11 a.m.
SCAD Museum of Art
601 Turner Blvd.
Savannah, Georgia
This event has been moved to an earlier start time of 11am.
The SCAD Museum of Art welcomes luminary George Clinton as this year’s distinguished Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecturer. Focusing on Clinton’s diverse creative output and legendary cultural status, the lecture is presented in connection with his exhibition Cloaked in a Cloud, Disguised in the Sky in the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Center gallery.
Beyond Clinton’s contributions to the arts as the ingenious progenitor of funk music with his Parliament-Funkadelic universe, he is also an icon of self-fashioning through his outlandish styling and endless collaborations across art forms. Since the 1990s Clinton has been a prodigious creator of wildly unconventional paintings and drawings. Perhaps a less well-known aspect of his creativity, this work developed from frequent sketching while on tour or signing autographs and is only now being exhibited in a fine art museum for the first time. Framing Clinton’s practice in dialogue with the legacy of painter Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), an equally historic artist whose works share stories of the accomplishments and challenges of African Americans, the lecture will explore the power and relevance of Clinton’s oeuvre as an important if fantastical perspective on the Black experience in the U.S.
This event is free and open to the public. It is presented by SCAD MOA’s Evans Center for African American Studies with generous support from the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation.
About the artist
George Clinton (b. 1941, Kannapolis, N.C.) became interested in music while living in New Jersey during the early 1950s. After an early Doo-wop hit single with the Parliaments, Clinton decided to record the same band under a new name: Funkadelic. Clinton gradually put together a collective of more than 50 musicians and recorded the ensemble during the 1970s both as Parliament and Funkadelic. While Funkadelic pursued band-format psychedelic rock, Parliament engaged in a funk free-for-all, blending influences from the godfathers (James Brown and Sly Stone) with freaky costumes and themes inspired by 1960s acid culture and science fiction. In 1978–79, the most successful year in Parliament-Funkadelic history, Parliament hit the charts first with “Flash Light,” P-Funk’s first R&B number one. Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove,” the title track of its 10th studio album, spent six weeks at the top spot on the R&B charts during the summer, while Parliament’s “Aqua Boogie” would hit number one later in the year. Clinton began his solo career with the 1982 album Computer Games. Several months later, Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” hit number one on the R&B charts.
Clinton and many former Parliament-Funkadelic members continued to tour and record throughout the 1980s as the P-Funk All-Stars. The early 1990s saw the rise of funk-inspired rap (courtesy of Digital Underground, Dr. Dre, and Warren G) and funk rock (Primus and Red Hot Chili Peppers), re-establishing Clinton’s status as one of the most important forces in the recent history of Black music. Along with renewed notoriety and respect, Clinton gained a wider audience with appearances in the movies The Night Before, House Party, PCU, and Good Burger and in commercials for Apple computers, Nike, and Rio Mp3 players, as well as hosting the HBO original series Cosmic Slop. Clinton also composed theme songs for the popular TV series The Tracey Ullman Show and The PJs.
Clinton has received a Grammy Award, a Dove Award from the Gospel Music Association, and an MTV Video Music Award and has been recognized for lifetime achievement by BMI, the NAACP Image Awards, and the Motown Alumni Association. Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. In 2012 Clinton received an honorary doctorate of music from the renowned Berklee College of Music. He was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2024.
About the Evans Center
Established in 2011, the SCAD Museum of Art’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies celebrates the imaginative breadth and expressive legacy of African American art and culture. Through experimental public programs, immersive workshops, riveting lectures, and topical symposia, the Evans Center immerses students and community members in the rich tapestry of Black expression.