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Lavar Munroe SCAD deFINE ART 2024 guest

Lavar Munroe

B.F.A., illustration, 2007

Interdisciplinary artist Lavar Munroe (b. 1982, Nassau, Bahamas; SCAD B.F.A., illustration, 2007) examines themes from fables, folklore, and cinema in mixed-media works informed by his Bahamian heritage and travels in Africa. Munroe's practice centers collective narratives charged by personal, historical, and mythological references. Combining painting and relief sculpture, his hybrid works engage conceptions of love, magic, and utopia with fantastical, dreamlike imagery and often incorporate sentimental objects collected and gifted from his family or found during his travels. Exploring the friction between the desire for escape and the longing for home, he challenges viewers to journey beyond the familiar.

Munroe earned his B.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2007. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned his M.F.A. in studio art from Washington University in St. Louis in 2013. Munroe has presented recent solo exhibitions at venues including Jack Bell Gallery, London; The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Md.; NOMAD gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Meadows Museum of Art, Shreveport, La.; the SCAD Museum of Art and Gutstein Gallery, Savannah; and The Central Bank, Nassau. His work has been presented internationally in numerous group shows; at Art Basel Miami Beach; and in the Kampala Art Biennale, OFF Biennale Cairo, Dak'Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, and the Venice Biennale. His work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art; Fondation de France; Fondation Gandur pour l'Art, Geneva, Switzerland; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas; and MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Art, Rome.

Munroe is the recipient of many honors and awards, including a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, the Kraus Family Foundation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and was a finalist for the Sondheim Art Prize. He lives and works in Baltimore and the Bahamas.