SCAD Museum of Art Breaks Ground for Historic Museum Expansion

/PRNewswire/ -- The Savannah College of Art and Design held an historic groundbreaking ceremony yesterday, Jan. 21, 2010, for the SCAD Museum of Art complex, which will include the future home of the Walter O. Evans Center for African American Studies housing one of the finest collections of African-American art in the United States, as well as other significant museum collections in new galleries and academic spaces. Representatives from Savannah's city government, members of the art and preservation community and four generations of the Evans family attended the event.

SCAD's dynamic new center for African-American art, literature and culture

The Walter O. Evans Center for African American Studies, the heart of the museum complex, is named for Savannah native and nationally renowned art collector Dr. Walter O. Evans. Listed frequently among America's top 100 collectors by Art and Antiques magazine, Evans assembled a legacy collection that spans 150 years of African-American art--from 19th-century landscape paintings of the Hudson River School to works by masters of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as folk art, examples from the Federal Art Project of the 1930s, and later 20th-century works by Lawrence and Bearden among others. In December 2005, Evans donated a significant collection of African-American art to SCAD, and the gift has created an invaluable resource for the university, the region and the nation.

The Evans Center will provide a permanent home for the Evans Collection as well as an interdisciplinary facility devoted to the study of African-American art, literature and culture that will include classrooms, exhibition space, event space and a theater. The center also will also create the opportunity for SCAD to develop more educational programs and relationships with public and private schools in Savannah and the Southeast.

"My wife Linda and I wanted the collection to stay in our hometown," said Evans. "However,
selecting SCAD as the recipient was more than a matter of location. The partnership with the
university will ensure that people of all ages and diverse social and ethnic backgrounds will have
an opportunity to view and learn from the collection for many years to come. Linda and I hope that through this new Center for African American Studies, visitors will recognize the importance of preserving our cultural heritage and of providing a legacy for those who come after us."

SCAD's renowned expertise in historic preservation and urban revitalization

The SCAD Museum of Art sits on a site that had once been dilapidated and abandoned. Now saved and restored, the expanded museum and Evans Center will be new neighborhood anchors and vibrant centers of student and university activities. Through this institutional practice of adaptive reuse, SCAD has redefined preservation education and demonstrated how building conservation can revive neighborhoods, restore local economies and reawaken civic pride. The SCAD Museum of Art complex and the Evans Center further exemplify SCAD's commitment to the revitalization of Savannah's commercial corridor along Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and will bring new life to a downtown district that was once vital to the city.

With the museum expansion, SCAD's latest adaptive re-use project will focus on the Central of Georgia Railroad 1853 depot, located directly behind the current museum that is housed in the former 1856 railroad headquarters. Both buildings were original to the Central of Georgia Railroad complex, the only surviving antebellum railroad complex in the country and a National Historic Landmark. SCAD will adaptively reuse the depot's remaining brick masonry walls and will incorporate other materials salvaged from the site in the new construction. Likely constructed by African-American slaves and built from bricks made by slave labor, the Evans Center will be physically infused with the African-American culture and history that it seeks to celebrate and preserve. The exterior design culminates in an 86-foot-tall steel and glass lantern that will stand over a central atrium and a glass-walled gallery where there were once railroad tracks.

Planned in two phases, this first phase will add approximately 60,000 square feet to the museum complex. The expanded facility will accommodate much of the museum collection now housed in off-site storage and expand programming with the addition of new galleries, classrooms and a 250-seat theater. The courtyard beside the museum will be landscaped, and a streetscape with trees and a new sidewalk on the Turner Street side will transform the neighborhood.

The urban design firm Sottile and Sottile, headed by SCAD professor and alumnus Christian Sottile, is leading the development of the project's exterior design. The principal architects are
the Atlanta firm Lord, Aeck & Sargent, who were architectural partners for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Savannah architect Neil Dawson, and the Boulder, Colo.-based exhibition design firm Quenroe Associates, whose clients have included the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, and the Smithsonian Institution, among others.

As a teaching museum, the SCAD Museum of Art supports the academic and creative programs at SCAD by providing students with direct encounters with works by major artists while enriching the artistic, educational and cultural offerings available to the university and wider communities. The museum is a cultural gem that adds to Savannah's reputation as an ideal location for visitors and those interested in the arts and architecture.

SCAD: The University for Creative Careers

The Savannah College of Art and Design is the most comprehensive art and design university in the world, offering more degree programs and specializations than any other art and design university. SCAD is a private, nonprofit, accredited institution conferring bachelor's and master's degrees in distinctive locations and online to prepare talented students for professional careers. SCAD offers students a choice of degree programs in 46 majors and more than 50 minors at locations in Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; in Lacoste, France; online through SCAD eLearning; and in Hong Kong beginning Fall 2010.

SCAD offers an exceptional education and unparalleled career preparation. The diverse student body of more than 9,900 comes from all 50 United States and nearly 100 countries worldwide. Each student is nurtured and motivated by a faculty of more than 650 professors with extraordinary academic credentials and valuable professional experience. These faculty emphasize learning through individual attention in an inspiring university environment. SCAD provides an innovative curriculum enhanced by advanced, professional-level technology, equipment and learning resources. SCAD has garnered acclaim from respected organizations and publications, including BusinessWeek, American Institute of Architects, DesignIntelligence, U.S. News & World Report and Los Angeles Times.

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Stanford Researcher Spotlights Antebellum Artists Who Protested Slavery

What Does One Do When Confronting the Biggest Social Evil of One's Time? In the Case of a Few Artists in the Decades Prior to the Civil War, They Lifted Their Pens and Paintbrushes

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Rhonda Goodman, a Stanford doctoral student in art and art history and a Geballe Dissertation Prize Fellow at the Humanities Center, has studied the little-known artwork for messages that reveal the social and political attitudes of the time. She focused her research on the way artists portrayed slave auctions, in particular.

The "sentimental culture" in the decades prior to the Civil War was a time when artists and writers "used their works to elicit a certain type of feeling and engender sympathy," said Goodman, a former Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. Significantly, the most popular book of the 19th century, after the Bible, was Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Here's a case in point: On the morning of March 3, 1853, the little-known English painter Eyre Crowe, who traveled America with author William Makepeace Thackeray, saw an advertisement in Richmond, Va., for a slave auction: "Fifteen likely negroes to be disposed of between half-past nine and twelve—five men, six women, two boys, and two girls."

Although engrossed in his sketching, he attracted attention. No one would bid. The auctioneer finally confronted the artist and asked him how he would like it if someone interrupted his business. As Crowe recalled in his memoir, With Thackeray in America: "This was unanswerable; I got up with the intention of leaving quietly, but, feeling this would savour of flight, I turned round to the now evidently angry crowd of dealers, and said 'You may turn me away, but I can recollect all I have seen.'"

Crowe left the "stifling atmosphere of human traffic," but he remembered what he saw somewhat differently than what he portrayed in the sketch he made on the spot, which was eventually published in the Illustrated London News in 1856. Crowe "Europeanized" the slaves' physiognomy to reduce the sense of otherness for white viewers, as these artists typically did, Goodman said.

In the finished painting, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861, the group of people are no longer docile and waiting. The women are tense and anxious. In the sketch, it's not clear if the man to the right is part of a family group. But in the painting, the association is unmistakable. He is anguished and unresigned—"angry, because he cannot defend his family," Goodman said.

The painting "reminds us that this is a perverse situation; they may be sold apart," Goodman added.

Crowe's strategy worked: His painting got the right kind of attention. Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia, was discussed in The Times, the Athenaeum, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and Art Journal; the last called it "one of the most important pictures in the exhibition" and wrote, "The appalling guilt of that accursed system was never more successfully depicted"—important and timely, since Britain was arming the South and barely able to keep an official neutrality because of its dependence on cotton.

Was Crowe fulfilling the threat of his exit line, recollecting what he didn't dare sketch in front of the angry dealers? Or was he altering his sketch to make a political statement, a visual equivalent to Uncle Tom's Cabin?

We'll never know for sure. In any case, he wasn't alone. In Thomas Satterwhite Noble's Price of Blood (its title taken from Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which a character describes money earned from the sale of children by their master and father as "the price of their blood"), a plantation owner sells his barefoot mulatto son, who looks away from him; their faces differ only by age and the color of their skin.

Noble was a Southerner who fought for his states' rights, though he loathed slavery. He made a series of paintings depicting its horrors after the war, as the nation faced a new set of race issues. No one knows who painted the unsigned Slave Auction (circa 1850), now owned by the Carnegie Museum of Art. Did the artist wish to avoid controversy through anonymity? In the painting, a woman so pale "she may be an octoroon" is dressed like a bride and being led into a group of men who are appraising her, Goodman said. Perhaps she is being sold into concubinage. In the foreground, a man is raising a weapon, threatening violence, and a nearly naked baby lies beneath him in the foreground. The scene recalls the Massacre of the Innocents, but the mother doesn't seem to notice; she is clinging to an older child who is being examined by a dealer.

Who bought these paintings? "Nobody did," Goodman said. In some cases, they didn't even try: Goodman said the more gruesome art of the period prior to 1820—of slaves being branded or whipped, for example—was not made for sale or exhibition at all.

But these artists hoped for a market. After the execution of radical abolitionist John Brown on Dec. 2, 1859, sculptor John Rogers failed to find a buyer for his Slave Auction (1859), a group of figures in plaster. "I find the times have quite headed me off," he wrote in a Christmas Eve letter, "for The Slave Auction tells such a strong story that none of the stores will receive it to sell for fear of offending their Southern customers."

Instead, Goodman said, he commissioned a black man to find a buyer by trying to sell the painting door-to-door on the streets of New York. It sold.

"Part of what is so important about Rhonda's work is its interdisciplinary scope—the way she brings together cultural history, the history of race, visual arts and material culture," said Bryan Wolf, the Jeanette and William Hayden Jones Professor in American Art and Culture and Goodman's dissertation adviser. "She's showing how the issues surrounding slavery permeated virtually every aspect of antebellum life, and she's also showing, through the example of a painter like Crowe, how ways of thinking—like sentimentalism, which was so important to middle-class culture at the time—were mobilized in the service of the antislavery cause."


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