unique relationship.
ANTHONY OLUBUNMI AKINBOLA
Good Hair
Aug. 23–Dec. 23, 2024
Nigerian-American artist Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola (b. 1991, Columbia, Mo.) presents recent works that repurpose everyday objects associated with Black hair to convey the intersection of commodities and their broader sociopolitical implications. In his most ambitious Camouflage painting to date, Akinbola stitches durags into a 48-foot-wide composition, invoking Modernist painting tropes while critically underscoring the ubiquity of gestural abstraction. The Price of Oil, an installation of pomade cans on retail shelving, signifies the dynamic history of Black hair within the American economy, where abundance paradoxically connotes the celebration yet sterile commercialization of culture. His newest sculpture Spinnin’ is a monument to barbershops — the earliest sites of Black commercial enterprises and civil rights organizing — recognizing their part in fostering Black political mobility and financial independence in an ever-resistant environment. Exemplifying Akinbola’s yearslong practice of mediating between sculpture and painting through material, Good Hair draws attention to the nuanced roles of everyday objects within Black life, individuation, and joy.
MONIRA AL QADIRI
Holy Quarter
Aug. 23–Dec. 23, 2024
Monira Al Qadiri’s (b. 1983, Senegal) multidisciplinary practice is rooted in the culture and histories of the Persian Gulf. Her works examine the region’s complex past and circumstances that have contributed to rapid change. In Holy Quarter, a film and sculptural installation, she explores the blending of myth and purported fact. The film centers on the exploits of British explorer Harry St. John Philby, who journeyed to the "Empty Quarter" of the Arabian Peninsula in the 1930s in search of the legendary lost region of Ubar, described in local lore as having been destroyed by divine punishment. Rather than discovering this ancient civilization, Philby encountered remnants of a dramatic meteorite strike, which formed black glass "pearls" from melted sand. Juxtaposed with Al Qadiri’s sculptural evocations of these pearls, the film is narrated by the spirit of the meteor, which warns of impending ecological disaster at the hands of man while offering hope for the future through collective efforts at reversal.
ANYA MOLYVIATIS
SUBMERGE
Aug. 30–Nov. 25, 2024
In her debut solo museum exhibition, Anya Molyviatis (b. 1994, Switzerland; SCAD B.F.A., fibers, 2021) presents a new series of her signature three-dimensional textiles exploring relationships between light and materiality. The exhibition includes Molyviatis’ largest weavings to date, simultaneously exquisite in their intricate construction and powerful in their grand visual impact. In works featuring a diamond waffle pattern developed by the artist, Molyviatis uses both the physical structure of interwoven threads and the visual cues of color juxtapositions to convey an enhanced sense of depth. To create each work, Molyviatis weaves hand-dyed cotton with mohair wool, meticulously threading thousands of fine fibers through 40 harnesses of a vintage loom — one of only 20 in existence worldwide. The resulting works harmoniously blend technology and craft, with compositions that augment our perception of weight, density, and sound through awe-inspiring designs. Enveloping the gallery in soft gradients of texture and color, Molyviatis offers visitors an extraordinary setting for contemplation and reflection.
DAN FLAVIN
Works from Dia Art Foundation
Sept. 12, 2024–Jan. 6, 2025
Dan Flavin: Works from Dia Art Foundation is a focused exploration of American artist Dan Flavin’s (b. 1933, Jamaica, New York; d. 1996, Riverhead, New York) practice during the period spanning 1962 to 1974. Flavin was a significant figure in American Minimalism despite his active rejection of the label. In 1963 he began establishing a simplified formal language based on interactions between light and space, which generated a system of material and conceptual parameters — or "situational" phenomenon — through which his works could exist. Using commercially available lamps and standard-issue fluorescent bulbs, the artist discovered a rich vocabulary of possibilities and infinite variations. The featured works encapsulate pivotal moments and key series in Flavin’s oeuvre, concurrently serving as a testament to the enduring relationship between the artist and Dia Art Foundation.
GEORGE CLINTON
Cloaked in a Cloud, Disguised in the Sky
Sept. 26, 2024–Jan. 27, 2025
George Clinton (b. 1941, Kannapolis, N.C.) is a cultural icon whose contributions to the arts span seven decades. He revolutionized music and performance as the bandleader of Parliament-Funkadelic, collaborating across genres and mediums with outlandish styling, spectacular set designs, and pioneering artistry. While on tour in the 1990s, Clinton began applying his creativity to drawing and painting, developing a surreal, hallucinogenic, maximalist aesthetic that riffs on the characters, mythology, and language of P-Funk. His artistic approach is defined by improvisation, experimentation, and innovation — refusing to be bound by traditional expectations or societal norms. This landmark exhibition focuses on the wildly unconventional works Clinton has made in the years since, showcasing his inventiveness in the context of a fine art museum for the first time. A true visionary, Clinton presents a multidimensional perspective on Black experience in the U.S., inviting us all to enter a world that is fantastical, optimistic, and full of funk.
FEATURED PROGRAMMING
Unless otherwise noted, all events are free and open to the public and take place at the SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Ga.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 25 | 11 A.M.
Artist talk with Ruben Toledo
Renowned illustrator Ruben Toledo elucidates the essence of his iconic drawings and the exquisite fashion designs of his late wife, Isabel, on view in Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter. Exploring the profound intersection of art and fashion in his own partnership and within an evolving industry ecosystem, Toledo reflects on the infallible connections between love, legacy, and creativity. Gain a deeper understanding of the Toledos’ entwined practice, as the legendary artist offers insight into the inspirations and processes behind the works featured in the exhibition.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 25 | 2 P.M.
Artist talks with Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola and Monira Al Qadiri
Expounding on their newly opened solo exhibitions, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola and Monira Al Qadiri speak to the powerful impact of cultural influences on their multifaceted practices. Akinbola, whose works repurpose Black hair care products, discusses the intersections of commodities and their broader sociopolitical implications on Black individuation, joy, and life. Al Qadiri explicates the mythology, history, and natural forces of the Rub’ al Khali desert that inform her work Holy Quarter.
WEDNESDAY, SEPT. 25 | 5:30 P.M.
Artist talk with Thukral and Tagra
Thukral and Tagra explore their newly opened exhibition, speaking to the use of dynamic imagery in their collective practice, which encompasses painting, installation, and digital drawing. The artists discuss the digital and natural influences that manifest in the hyperrealistic paintings in their series Arboretum.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 26 | 11 A.M.
Curator talk with Daniel S. Palmer and Dia Art Foundation’s Humberto Moro on Dan Flavin
SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer and Dia Art Foundation’s Humberto Moro illuminate the work and career of American Minimalist Dan Flavin, sharing the artist’s cultural import with contemporary audiences and highlighting the relevance of his work for a new era.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 26 | 5 P.M.
Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecture with George Clinton
As the distinguished Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecturer, cultural icon George Clinton discusses his diverse creative output, exploring the potency and resonance of his oeuvre as a vital if fantastical perspective on the Black experience in the U.S.
THURSDAY, SEPT. 26 | 6 P.M.
Opening celebration
Meet and mingle with the featured artists and the SCAD MOA community as you experience the full slate of new fall exhibitions.
FRIDAY, SEPT. 27 | 7 P.M.
Concert with George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic
Lucas Theatre for the Arts, 32 Abercorn St., Savannah
The mothership is landing! George Clinton brings the unstoppable Parliament Funkadelic to Savannah for a night of cosmic beats and the funkiest vibes. Clinton’s vision took funk from a niche style to a global phenomenon, earning the musical collective a well-deserved spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Experience the legendary force that is George Clinton and the P-Funk universe — live at SCAD. Tickets range from $37–75 for the general public and $27–65 for SCAD Card holders. Present your concert ticket at SCAD MOA to receive free admission through Monday, Sept. 30. Purchase tickets at scad.edu/georgeclinton. For more information, email [email protected].
THE SCAD MUSEUM OF ART
The SCAD Museum of Art features more than 10 dynamic gallery spaces presenting exhibitions and commissioned works by international emerging and established artists. The museum serves visitors and students alike, enriching both the high caliber of education at SCAD and the cultural life of the Savannah community and beyond. Exhibitions range from painting, sculpture, and photography to digital media, fashion, and jewelry, complementing the artistic disciplines offered at the university. The museum also hosts public programming year-round, including lectures, gallery talks, workshops, and film screenings.
SCAD MOA has presented exhibitions by artists including Miya Ando, Radcliffe Bailey, Nick Cave, Doreen Lynette Garner, Katharina Grosse, Subodh Gupta, Hassan Hajjaj, Alfredo Jaar, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat, Rashaad Newsome, Raúl de Nieves, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Rose B. Simpson, and Saya Woolfalk, as well as site-specific installations by Rachel Feinstein, Jorge Pardo, Odili Donald Odita, Daniel Arsham, Jose Dávila, and others.
An award-winning architectural icon, the museum attracts visitors from around the world to the heart of Savannah’s vibrant downtown historic district and incorporates the oldest surviving pre-Civil War railroad depot into its striking contemporary design. Recognized with awards from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the Congress for the New Urbanism, the International Interior Design Association, and the Historic Savannah Foundation, the museum received the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture, a pinnacle achievement.
Established in 2011, the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies celebrates the imaginative breadth and expressive legacy of African American art and culture. In the decade since its founding, the Evans Center and SCAD MOA have presented internationally heralded exhibitions focused on the legacies of Elizabeth Catlett, Frederick Douglass, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence, as well as contemporary exhibitions by artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kenturah Davis, Chase Hall, Nina Chanel Abney, and Awol Erizku.
SCAD: THE UNIVERSITY FOR CREATIVE CAREERS
SCAD is a private, nonprofit, accredited university, offering more than 100 graduate and undergraduate degree programs across locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and online via SCADnow. SCAD enrolls more than 17,500 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 100 countries. The future-minded SCAD curriculum engages professional-level technology and myriad advanced learning resources, affording students opportunities for internships, professional certifications, and real-world assignments with corporate partners through SCADpro, the university’s renowned research lab and prototype generator. SCAD has earned top rankings for degree programs in interior design, architecture, film, fashion, digital media, and more. Career success is woven into every fiber of the university, resulting in a superior alumni employment rate. A 2023 study found that 99% of SCAD graduates were employed, pursuing further education, or both within 10 months of graduation. SCAD provides students and alumni with ongoing career support through personal coaching, alumni programs, a professional presentation studio, and more. Visit scad.edu.
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