Fine Arts Showcase

The Savannah College of Art and Design presents the university’s Fine Arts Showcase from May 2023, featuring artwork by over 150 student and alumni artists. Over 400 works were on view at Alexander Hall in Savannah, Georgia and available for sale through SCAD Art Sales, the university’s in-house art consultancy. SCAD is the only university to offer a commercial gallery service that exclusively represents the work of students, alumni, and faculty to international clientele.

Participating artists included Isabella Kimmel, Tsu Yu Chen, Femke Schoonman, Kassidy Keenehan, Kyla Rys, Emerson Scheer, Davis Klemm, Will Foerster, and Charlie Card. 

During the event, audiences had the opportunity to also see Tianxing Xu’s M.F.A. thesis exhibition COLORING BOOK. In the exhibition, Xu (M.F.A., painting, 2023) presents a collection of paintings, prints, and artist’s books that serve as building plans for an imagined amusement park. Through the schematics of this unrealized fairground, the artists explores the concept of actualization, rendering objects and spaces as distorted, fragmented, and blurred, constructing chaos via absolute order. For Xu, the works remain unfinished without the presence of the audience. In this exhibition, the artist invites viewers to participate in the works’ completion by coloring in a book of diagrams in the gallery.

Revolving around themes of regret, unfulfilled promises, and a sense of distance, the personal stories embedded in Xu’s works are private and ineffable. Like pages ripped from a diary, each work seeks to capture the emotions of an important day long forgotten. In the works on view, images from the artist’s memory appear overexposed and spotty, as if scorching sunlight has bleached their surface, prolonging his search for clarity in recollection.

“SCAD was thrilled to welcome the community to Alexander Hall to view and shop outstanding student work from painting, photography, printmaking and sculpture,” says dean of the school of fine arts Honor Bowman. “The students have a strong skill set across media, techniques, and perspectives in contemporary art. This event is our much-anticipated opportunity to showcase those skills and connect with the greater community in Savannah to share what we learn in the classroom! This is also a professional practices opportunity for the students, an important note because business practice and art sales are at the heart of our curriculum.”

The School of Fine Arts prepares students for creative careers in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. SCAD artists shape wood, concrete, bronze, light, digital projections, and other materials in large public art works, movie miniatures, props and prosthetics, commercial prototypes, fine art, site-specific installations, set designs, and more. The university’s students and alumni exhibit at world-renowned museums—from the Guggenheim to the Museum of Modern Art to the Smithsonian—and share their work at the world’s most prestigious art fairs.

For more information on the university, visit scad.edu.