Richardson Rambles

We recently took a quick trip to Savannah to spend a weekend with family.  In addition to strolling through this gorgeous and historic city and eating too much, we had a chance to take in some art at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art.  SCAD was founded in 1978 and appears to have had a profound impact on the city by highlighting the cultural arts and bringing talented creatives – some of whom stay and further enrich the community arts scene.  Consequently, Savannah feels more open and progressive than many other southern cities in the U.S. We are big fans.

We wandered through a group exhibit and saw the work of four young artists.  The exhibition space is in the Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies gallery, which is located in a former Central Georgia Railway depot built with slave labor. The depot served as a transportation center for commodities – such as cotton – also produced by slave labor.  Several of the artists in the group exhibit referenced this in their work.

The four artists currently on view are Diedrick Brackens, Ken Gun Min, Zanele Muholi, and Sarah Crowner.

Diedrick’s exhibition, entitled “The Shape of Survival” uses woven tapestries to explore his black heritage, his queer status, and growing up in the American south.  The pieces, some wall-mounted and some free standing, are made of hand-dyed cotton referencing the slave community’s hand labor and the crop whose cultivation caused southern planters to purchase and enslave African people.

Diedrick’s work is held in the permanent collections of various institutions, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; New Orleans Museum of Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and several others.

“Ceremonies” celebrates the enduring nature of tradition and ritual, reminding us that throughout our history, no matter how bad things get, humans seek comfort in the repetition of ritual acts.

Diedrick Brackens, ceremonies, 2025

In “shadows spell my name”, Brackens references how black people and particularly, gay black men move through a shadow world, hiding from people that would harm them.  Look closely, and you’ll see that the soft lines and muted colors reveal an act of terrible violence – the stabbing of a black man.

Diedrick Brackens, shadows spell my name, 2025

Diedrick Brackens, shadows spell my name, close-up 2025

“through the summer triangle” shows two figures performing a rond-de-jamb on a plaid dance floor.  The orange and pink color motif is repeated in the inverted triangle, which represents the African American cultural inheritance and queer identity.

Diedrick Brackens, through the summer triangle, 2021.

The piece called “root-bound” elicited laughter from several viewers.  In it, Brackens depicts himself dancing – or more accurately twerking a la Miley Cyrus – in the garden below an open window, not caring that he might be observed dancing in the nude while gay.

Diedrick Brackens, root-bound, 2024

Ken Gun Min presents “The Vastness is Bearable Only Through Love” wherein he explores the enormity of our planet with its vast landscapes, its powerful weather phenomena, and the effects of these on humans and the other creature that inhabit our planet.  Mixing oil paints, Korean pigments, embroidery and beading, Min highlights how longing, melancholy, and euphoria are experienced across cultures and identities, including the queer identity.  Min showed several works at Art Basel – Miami Beach in 2024.  He has a long list of solo and group exhibitions at well-known galleries.

Ken Gun Min, You May Disappear Here, 2023

Ken Gun Min, Xochipillia (Moth in the Murder Lake), 2023

Ken Gun Min, How deep is the ocean?, 2024

In the close-up below, you can really see the incredible layering of materials that add texture and depth to Min’s work.

Ken Gun Min, How deep is the ocean? close-up, 2024

Ken Gun Min, Westlake, 2024

At 52, Zanele Muholi is the oldest artist in this group exhibit.  Muholi is a South African photographer, videographer, and activist whose work celebrates the lives of Black lesbian, gay, queer and intersex communities and brings attention to the ongoing discrimination and violence these groups suffer.  This artist identifies as “they” so readers, please forgive me if I misuse their pronouns – I am not expert in this matter.  They are also broadly collected and shown with exhibits in established museums throughout the world, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Brooklyn Museum; the Carnegie Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Tate Modern, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and others.

The works at SCAD include their black and white photo self-portraits, highly stylized and showing a range of who they might be and presenting positive imagery for marginalized people. The self-portraits come from the artist’s ongoing body of work entitled “Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness).  I believe the images are meant to be confrontational, as if to ask, “who are you to think I cannot be this person?”  I didn’t find them terribly confrontational, but they were certainly direct and uncompromising.  (Of course, it’s possible that I avoided the more controversial images.)

Zanele Muholi, Muholi Muholi II, Parktown, 2016

I thought the photo below was amazing as the artist seemingly melts into the branches and needles of the surrounding trees.

Zanele Muholi, ZaBo, Kyoto, Japan, 2017

Zanele Muholi, Somnyama Ngonyama II, Oslo, 2015

This last piece is from the self-portrait series but here the artist places the photographs in light-boxes, which adds an element of eeriness to the work.  They were, of course, much more impressive in person, another case where iphone technology, while generally excellent, cannot quite capture this kind of art.

Zanele Muholi, Khanyilanga I, Koreatown, Los Angeles, 2024

Sarah Crowner’s piece, “Platform as a Platform” consists of a 230-foot long glazed terracotta tile walkway that invites the viewer to walk along it and appreciate its extensive length.  Crowner carefully placed what appear to be abstract paintings at various intervals along the walkway.  The terracotta tiles reference SCAD’s historic brick structure, while the canvases represent its current function as a working art space – they are actually drop-cloths from the school’s screen-printing lab, and the “abstract forms” are the byproducts of years of student explorations of their chosen medium.  I thought they were pretty fun.

Her work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Contemporary Austin, Texas; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MASS MoCA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Sarah Crowner, Platform as a Platform, 2024

Sarah Crowner, Platform as a Platform, drop-leaf “art” close-up 2024

Sarah Crowner, Platform as a Platform, drop-leaf “art, 2024