Sitting on the eastern edge of the Bible Belt, Savannah, Georgia has become a beacon of creative power.  The city is evolving past its antebellum roots, building a new heritage with Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) at its heart. The university’s student body accounts for over 10% of the city’s population. Last month, SCAD Museum of Art presented its 16th edition of deFINE ART, a daring symposium of artist talks, honoree tributes, and opening celebrations for the ten exhibitions on display. This year’s program included a selection of 10 of the most pertinent contemporary creators across mediums. 

The exhibitions highlighted narratives that leap into a flurry of global conversations, making SCAD Museum of Art one of the year’s most relevant institutions. Themes of identity, sexuality, mindfulness, and mortality are explored throughout the exhibition spaces. Some of the program’s most impactful exhibitions include, The Shape of Survival, from Diedrick Brackens whose woven tapestries explore queerness and the African diaspora in America’s South, Christina Quarles’ Far From Near, a robust repertoire of illustrations and paintings representing the female figure in slapstick absurdity, HEAVE, Samuel Ross’ multimedia solemn, if not morbid, statement on society’s negligence of the working class, and deFINE ART honoree, South African artist Zanele Muholi, with a mid-career survey of the acclaimed activist works including a selection of four bodies of photographic work and Umkhuseli (The Protector), 2023, a show-stopping sculpture of The Virgin Guadeloupe created in Muholi’s likeness. Made from resin, marble dust, and bronze, with a molded stark white robe draped over the deep metallic tones artists’ skin, the piece towers over guests and portraits of the queer community in South Africa, emphasizing the title of the piece.

The standout exhibition came in a series of glass-enclosed jewel boxes that line the street facing facade of the museum that played host to Raíces/Roots, a mesmerizing suite of sculptural vignettes by Raul De Lara. In his first solo museum exhibition, these vitrines present the artist’s industrial-design-inspired works with the precision and polish of a retail display, yet confront the viewer with a provocative tension between functionality, scale, and surrealism. 

De Lara, born in Mexico, moved to the United States at the age of twelve. His family navigated the labyrinth of the immigration process while his father, an architect managing with the constraints of being undocumented, worked in construction. Though De Lara’s status was stabilized through the DACA program, he was stuck in the U.S, unable to travel outside the country. In 2024, after 16 years away from his homeland, he was granted an emergency travel parole to visit a critically ill family member in Mexico. Back in his hometown of Torreon, in the border state of Coahuila, he was disoriented by the passage of time; furniture and buildings that  once seemed imposing had shrunk in stature, while cacti and monstera plants had grown tremendously. Despite his memories of a scenic green landscape, the region was in reality an arid desert. 

His lineage presents a long history of woodworking in its many forms, affording the artist a spiritual understanding of his craft. His practice acts as a reflection of “home,” a malleable state of mind as opposed to a static place that is palpable in the work, with psychedelic interpretations of common objects. Raíces/Roots reflects an innate mastery of De Lara’s chosen medium, wood, transformed under his hands into thousands of cactus spines, colossal monstera leaves, and largely functional seating, each piece a testament to his masterful comprehension of the material’s potential for both utility and whimsy. The utilitarian aspects of his works, including natural wooden chainlinks, screws, and bolts, challenge the less-functional objects; a marble tombstone on a rocking mechanism with an inflation valve, a fully wood sleek monstera leaf in a vase on a stool, and two zappy cacti fit with saddles, paralleling a rocking horse. Though the work doesn’t harp on tropes of struggle, it weaves a tapestry of melancholy uncanniness mixed with the ineffable joy and empowerment that nostalgia inspires. The context of this display in the Deep South is poignant to the examination of renegotiated identity and uncertainty in emigration today.

Without question, deFINE ART offers students an immersion into world-class contemporary art. Beyond that, SCAD Museum of Art is providing a crucial visual education in topics that, according to polls, many in the region choose to rebuke. With the world-at-large online, it’s easy to access self-serving information while disregarding the needs of marginalized people. SCAD steps in with critical discourse and tremendous potential to reclaim dominion over the city’s troubled past.