Isabel Toledo @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah - "A Love Letter" Exhibition

Isabel Toledo: A Love Letter

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

August 14 – December 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 Toledo 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 Toledo’s impassioned functionalism and Ruben Toledo’s fantasy-prone humor was inspirational, pushing both to greater heights. A Love Letter features a selection of Isabel Toledo’s designs displaying her mastery of technique, fabric, shape, and color, complemented by new works by Ruben Toledo created exclusively for the exhibition and a short film highlighting Isabel Toledo’s practice and memorializing their unique relationship.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah - "Good Hair" Exhibition

Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola

Good Hair

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

August 23 – December 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, Anthony Olubunmi 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.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah - "Arboretum" Exhibition

Jiten Thukral & Sumir Tagra

Arboretum

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

July 31 – December 23, 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.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Olimpia Zagnoli @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah - "Multifaceted" Exhibition

Olimpia Zagnoli: Multifaceted

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

July 31 – December 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, Olimpia Zagnoli transposes her bold images from their two-dimensional format into large-scale sculptures with careful consideration of every line, angle, and hue. Olimpia 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.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Holly Hendry: Watermarks @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

Holly Hendry: Watermarks 

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah 

February 26 – June 24, 2024

Sculptor HOLLY HENDRY approaches the SCAD Museum of Art’s historic edifice as a porous network of passages and conduits. Framed within the glass vitrines on the building’s façade, the artist’s new diorama-like installations offer imagined cross-sections of the museum’s inner workings and infrastructure. Each work evokes looped industrial pipes, deflated mechanical gears, and strange anatomical forms to encourage reflection on the relationships between sculpture, the human body, and the built and natural environment.

In particular, Holly Hendry focuses on the theme of flowing water, referring both to the liquid movements found across Savannah’s aquatic landscape and to our human anatomy. Some of her caricature-like sculptures appear to be inundated by floods, while others undulate and tumble in wave-like formations or leak teardrop-shaped blown glass drips. The artworks’ titles also reiterate this intermingling of body and water, referencing lines from Ovid’s story of the water nymph Cyane, who dissolves in her own tears — an apt metaphor for the effects of the global climate crisis and rising sea levels. Hendry’s richly detailed creations give life to the hidden aspects of our surroundings — elements that might be concealed from our view yet nevertheless undergird our reality.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Ivan Argote: The Burden of the Invisible @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

Iván Argote 

The Burden of the Invisible 

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah 

February 21 – July 29, 2024 

In The Burden of the Invisible, multidisciplinary artist IVAN ARGOTE presents critical yet playful works that challenge collective memories and the narrow, dominant histories commonly presented in public spaces. Through sculpture, film, painting, and photography, the artist reimagines historical monuments in Savannah and around the world, reflecting on their purpose and proposing alternate realities. Argote’s new installation Señores creates an uncanny scene, grouping archetypal statues in states of decay and overgrown with various plants. His film Levitate and recent series of concrete paintings also contend with monuments’ supposed permanence and their militaristic iconography, revealing how notions of power and domination are present within our history and daily lives. By representing real sites of commemoration, albeit fictitiously and satirically, Argote advocates for decentralized, constantly evolving public spaces that acknowledge other narratives.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Awol Erizku @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

Awol Erizku: X 

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah 

February 26 – July 3, 2024

In his debut solo museum exhibition, AWOL ERIZKU focuses on pioneering American Muslim human rights activist El Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) as a subject of personal inspiration and complex cultural significance. Awol Erizku views the historic figure as a metaphorical prism of faith, masculinity, transformation, and a vessel for truth. This ambitious exhibition is composed of new and recent works by Awol Erizku, including iconic photographs, sculptures, works on paper, a powerful film, and an installation of a rare historic manuscript. Together, they collectively convey the artist’s multidisciplinary practice and dynamic approach to a diverse range of media. Presented in the SCAD Museum of Art’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies, the exhibition critiques the Eurocentric canon of art and history, with Malcolm X serving as a key figure connecting the U.S. and Africa. Awol Erizku posits his singular aesthetic as a means to link ancient mythology, diasporic tradition, and contemporary culture as an antidote to closed-mindedness — striving toward Malcolm X’s late-life universalism and dedication to the “overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood.”

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA 

Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org

Cao Fei: At the Edge of Superhumanity @ SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah

Cao Fei

At the Edge of Superhumanity 

SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah 

February 26 – July 29, 2024

Since the early 2000s, SCAD deFINE ART honoree CAO FEI has produced forward-thinking work that acutely responds to and reflects on — in real time — shifts in our perception and experience of reality during periods of rapid globalization, urban development, and technological advancement. A pioneer of creating digital worlds, Cao Fei transforms two galleries at the SCAD Museum of Art into an immersive multimedia installation featuring live-action films, as well as virtual, augmented, and mixed-reality environments for visitors to explore. Blurring distinctions between the terrestrial and the cyber, the familiar and the futuristic, Cao Fei reveals how the spaces we inhabit shape our identities and social interactions, and ultimately redirect our search for meaning and purpose in life.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART - SCAD MOA

Savannah College of Art and Design

601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Georgia

www.scadmoa.org