The ninth annual Boxed In/Break Out features the unique sculptures of Abby Edwards, whose work explores the human experience through absurdity, humor, and child-like curiosity. Her installation Dirt and Stardust examines the relationship between humankind’s inner worlds and the outer cosmos through bold and colorful compositions.

Dr. Katie Geha, Director of the Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia, selected Edwards’ proposal, noting: “Abby Edwards proposal for Boxed In/Break Out was accomplished and realized. Her works have a playful approach to the unknown, UFOs, and the awe that accompanies the exploration of the unknown. Her sculptures, exaggerated in form and color, display an absurdist examination of our inner and outer galaxies. Her work will read particularly well from the street and inspire joy in the casual passer-by.” Recognizing that the unknown can be an unsettling topic, Edwards ultimately invites curiosity, inspiring viewers to ask questions, and reignite their imaginations.

Of One Mind is a collaboration between local artists Autumn Gary and Alexis Javier around the theme of “oneness,” an approach outlined in the Ohèn:ton Karihwatéhkwen, or the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address. In this invocation, participants express gratitude for life-sustaining forces and elements, effectively recognizing humans’ inseparable bond to the natural and spiritual worlds. Each verse concludes with the following refrain: “Now our minds are one.”

Gary and Javier’s original sculptural installation will speak to this idea, highlighting art’s ability to act as a unified, timeless, and inclusive language. A series of abstract sculptures will demonstrate our symbiotic relationship to the cosmos and the recurring myths that connect the ancient past, our present moment, and the future. This exhibition will also include interactive sensory elements to empower and welcome all visitors. Finally, Gary will create a series of outdoor sculptures for the Jepson’s terraces around the theme of nature as guide.

George Clinton is a cultural icon whose contributions to the arts span seven decades. He revolutionized music and performance as the bandleader of Parliament-Funkadelic, collaborating across genres and mediums with outlandish styling, spectacular set designs, and pioneering artistry. While on tour in the 1990s, Clinton began applying his creativity to drawing and painting, developing a surreal, hallucinogenic, maximalist aesthetic that riffs on the characters, mythology, and language of P-Funk. His artistic approach is defined by improvisation, experimentation, and innovation — refusing to be bound by traditional expectations or societal norms. This landmark exhibition focuses on the wildly unconventional works Clinton has made in the years since, showcasing his inventiveness in the context of a fine art museum for the first time. A true visionary, Clinton presents a multidimensional perspective on Black experience in the U.S., inviting us all to enter a world that is fantastical, optimistic, and full of funk.

Opening Reception: November 15th, 5-8pm

A boundary between the known and the unknown. An untamed landscape, new and at the same time, nostalgic. An inner journey being explored. Time is blurred and sagging. The weight of this struggle is balanced by a new love, a persistent joy of discovering new limits in the size of our hearts.

Trish Andersen and Michael Porten have stepped into a Wild new Frontier for their first exhibition together. Tackling what it is to be both artists and parents, collaboration is given fresh meaning as their son Walt turns one-year-old on the eve of this show. A wild ride, to say the least, parenting asks one to speed ahead while having little chance to look back. Time stands still and also seems to catapult, prompting excitement and anxiety, igniting instinctive survival skills.

William Glaser Wilson creates deeply personal paintings that respond to his individual experiences and adapt to the conditions of his immediate environment. Originally trained as a photographer, he investigates the power of images to capture a moment, using both representation and abstraction within paintings that serve as impressionistic records. Merging the distinctive realms of his daily life and studio practice, Wilson imbues his works with significant subjective meaning while engaging with collective themes of the passage of time, family, and memory.

Wilson developed his most recent paintings after moving to a remote locale in a once-thriving mining community in upstate New York, where he based his studio in an abandoned church. As the title of the exhibition suggests, Spirit Sanctuary is directly influenced by this space. In new works executed on a vertical format mimicking the proportions of the stained-glass windows that provide the studio’s only source of light, Wilson embraces the picturesque natural environment and scarcity of commercial supply in his community as an opportunity for the expansion of visual possibilities rather than restriction. The artist incorporates found materials like flowers and liturgical linens in his highly expressive paintings, loading ritual and reverential iconography into works that serve as acts of devotion to the messiness and beauty of everyday life.

Spirit Sanctuary is organized by SCAD Museum of Art curator Ben Tollefson and is presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2025.

About the artist
In his practice, William Glaser Wilson (b. 1994, Yonkers, New York; SCAD B.F.A., photography, 2017) uses photography, sculpture, and painting to portray collective struggles and pleasures through constructed environments. Wilson has shown his work in solo and two-person exhibitions at CCAN Art Gallery at Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and the Savannah Cultural Arts Center, Ga., among others. His work was included in the group exhibition Self-Adjacent, which traveled to venues including the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Va.; Massey Klein Gallery, New York; and the Kennedy Museum of Art, Athens, Ohio. He has participated in residencies including the SCAD Alumni Atelier. Wilson lives and works in the Adirondacks of New York with his daughter and wife, fellow artist Julia Wilson.

Telfair’s Making Marks exhibition is the essence of community art, showcasing works by diverse individuals of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities, and highlighting the empowering experience of creating. Artmaking provides opportunity for healing, transformation, and discovery, and brings people together to connect our community. This exhibition represents hundreds of local artists and includes artwork created during Telfair’s extensive outreach sessions with various community partners, including local health and social service organizations, as well as individual submissions from students and veterans. Themes found in this exhibition reflect the positive impact art can make in our lives and remind us that artmaking is for everyone.

Opening Celebration will be held December 8th, 2-4pm.

Join Telfair Museums’ staff and members of the Savannah community in the Neises Auditorium* for the opening program for Making Marks. This community exhibition features works submitted by local residents of all ages and backgrounds emphasizing the healing and transformative power of art making. The program will include a presentation of Telfair’s outreach programming and participant speakers from partner organizations. This event is free of admission and open to the public.

*Auditorium program will start at 2:30pm.

Adrift x Collision is a collaborative exhibition that brings together visual artists and writers to explore the relationship between text and imagery. Each pairing in this collection represents a journey of creative discovery where words and visuals interweave, sometimes converging and sometimes diverging, but always revealing new layers of meaning.

This collection of work creates a dialogue between mediums where the written word enhances the visual and the imagery either supports or challenges the narrative. The exhibition invites viewers to explore the fluidity of interpretation and how language and art can transform one another.

Collaborators: Rebecca Braziel + Lisa Jaye Young, Bri’ Anna Richards + Asya Loring, Kevin Kirkwood + Brienne Walsh, Faran Peterson Riley + Ezra Ali-Dow

Co-curated by Antonia B. Larkin, Visual Arts Specialist and Ezra Ali-Dow, Performing Arts Specialist

Gallery Opening Reception

Friday, December 13 | 6:00-8:00pm - Free and open to the public. Light refreshments served!

Telfair Museums presents a solo exhibition of iconic digital art by Jim Campbell (b. 1956), whose light-based works explore the limits of human perception. Holding degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics from MIT, along with patents for his work in development of high-definition video, Campbell is widely known for his low-resolution moving images created by arrays of LEDS. This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to the San Francisco-based artist’s works in the Southeast and will coincide with Telfair’s 2025 PULSE Art + Technology Festival.

Thresholds of Perception includes a sampling of Campbell’s low-resolution works spanning more than 20 years of his output. His captivating images engage the viewer in a primal act of looking and recognition, bringing physical materiality and humanizing elements to the digital. Works such as Color Home Movies, which incorporates found footage from anonymous home movies, are stripped down to animated pixels of light which rely on the viewer’s memory and imagination to complete the missing information. Recognition often comes from movement, for example the gait of an individual walking in Campbell’s Motion and Rest series. In one of Campbell’s major works Eroding Wave, 3,456 LED lights extend into the viewers’ space, dispersing light in three dimensional particles as silhouettes of swimmers move upward through a sculptural wave.

Jim Campbell’s art has appeared in numerous exhibitions in the US and abroad and is represented in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and others. His public art works include Day for Night (2018) a permanent moving image installation displayed across the top nine floors of Salesforce Tower in San Francisco.

Exhibition will coincide with Telfair’s 2025 PULSE Art + Technology Festival, January 16-18.

‘Pause’ features faculty work from SCAD’s Fibers Department, showcasing work made when they have the opportunity to pause between busy quarters and return to their studios to make work.

Opening Reception: January 10th, 5 - 9 PM

Closing Reception: February 7th, 5 - 9 PM

Open Saturdays and Sundays, 1 - 4 PM

Opening Reception: January 11th 6-9 pm with artist talk 7:00-8:00 pm

Cleo the Project Space is pleased to present “You’re the Man Now, Dog” with work by Matthew Flores. This exhibition utilizes commonplace transmissions to address the limits of concise communication through the presupposed advantage of technology.

Armed with an archive of one liners, automation and pop culture references, Flores explores the possibilities of appropriating meaning while performing the role of artist. The use of a fax machine, television set, and Funny Fone become vehicles in this newest body of work for placing the responsibility of interpretation on the viewer. The possibility for miscommunication is at the crux of his set up with the machinery and includes jokes with multiple implications, the looping of audio, and the delayed, or even unavailable, retrieval of imagery. This allows for multiple translations of symbology amidst emotional reflexes like frustration or laughter that curry their own weight in the decisions of the audience when assigning meaning.

All the while Flores himself serves as director of the happenings and performances with just enough of a hand in the work, or reworking, of the art on display to challenge perception. The use of screens and humor as modes of transmission is an act of attracting an audience by the everyday. It is through that direct access of information the work spurns a larger conversation of absurdity in the retrieval of the delivery. With the theatrics of this collection, the gallery is set as a stage for multiple performances that involve the audience as players in the act with their variety of reactions completing the circuit of storytelling.          

Join us on January 15, 2025 from 5 – 7PM at Laney Contemporary as we embark on the first of many events to raise awareness and funds forARTS Southeast’s forthcoming Ossabaw Island Artist Residency

For the last fifteen years, Betsy Cain has spent countless hours meditating on the horizons and grasslands, sawtooth palms and hammocks on Ossabaw Island as a way to honor Ossabaw matriarch, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West, and the impact she and the island have had on Cain’s life. These en plein air meditations have resulted in over 100 lyrical drawings made in ink.

To further honor West’s legacy, all proceeds from the exhibition benefit ARTS Southeast’s upcoming Ossabaw Island Artist Residency Program.

Betsy Cain: Ossabaw Meditations, 2010 – 2024, is on display from January 15 – 25, 2025.

Gallery Hours: T – F, 11 – 5 PM & Sat, 11 – 2 PM  

Telfair Museums’ PULSE Art and Technology Festival returns for its 18th year with a must-see exhibition and lecture by pioneering electronic artist Jim Campbell, a showcase of projects by local artists working in new media, and programs for all ages. The festival kicks off with a member’s opening and lecture by Jim Campbell, and a showcase of art and projections by local artists. Friday’s schedule includes a tech talk for students grades 4 and up, a curator’s tour, and an Art and Film night with a classic sci-fi anime screening. The festival ends Saturday with a workshop for youth, a Free Family Day with game demonstrations, family art making, and a cool, new performance by the Tybee Ballet Theatre.

Click here to see the program schedule.

Epic in their explosive color yet confined within painted frames, the large-scale mixed-media paintings of Ken Gun Min capture the paradoxes of our beautifully complex world, where utopian idealism collides with dystopian realities. Through lush landscapes and tender portraits, Min orchestrates sublime scenes — both real and imagined — that draw from his experiences as a queer Korean immigrant in the U.S. Focusing on the emotion of his parafictional stories, Min showcases the moment of beauty before destruction, stirring feelings of uneasiness and awe. Ultimately, his works highlight the importance of seeing life in its entirety and remind viewers to offer gentleness to all journeying through this vast existence.

On raw canvases treated with gesso and Japanese bookbinding glue, Min applies a unique cross-cultural blend of materials, such as Western oils, Korean pigments, and hand-embroidered beads, that address his transition from South Korea to the U.S. and challenge the boundaries of painting and craft. These textural compositions, inspired by historical European paintings and East Asian textiles, evoke Min’s “queer utopia,” underpinned by the repressed histories and urban legends of Los Angeles. Depictions of animals such as lions, peacocks, and moths, adorned with gems and facing their demise, serve as allegories for the gentrification of local queer Asian hubs and as anthropomorphic symbols of “cruisers” or gay sex workers, whose lives are often at risk in their profession. While Min’s portrayals of male figures wading in water also allude to the tragic homophobic murders and disappearances of transgender people at a nearby lake, his centering of intimate, muscular men of color brings visibility to queer communities and offers new conceptions of masculinity, sexuality, and race.

Jan. 24 - June 22, 2025

Diedrick Brackens creates woven tapestries that blend a cosmic array of allegories, historical narratives, and autobiographical memories into compelling forms. In The Shape of Survival, Brackens brings his work into intimate dialogue with the American South, drawing on the region’s history of quilting and influences from myriad historic artists, most notably Aaron Douglas. Brackens’ use of hand-dyed cotton acknowledges the weighty legacy of this material, honoring its past while transmuting it into lyrical, awe-inspiring artworks.

The Shape of Survival takes on additional resonance in the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies within a structure that originally served as a Central of Georgia Railway depot where cotton and other commodities produced by enslaved Black labor were transported and stored. Yet the poetic and often ecstatic gestures of Brackens’ figures offer a sense of joy and revelry, expressing a powerful engagement with the richness of both African American cultural inheritance and queer identity. Together, these works propose conversations across the centuries on the power of art and its potential for transformation and growth.

Feb. 24 - July 7, 2025

SCAD deFINE ART honoree Zanele Muholi is a boundary-pushing artist esteemed for their work exploring notions of Black identity, community, and advocacy. A self-described visual activist, Muholi prioritizes the depiction of marginalized people from queer communities in both their home country of South Africa and around the globe. Through striking photographs, film, and sculpture, the artist honors the complex lived experiences of Black individuals, underscoring the vital need for visibility and agency.

Muholi’s exhibition includes several landmark bodies of work including Somnyama Ngonyama, translated from Zulu as Hail the Dark Lioness, an ongoing series of self-portraits that cast the artist as the central figure in sumptuous black-and-white images. In these staged confrontations, Muholi dons everyday items like clothespins, rugs, and plastic bags, which transform through unexpected arrangements, reflecting both personal and collective narratives of race and body politics.

The exhibition also features selections from Brave Beauties, highlighting trans women and nonbinary people in empowered poses, and Faces and Phases, a series of portraits that respond to the violence and discrimination faced by Black lesbians in South Africa. A never-before-seen group of self-portraits continues the artist’s Somnyama Ngonyama series in lightbox format. Through these works, Muholi reenvisions Black queer representation and challenges pervasive stereotypes, offering an empathetic and emboldened perspective of the human condition.

Feb. 24 - July 6, 2025