The Savannah College of Art and Design Re-Opens as a Major Teaching Museum

Written by Corinne Tinsdale Tuesday, 06 March 2012 21:30

Savannah, Georgia.- The Savannah College of Art and Design announces one of its most important education initiatives to date: the new SCAD Museum of Art, a significantly expanded and re-imagined contemporary art and design museum conceived and designed expressly to enrich the educational milieu for SCAD students, professors, and art and design enthusiasts. SCAD Museum of Art re-opens to the public on Saturday, Oct. 29th. Inaugural exhibitions at the new museum include: Bill Viola, The Crossing; Liza Lou, Let the Light In; Kendall Buster, New Growth: Stratum Field; a solo exhibition of recent works by Kehinde Wiley; and selections from the SCAD Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection, including the Evans Collection of African American Art, presented in the new Walter O. Evans Center for African American Studies within the museum.

In keeping with the university’s mission, a year-round program of exhibitions, installations, performances and museum programs and events will engage with SCAD’s 41 majors and more than 50 minors - from fashion and fibers to painting and sound design. This programming will also provide students and professors across all disciplines a collaborative space to experience celebrated works of art and design, and to interact with the renowned and emerging artists who create them. SCAD Museum of Art provides one square foot of academic space for every square foot of exhibition space. Galleries act as extensions of the traditional classroom, and, on the second floor of the museum, 12 classrooms create expansive learning laboratories. These museum classrooms are specifically designed to facilitate the learning experience – wide hallways and doorframes allow for easy movement and study of large works of art, and storage facilities located among the classrooms allow access to all of SCAD’s collections and temporary works. SCAD continues its award-winning legacy of adaptive reuse in the museum’s distinctive design and execution. The new museum joins past and present by uniting the ruins of the Central of Georgia Railroad 1853 depot, a National Historic Landmark and the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the country, with 65,000 square feet of new space. At 82,000 square feet total, the revitalized and re-envisioned structure honors the historical elements of the older buildings, preserving parts of the ruins as they exist today, while also featuring modern applications and materials. An 86-foot-tall steel and glass lantern punctuates the museum design and will soon adorn the Savannah skyline with a beacon of light.

The design of the new museum was conceived by President Wallace and Senior Vice President for College Resources Glenn Wallace. SCAD alumnus and professor Christian Sottile of Sottile & Sottile and Lord, Aeck & Sargent Architects, in association with Dawson Architects, executed the design, which was supervised by SCAD alumnus Martin Smith, executive director of design and new construction. The expansive facility includes galleries and classrooms, a 250-seat theater, a terrace and outdoor projection screen, a conservation studio, a museum café, and an event atrium. The museum is home to two new signature galleries: the Walter O. Evans Center for African American Studies, which boasts one of the most significant collections of African American Art in the United States and the André Leon Talley Gallery, which celebrates style and design in its myriad forms. SCAD Museum of Art also features breakthrough technology, highlighted by a state-of-the-art interactive orientation center in the museum’s entry hall. Designed by Pentagram exclusively for the museum, this 10-foot-long touch pad delivers information and images of the facility, exhibitions, artists and museum events.


The inaugural lineup of exhibitions sets the tone for the roster of national and international, renowned and emerging artists whose work will be presented in the museum: "Bill Viola: The Crossing" Co-commissioned by SCAD in 1996, "The Crossing" premiered in Savannah and has since been exhibited around the world. Rich in metaphor and grounded in shared spiritual beliefs of East and West, this canonical video art celebrates Viola’s signature ability to convey complex themes with scale and sound. As meticulous as it is magnetic, Liza Lou’s work never fails to draw a crowd. In "Let the Light In", the artist engages themes of containment, labor and repetition with millions of brilliant glass beads that illuminate the will and sensibility of human workmanship. As she has for much of her career, Lou brings a painter’s eye to her sculptural work, examining visual themes from the Pop Art and Neo-Expressionist tradition in unique environments of her own design. Commissioned by SCAD for the debut of SCAD Museum of Art, "New Growth: Stratum Field" is a site-specific sculptural installation designed and constructed to converse with the resonant features of the museum’s 290-foot south-facing gallery. Recalling Buster’s most iconic structural forms, this work explores biological architecture in all its many incarnations. The monumental and life-size portrait paintings of acclaimed artist Kehinde Wiley transpose elements of contemporary culture onto Baroque and Renaissance decorative backdrops.  In addition to exposing students to the work of lauded visiting artists, the museum will also present rotating exhibitions that feature selections from the Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, the Earle W. Newton Collection of British and American Art, as well as from SCAD’s permanent collection, which include works by Salvador Dalí, Nicholas Hlobo, Richard Hunt, Willem de Kooning, Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wangechi Mutu, Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Carrie Mae Weems.

SCAD maintains a permanent collection of more than 4,500 artworks, many of which will appear on rotation at the newly expanded museum. The SCAD Permanent Collection includes: The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, one of the most significant collections of African American art, spanning more than 150 years and featuring prized works by Bannister, Duncanson, Bearden, Hunt and many more; The SCAD Costume Collection, which includes garments donated by Cornelia Guest, daughter of fashion icon C.Z. Guest, and haute couture from Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel, Oscar de la Renta and Givenchy, among others; The 20th-century Art Collection, which includes an array of Modern art prints by major 19th- and 20th-century figures, from Goya and Renoir to Rauschenberg, Dali, de Kooning and Picasso as well as contemporary works by artists such as Nicholas Hlobo, Yeondoo Jung, Wangechi Mutu, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Carrie Mae Weems. The 19th- and 20th-century Photography Collection, featuring works by Cartier-Bresson, Mapplethorpe, Leibovitz and Warhol; The Earle W. Newton Collection of British and American Art, consisting of rare books, antique maps, paintings and work by Hogarth, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney. The SCAD Museum of Art will feature SCAD’s third annual deFINE ART program from February 21st to 25th 2012. deFINE ART is a major event highlighting the SCAD School of Fine Arts and its degree programs in painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography and more. Over the course of a week, SCAD students and community members enjoy lectures, exhibitions and performances by some of the top names in art.Since its inception in 2009, deFINE ART has attracted thousands of visitors and featured acclaimed artists and professionals such as Marina Abramovic, Nick Cave, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Marilyn Minter, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Sarah Thornton, Gary Tinterow and Richard Vine. Visit the museum's website at ... http://scadmoa.org

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