‘Tideland’ is an exhibition of black and white photographs by Savannah-based photographer Parker Stewart (b. 1992). Taken between 2020 and 2024, these evocative photographs document the coast of Georgia by transporting the viewer into the visceral and primordial atmosphere of the barrier islands and inland waterways.

The SCAD Museum of Art is proud to honor our U.S. service members by participating in the annual Blue Star Museums movement. In collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, the Department of Defense, and museums across America, SCAD MOA welcomes active-duty military personnel and their families with complimentary admission starting on Armed Forces Day, May 17, through Labor Day, Sept. 1, 2025. We look forward to presenting our latest exhibitions to these brave responders.

The SCAD Museum of Art joins world-renowned cultural institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Dallas Museum of Art as a Blue Star Museum participant.

(Un)Grounded, a solo exhibition of new work by Iranian-American artist Raheleh Filsoofi, is an immersive multimedia installation of ceramic vessels, sound, and video in conversation with the pottery and landscapes on view in The Moss Mystique: Southern Women and Newcomb Pottery. Over the past two years, Filsoofi has traveled to nine states in the Southeast to collect soil, including a visit to Savannah in April 2024. She has carefully archived, processed, and extracted the clay from these locations to form the physical and symbolic content of her multidisciplinary practice. Embracing her movement as a woman and immigrant within the region, (Un)Grounded considers the legacies of Newcomb Pottery through Filsoofi’s personal identity to engage with present-day perceptions surrounding southern identity, transience, and meanings of authenticity.

In 1895, administrators in the art department at the H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans, Louisiana, a women’s higher education institution that was joined to Tulane University, started a new commercial enterprise so that their students could put the skills they learned in their art and design courses into practice. A group of potters, mostly men, created the various objects out of clays sourced throughout the South, and women graduates of the art program painted them with images of flora and fauna. Newcomb Pottery quickly received praise throughout the US for the quality of its designs and the perceived authenticity of its representation of Southern regional identity, and these strong ties to location remain present today, long after the Pottery’s closure in 1939.

This exhibition focuses on the Newcomb potters’ material and chosen subjects, their relationships to regional identity, and the Pottery’s changing approaches to these subjects over time. Tasked with representing the region through their work, Newcomb designers earned a reputation for turning to their local environment for inspiration. This exhibition explores how designs that featured repeating, semi-abstract, and carefully selected plants such as waterlilies eventually transformed into muted landscapes of moss-draped oaks and cypresses, and the way these images matched romanticized visions of the South that were growing in the 20th century. The Moss Mystique asks visitors to reconsider their ideas about what makes a place unique. In an adjacent gallery, interdisciplinary artist Raheleh Filsoofi’s new multimedia exhibition (Un)Grounded will respond to the complexities of Newcomb pottery.

100 Days of Purpose – June 1–September 8 (ongoing)
Led by Savannah’s only lifestyle medicine physician and coaching team at Purpose & Plants, this 100-day community wellness challenge inspires simple, daily actions tied to your deeper purpose. It’s free, flexible, and designed to help you reset, recharge, and reconnect. Join the private Facebook group to access all of the free giveaways and resources.
→ Join anytime: https://purposeandplants.com/100-days-of-purpose-1

James Benjamin Franklin has brightly reimagined the conventions of painting through a language of process and discovery. His works incorporate repurposed textiles such as blankets, towels, afghans, clothing, and bathroom mats, creating sensually-layered rafts of visual and physical texture which serve as alternative canvases. These surfaces, in turn, are painted, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed with materials which include acrylic paint, sand and glitter. Whereas traditional canvas can be precious or overbearing, Franklin’s tactile surfaces are liberating and playful. They allow open experimentation where his visual lexicon and studio methods can evolve or reinvent themselves.

Franklin’s paintings are housed in handcrafted plaster-molded frames, each one with a unique geometry. Irregular shapes complement and contain the playful chaos of the many-layered painting surfaces. His process of discovery explores how specific media become more meaningful when applied to textiles and other found surfaces. His work is experimental in the best sense of that oft-used expression: it deploys intentional, rigorous investigation while learning from each new result.

The finished pieces suggest an artist who relishes surprise at the unexpected while discovering freedom in technique. This freedom has led Franklin to refine his practice with increasing nuance in shape, edge, color, and texture, and their interactions over time. Ultimately, the artist wishes to communicate something essentially human about the making of his art – the joys of creative experimentation, as evidenced by the work itself.

“There’s an understanding of time that I appreciate,” says Franklin. “You can get a sense of how the art was made, revealing a story or history to the process – the joy, as well as the struggle. Bringing the viewer into the piece and having a shared experience about making and about life.” Creative acts are communicated and felt more urgently than an aesthetics borne of intellectual preoccupations. Within a single work of art, new meanings and additional layers are revealed over time. Franklin’s art is evergreen, relational, and continuously inspiring.

Paintings shown in Visitor feature vivid, bold colors and mark-making, resulting in finishes and atmospheres which are new to Franklin’s body of work. His edges and borders have also evolved, enabling a variety of ways of seeing the painting as an ensemble. The frames create counterpoints to prevailing visual energies which radiate from an alchemical display of pigment, texture, and surface.

The title of the show references a poetic entrance, or visitation, to otherworldly spaces. Franklin is a first-time visitor to Savannah, Georgia, where his work also fills the galleries at Laney Contemporary for the first time. Both artist and audience share an experience of visiting and being visited.

Bio:
James Benjamin Franklin received his BFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA in 1999 and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2017. Recent exhibitions include Cranbrook Museum of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI; KMAC, Louisville, KY; FRONT International, The Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Broadway, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Reyes | Finn, Detroit, MI; and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City. Franklin was born in Tacoma, WA in 1972 and lives and works in Detroit, MI.

Hours:
Tuesday-Friday, 11-5pm
Saturday, 11-2pm
Free Admission

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