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

Red. Yellow. Blue. For centuries, this trio has impacted artistic practice and culture on a global scale. Collectively known as primary colors, they serve as the foundation of color theory in art. Defined by a set of colors that, when mixed, form the basis of all other colors, primary colors are the building blocks of the color spectrum. This bold triad can evoke emotion, convey messages, and influence our perceptions of the world, and it presents endless possibilities for creativity and expression. Its distinctiveness has inspired renowned artists like Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, and even entire art movements, like De Stijl and Pop Art.

Drawn from Telfair Museums’ permanent collection, Primary: Artists Working in Red, Yellow, and Blue explores how artists have utilized primary colors in adventurous ways to elicit brilliant experiences. Featuring works by Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly, and Joan Miró, these energetic and dynamic compositions introduce viewers to the expansive possibilities of a simple palette.

Artists depict interior settings in many ways. Some focus on them as the subject of their work, while others use them to create settings and backdrops to inform a scene. Often, they are rich in detail and ripe for further visual exploration. Stay Awhile: Interiors in Art encourages visitors to thoroughly ponder a selection of works from Telfair’s permanent collection, including paintings, drawings, and photographs, that feature a variety of views of the indoors. Rather than emphasize a specific narrative, the text accompanying each work of art offers the visitor entry points for looking more closely at elements of a composition, encouraging them to form their own ideas or discuss them with fellow museumgoers.

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 photographs show how the air hangs heavy on this ancient coastline, a place where the sea and the land entwine in an eternal embrace. Fog shrouded marshscapes, summer thunderstorms, dockhouses held up by toothpick pilings and details of old wooden shrimping trawlers are just some of the moments recorded by Stewart. These photographs depict a landscape of quiet grandeur, a place where the past whispers from the trees and the future is constantly being written on the tides.

This exhibition is part of the #art912 initiative, a platform dedicated to raising the visibility and vitality of artists living and working in Savannah. Tideland is organized by Telfair Museums and curated by Erin Dunn, curator of modern and contemporary art. 

Parker Stewart is a photographer based in Savannah, Georgia. A native of North Carolina, Stewart arrived in Savannah in 2011 to study photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Stewart’s work is focused on the notion of Place, and he uses photography as a tool to record the moments and scenes that move him the most. Currently Stewart is making photographs of the landscape and culture of the wild Georgia coastline and the rural Savannah River Basin. As well as working on extensive bodies of work in Coastal Maine, Western North Carolina, the Oregon Coast, and the Mojave Desert.

People in Savannah and the greater coastal Georgia and South Carolina region have handcrafted objects for generations to fill the needs of furnishing their homes, pursuing new artistic endeavors and creating products to sell in a range of markets. For this reason, these works often incorporate locally available materials and reflect many cultural values. They offer a range of insights into the history of artmaking in this area.

The new Craft along the Coast galleries feature works from Telfair’s permanent collection that date from the 18th to the late 20th centuries. Gallery 1 presents examples of woodworking, ceramics, and painting, while Gallery 2 focuses on Savannah’s silversmithing traditions. Both galleries tell stories of markets and craft legacies, helping to draw lines of continuity through a dynamic history.

Art has the power to expose, to connect, and ultimately to heal. In her upcoming exhibition, The Art of Healing: A retrospective of six years in Richmond Hill, Antoine de Villiers presents more than just a body of work, she offers a profound window into the emotional terrain of belonging, resilience, and transformation.

On view 2025 May 1-July 18 at Photopoint Gallery

Opening reception & Artist Talk
for women… 2025 May 8 / 6-8 pm

Cleo the Project Space is pleased to present Impressed with work by Ben Tollefson and Abby Edwards. This duo uses fantasy to heighten ideas of connection, memory and self reflection found through pop culture and societal impressions.

Edwards’s sculptural work combs through childhood iconography during the ‘90s to revisit play with shape and design. The reference to Memphis Design (found in moments with Tollefson’s work as well) is an invocation of brightly stylized compositions with a rejection of muted aesthetics. This adds humor and absurdity to her objects, found in the movement given to pencils, the size given to their grips and the overall palette given to the entire body of work, both highly patterned and textural. Edward’s work is a reminder of the importance of boundless expression through recollection, an activity that propels creativity in rebellion against a restrained maturity.

Embracing a wide range of motion, color and style as well, Tollefson’s paintings delve into reclaiming a sense of self through the idea of gender as a performance. Using drag and theater for inspiration, the work features self portraits clad in costuming to play with perceptions of a character. This play is a routine in forced illusion that pushes boundaries of gender ideology in favor of dynamic redefinitions. The paintings featuring sets with increased melodrama through the placement of curtains and lighting put the body of work into a feverish reality in which the acts of revealing and masking blur at center stage.

On Display at Thompson Savannah: 201 Port St, Savannah, GA, 31401

Telfair celebrates a new exhibition in its immersive Children’s Art Museum (CAM) that focuses on the fantastic art of Savannah artist and sailor William O. Golding (1874-1943). A host of new interactive experiences will lead children and adults through the remarkable story of this artist whose seafaring adventures of 49 years inspired his distinctive maritime drawings. New exhibits by FREN Inc. bring Golding’s pencil and crayon drawings to life in animations that visitors of all ages may control and interact with.

A popular 2022 Telfair Museums exhibition and book documented Golding’s colorful life and art. Golding, an African American seaman, was tricked aboard a sailing ship as a youth on Savannah’s waterfront in the 1880s. He eventually became a seasoned sailor who served in the U.S. Navy and worked on ships of all types from a whaler to a man o’ war. In the new CAM, Telfair’s collection of 23 Golding drawings serves as inspiration for interactive exhibits showcasing the ships depicted in his art, as well as ports near and far that he visited across the globe. An immersive LED wall will allow participants to guide their own animated ship to follow Golding’s journeys, exploring geography, weather, and maritime technology as seen by one of Savannah’s most unique artists.

Laney Contemporary and Local 11ten proudly present Synergy, a collaborative exhibition featuring the work of six artists: Betsy Cain, Amy Pleasant, Will Penny, Ansley West Rivers, Todd Schroeder, and Katherine Sandoz.

On view: May 14th - August 31st, 2025

Reception: June 6th | 5 - 6:30 pm

Location: Local 11ten

Curated by Jacob Edenfield.

(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.

Grumpy Old Men is a group show by male artists of a certain age that explores what was the best life lesson learned from their own father or father figures. Gallery profits from show are donated to Frank Callen Boys & Girls Club

James Benjamin Franklin: Visitor

Opening Reception: Friday, June 27th, 6:00 - 8:30PM

Artist Talk: Saturday, June 28th, at 11:30AM

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…

A Solo Exhibition by Lamar Robillard

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 26th, 6 - 9PM, with an Artist Talk at 7PM

In Fruits of Labor, Summer Wheat (SCAD M.F.A., painting, 2005) presents six richly textured paintings inspired by Greek mythology, animal archetypes, and astrology. A pair of totemic works featuring fruit–animal hybrids are flanked by multiple large-scale paintings that immerse viewers in a lush, harmonious world. In these scenes, Wheat portrays female figures as nurturers and cultivators lounging post-exertion, entwined with animals often associated with fear yet exuding calm and satisfaction. This new series expands Wheat’s practice of depicting women at work to their well-earned luxuriating that follows, insisting that moments of release, repose, and ease after collective effort are worthy of commemoration.

Wheat’s unique process begins with digital sketches, which she transforms into tapestry-like surfaces by piping acrylic paint through wire mesh. This labor-intensive technique yields composite images, embedding stylized characters within patterns, grids, and nets that reference folk traditions, sacred geometry, and digital systems. Inviting viewers to experience a dynamic interplay of depth and flatness, order and intuition, Wheat’s vivid, multilayered paintings are portals into alternate realms where the fruits of labor are fully relished.

Life is a beach with Shore Things a 4 person show with Jennifer Nolan, Melody Postma, Peter E. Roberts and Kurtis Schumm. Gallery profits from show are donated to Ossabaw Island Foundation

Featuring the works of Maxx Feist, Adrienne Berkland, and Isak Dove.

On view July 25-August 17, 2025

Creation, maintenance, and destruction are cyclical patterns we all experience as individuals. While particular lives may look different, there can be strength and resilience that comes from being part of a community amidst uncertainty. Three Savannah-based artists have come together to explore how their combined creative processes can help them navigate their journeys through these phases of life. The exhibition considers how painters with distinct styles use three specific color palettes as a form of processing, a commentary on our current times, and as an act of resistance. They ask: “In this time of turmoil, how do we use our art to navigate our emotions, and how do our emotions influence our art?”

Opening Reception: Friday, July 25, 5-9pm

First Friday Market: Friday, August 1, 5-9pm

Open hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1-4pm or by appointment.

If you ever wanted to produce a solo or group show at Location Gallery, now is your chance!

Up For Grabs is our very first foray into seeing and awarding a show that is submission based.

And yes, Up For Grabs is a working title...the winning entry will have their own title. For more info and to apply click link

www.locationgallery.net/upforgrabs

Jana Marie Cariddi presents Amygdala, a Solo Exhibition at the SCAD Museum of Art

Working Titles is a result of when the performers from the big top, sideshow and midway return to everyday life with spectacular results. New mixed media pieces by Peter E. Roberts

Gallery profits from show are donated to Third Act