News and Media

Published: Aug 9, 2011

SAVANNAH, Georgia - The Savannah College of Art and Design exhibitions department presents "Enchantment," an exhibition of bold paintings, collages and sculptures by internationally acclaimed artist Shinique Smith.

The exhibition, on display Aug. 11-Oct. 7 at SCAD's Pinnacle Gallery, highlights Smith's lively pastiche of design and fashion motifs as well as forms, textures and colors inspired by the city landscape. The works stimulate the imagination as the viewer uncovers the creative ways Smith gives new life and meaning to found materials within the dialog of contemporary art.

Smith's oeuvre is expertly represented here. Living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Smith creates a rich tapestry of color and textile that embodies the metropolis around her. "The SCAD and broader Savannah art community will be inspired by the many forms Smith's practice takes," says Melissa Messina, SCAD's senior curator. "This work is also a perfect complement to the city's lively fashion and music scene as she is able to create lyrical movement with an array of materials, particularly found garments and remnants, selected not only for their aesthetic qualities but their cultural attributes as well."

Smith, in her artist statement, writes that she "seeks to reinterpret the connections on which we build our personal myths through the objects that we both cherish and discard. At the same time, questions the relationships that contemporary societies have with the inanimate and the intimate. What is valuable and why, to an individual, to a culture, to a society? Through these efforts, a new spirit emerges."

Smith is the recent recipient of a major survey exhibition "Menagerie," which opened in September 2010 at the MoCA in North Miami, Florida. The same exhibition traveled to the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin. Smith's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions internationally at venues that include The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; The New Museum, New York; and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Her public collections are in The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Denver Art Museum, Colorado; The Studio Museum, New York; The Margulies Collection, Miami; and The Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

The reception and exhibition are free and open to the public. For more information, visit scadexhibitions.com.