11 a.m.
SCAD Museum of Art
601 Turner Blvd.
Savannah, Georgia
This in-person event is free and open to the public, and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2022.
Join SCAD deFINE ART 2022 exhibiting artists Barthélémy Toguo and Doreen Lynette Garner with SCAD MOA adjunct curator Humberto Moro for a special gallery tour of exhibitions by Toguo, Garner, and SCAD deFINE ART 2022 honoree Katharina Grosse. They share stories of exile, experimentation, space, and spectatorship that underpin the works on view.
About the artists
Working across painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, Barthélémy Toguo (b. 1967, Mbalmayo, Cameroon) addresses enduring and urgently relevant issues of exile, displacement, migration, colonialism, race, and the relationship between the Global North and South. At the core of his practice is the notion of belonging, which stems from his dual French-Cameroonian nationality. Through poetic, hopeful, and often figurative gestures connecting nature with the human body, Toguo foregrounds concerns that have both ecological and societal implications. The artist’s recent works are informed by political and social movements and humanitarian tragedies, including Black Lives Matter and refugee crises.
Medically sanctioned racial violence is not a distant history. It is an active influence on contemporary medical practice — one that Doreen Lynette Garner (b. 1986, Philadelphia) is invested in exposing. Garner’s sculptures and performances engage the history of medical experimentation on Black women’s bodies in the U.S., portraying their brutal humiliation and objectification, while clearly identifying the white perpetrators who enacted this suffering. Informed by deep research, her experimental and accumulative approach combines a wide range of materials — silicon, glass-fiber insulation, plastic, Vaseline, artificial hair, crystals, pearls — in anthropomorphic forms resembling fragmented or amputated body parts and human remains.
SCAD deFINE ART 2022 honoree Katharina Grosse (b. 1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is renowned worldwide for her expansive use of the painting medium to challenge space and spectatorship. In the past decades, she has produced a series of site-specific works related to architectural sites and the ways in which the public navigates them across space and time. Her vocabulary of color and shape on a massive scale represents her ongoing, abundant exploration of surfaces and their relation to perception. For her solo exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art, Grosse presents works on canvas and a large-scale installation adapted to the gallery space that reveal the material diversity of her artistic practice.