8 p.m.
SCAD Museum of Art
601 Turner Blvd.
Savannah, Georgia
This event is free and open to the public.
Nastassja E. Swift’s hyper-realized hand-felted masks offer an homage to Black femme faces in reverence of Black personhood. In this site-specific performance commissioned by the SCAD Museum of Art’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies, Swift contends with the agricultural knowledge and wounds of rice cultivation in the Lowcountry. Physically articulating the pluralities and complexities of the harvest in relation to enslavement, Swift transforms space into an altar to honor women’s labor and ancestral lineages of West Africa and the American South.
About the artist
Nastassja E. Swift is a multidisciplinary artist with a B.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University and a Distinguished Fellow of the Penland School of Craft. In 2021, Swift was the summer artist in residence with SPACES in Cleveland, where her community parade and exhibition received support from the Ohio Arts Council. Her short film and collaborative performance, Remembering Her Homecoming, premiered at the Afrikana Independent Film Festival in 2019 and was screened at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.
Swift was selected for a Public Arts Commission in Richmond, Va., marking her first large-scale public art project. She is the recipient of the Center for Craft: Craft Research Fund Artist Fellowship, a VMFA Fellowship, a Dr. Doris Derby Award, an Art Matters Fellowship Award, the inaugural Black Box Press Foundation Art as Activism Grant, and a Virginia Commission of the Arts Fellowship. Her work has been acquired by the Grace Linton Battle Memorial Fund for the Arts Collection and the Quirk Hotel in Charlottesville. Swift has been featured in the Berlin publication SomeMagazine, RVA Magazine, RHome Magazine, and Seattle’s the Stranger. She has participated in several national and international residencies and exhibitions, including her solo exhibition in Doha, Qatar, in 2016; NADA Miami; The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Michigan; and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and MASS MoCA.
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.