SCAD MUSEUM OF ART: A new season of programming celebrates the museum’s 15th anniversary

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA — The SCAD Museum of Art proudly presents its fall 2026 season of exhibitions, featuring work by compelling artists who represent distinct perspectives, mediums, and creative practices. Together, these nine new exhibitions commemorate the museum’s legacy of impact, serving students, the community, and visitors from around the world.

The SCAD Museum of Art opened to the public in 2011, becoming one of the university’s most important educational initiatives to date. Conceived by SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace and executed by architecture firm Sottile & Sottile, founded by alum Christian Sottile, this award-winning structure embodies the university’s longstanding commitment to adaptive reuse in its distinctive design, uniting the landmark ruins of the 1853 Central of Georgia Railway depot with 82,000 square feet of galleries, classrooms, art storage, and more. Renowned for its ambitious exhibitions programming, the museum has presented works by celebrated artists including Miya Ando, Radcliffe Bailey, Nick Cave, Doreen Lynette Garner, Katharina Grosse, Subodh Gupta, Hassan Hajjaj, Alfredo Jaar, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat, Rashaad Newsome, Raúl de Nieves, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Rose B. Simpson, and Saya Woolfalk, as well as site-specific installations by Rachel Feinstein, Jorge Pardo, Odili Donald Odita, Daniel Arsham, and Jose Dávila, among others.

This season, the museum continues to embrace its founding ethos with transformative shows by artists including Stephen Antonakos (b. 1926, Agios Nikolaos, Greece; d. 2013, New York) in a bold installation that re-creates the museum’s inaugural Jewel Box installation from 2011, featuring four of Antonakos’ signature neon works. Masako Miki (b. 1973, Osaka, Japan) immerses visitors in a surreal garden landscape populated by felted-wool sculptures that manifest enchanted characters from Japanese folklore, fostering connection and empathy by inviting reflection on each of our own cultural mythologies. Andrew Kuo (b. 1977, Queens, New York) similarly considers the power of art to share meaning and emotion in chart and letterhead paintings that blur distinctions between abstraction and communication, highlighting a dialogue in the artist’s work between precision and freedom, color and form, rational and irrational. Exploring shifts of Hong Kong Chinese visual culture across generations and geographies, Lap-See Lam (b. 1990, Stockholm) explores how diasporic identity is reflected and constructed using 3D-printed furniture and a virtual reality experience to engage the history of Sweden’s Chinese restaurants, exposing these spaces’ charged negotiations of the real and remembered, tradition and stereotype.

Founder of Denim Tears, Tremaine Emory (b. 1981, Atlanta) will present a retrospective look at his practice, highlighting his endlessly inventive creative output and numerous collaborations alongside influential works by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Alma Thomas, among others from the SCAD Museum of Art’s Permanent Collection. Approaching painting as a meditation on ancestral knowledge, Nengi Omuku (b. 1987, Warri, Nigeria) honors both her West African heritage and her personal experiences in works on the traditional textile sanyan, touching on themes of gender and domesticity, national and ceremonial dress, and the endurance of indigenous culture in the face of colonial rule.

A special presentation of Sarah Charlesworth’s (b. 1947, East Orange, N.J.; d. 2013, Falls Village, Conn.) images and influence conveys the artist’s enduring relevance to current and future generations. The exhibition gathers three additional artists with whom Charlesworth had important dialogues during her lifetime: her close friend and fellow Pictures Generation artist Laurie Simmons (b. 1949, Long Island, N.Y.); her acolyte Sara VanDerBeek (b. 1976, Baltimore); and her daughter, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman (b. 1988, New York), who has followed in her mother’s footsteps to create a unique studio practice.

In the museum’s dedicated alumni gallery, Othiana Roffiel (SCAD B.F.A., painting, 2012) presents luminous paintings that explore the interconnectedness of the human body and the cosmos, transforming the act of looking. In late October, the alumni gallery welcomes NH DePass (SCAD B.F.A., graphic design, 2017) to present the exhibition Nicolo, featuring a collection of meticulously layered assemblages that explore new modes of making.

Many of SCAD’s top-ranked degree programs — from painting, photography, fibers, and fashion to architecture, furniture design, extended reality, and interactive design and game development — are represented in the museum’s fall exhibitions. Students, alumni, and visitors can engage with the artists and curators at complementary programming, including an opening celebration, artist talks, and conversations throughout the week.

The opening celebration takes place Tuesday, Sept. 29, 5:30 p.m., at the SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Ga. For more information, visit scadmoa.org.
 

FEATURED EXHIBITIONS

OTHIANA ROFFIEL
The Sky I Keep | May 22–Oct. 4, 2026
Mexico City–based artist Othiana Roffiel (SCAD B.F.A., painting, 2012) presents luminous paintings exploring the interconnectedness of the human body and the cosmos. Rather than relying on direct references, Roffiel allows her mind–body connection to guide the work. Forms emerge from memory and imagination, creating a visual language that is both playful and profound. The works’ surfaces vary like terrain on a map: brushstrokes glint with oil, as choppy as sea currents, while other areas are raw and chalky, with the pigment’s grit leveled like topsoil. These horizonless compositions evoke epic and intimate views. Floating forms, reminiscent of moons or limbs, are surrounded by stippling marks recalling sand, raindrops, or stars, while soft gradients suggest transitions, whether cellular or planetary in scale. Roffiel’s paintings bear witness to the spectacle of nature, capturing both its vastness and the intimate impression it leaves on the individual. Her paintings bridge landscape and self, transforming the act of looking into a meditation on moments we hold close and images that linger in our minds.

STEPHEN ANTONAKOS
Four, Once More | Aug. 3, 2026–Jan. 11, 2027
Four, Once More presents four boldly hued neon works by Stephen Antonakos within the exterior glass Jewel Box vitrines of the SCAD Museum of Art, celebrating both the artist’s centennial and the 15-year anniversary of the museum’s opening. The exhibition re-creates the very first Jewel Box installation in 2011, which showcased Antonakos’ signature use of neon since 1960, inspired by both the dazzling lights of New York City that he encountered as a young artist from Greece and the transcendent qualities of light found in the gilded Byzantine sacred spaces of his homeland. Activating the distinct architecture of the museum’s historic façade, Antonakos’ work engages color and light, moving beyond the strict formal concerns of Minimalism to highlight the spiritual potential of his chosen medium.

LAP-SEE LAM
Phantom Banquet | Aug. 3, 2026–Jan. 11, 2027
Stockholm-based artist Lap-See Lam explores shifts in Hong Kong Chinese visual culture across generations and geographies through the history of Sweden’s Chinese restaurants. Following an earlier attempt to archive her family’s former restaurant, Lam translates digital scans of Chinese eateries across Sweden, turning their composites into 3D-printed furniture and a virtual reality experience. Indistinct yet familiar, her reconstructions reveal a shared design language encoded with intergenerational communal memory and Western fetishizations of the East, exposing these spaces’ charged negotiations of the real and remembered, tradition and stereotype. Narrated by a disembodied voice, the VR simulation journeys through a disintegrating dining room haunted by spectral figures, drawing on magical realism to conjure the past to the present. Lam’s glitchy tables and chairs — furniture subjected to the digital phenomenon of “generation loss,” or the corruption of data from migration across incompatible software — serve as metaphors for how diaspora transforms culture through time and space. Altogether, Phantom Banquet positions the Westernized Chinese restaurant as a collection of inherited and imposed memory where Hong Kong diasporic identity is reflected and constructed.

MASAKO MIKI
The Garden of Wandering Spirits | Aug. 10–Dec. 13, 2026
Masako Miki transforms the gallery into an immersive Japanese-inspired domestic interior that opens onto an imagined garden landscape populated by felted-wool sculptures and watercolor paintings. Her work introduces viewers to enchanted characters known as Yōkai, supernatural beings from Japanese folklore believed to inhabit everyday items and elements of nature such as umbrellas, rocks, and trees. Through abstraction, Miki translates the morphic qualities of the Yōkai into visual language, creating playful figures that resist fixed interpretation and embody fluid identities that move between the sacred and the common, the animate and inanimate. With her cast of shapeshifters, Miki extends this ancient mythology into the present, emphasizing how the objects we make and the landscapes we design generate cultural narratives that move between imagination and lived experience. Informed by the artist’s upbringing in Japan and three decades of living in California, this installation reflects Miki’s research into the history of Japanese gardens in the U.S., tracing their evolution into sites where cultural traditions and perspectives intersect and new meanings emerge. The exhibition echoes the contemplative experience of moving through these gardens, creating a space for pause and reflection. In this surreal environment laden with vibrant Yōkai, Miki encourages us to consider our surroundings imbued with presence and memories. Her works foster connection and empathy, inviting us to create new stories and mythologies through which we may better understand ourselves, each other, and our desired futures.

GROUP EXHIBITION
Sarah Charlesworth + Laurie Simmons + Sara VanDerBeek + Lucy Charlesworth Freeman | Aug. 17, 2026–Jan. 4, 2027
This special presentation of Sarah Charlesworth’s images and influence extends beyond her own artwork to convey the artist’s enduring relevance to current and future generations. With a focus on creative connection and intergenerational conversation, the exhibition gathers three additional artists with whom Charlesworth had important dialogues during her lifetime: Laurie Simmons, who was her close friend and fellow Pictures Generation artist; Sara VanDerBeek, who was an acolyte and worked with her to exhibit important work at a gallery the younger artist ran; and her daughter, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, who has followed in her mother’s footsteps to create a unique studio practice informed by deep faith and studies in psychiatry and medicine. Collectively, works by these artists share a new perspective on Charlesworth as a foundationally important artist who expands our understanding of photography’s role in our world today. The exhibition enables these three artists to serve as interlocutors, showcasing their inspiring work and that of Charlesworth anew.

ANDREW KUO
Attachments | Aug. 24, 2026–Jan. 1, 2027
Andrew Kuo’s paintings ask: “How does art communicate meaning, emotion, experience, and shared understanding?” The New York–based artist uses a variety of formal techniques to convey his generous worldview in paint on canvas. In his chart paintings, Kuo subverts our expectations of how information is visualized graphically with a colorful boldness and nuanced optical effects that transform data into complex abstractions. The works’ careful organization can be unlocked by a key below, allowing us to interpret the artist’s earnest ordering of the smallest details of his wide-ranging interests and the most intricate emotions of his life. In Attachments, these works are complemented by Kuo’s letterhead paintings, which feature a much looser application of paint on stationery backgrounds suggesting a range of evocative references. Their gestural lightness offers a different expression of meaning, highlighting a dialogue in the artist’s work between precision and freedom, color and form, as well as rational and irrational. Altogether, Kuo invites us into his world and encourages us to ask ourselves how we feel too.

NENGI OMUKU
There We Sat Down | Aug. 24, 2026–Jan. 11, 2027
Nengi Omuku’s paintings bridge diverse histories and modes of art making. Situating her work in both West African pre-colonial traditions of textile production and European oil painting technique, Omuku honors her heritage while evoking shared human experience. The artist creates her paintings on an unconventional yet culturally important material called sanyan, a hand-woven textile of blended cotton and silk made by the Yoruba people that signifies prestige and is typically worn on special occasions, which she carefully prepares as the substrate of her ethereal scenes. Omuku’s images depict dreamlike figures with obscured identifying features in lush natural landscapes. Though ambiguous, the figures are based on photographs of friends and colleagues. Probing the interior psychological states of her sitters, Omuku creates bodies that hover between specificity and universality, transcending the earthly limitations of the human form. Her singular painting approach is a meditation on ancestral knowledge, while expressing the personal as a mode of reflecting the collective.

THE SCAD MUSEUM OF ART CELEBRATES 15 YEARS
Sept. 14, 2026–Jan. 3, 2027
The SCAD Museum of Art opened to the public in 2011, becoming one of the university’s most important educational initiatives to date. Conceived by SCAD President and Founder Paula Wallace and executed by alum-founded architecture firm Sottile & Sottile, this award-winning structure continues the university’s longstanding legacy of adaptive reuse in its distinctive design. The structure honors the historical elements of the original edifice while incorporating modern materials to embody an active exchange of ideas. Emphasizing discovery and knowledge-building through the presentation of innovative works by renowned and emerging artists and designers from around the world, the SCAD Museum of Art continues to enrich diverse creative pathways as a center for learning and inspiration.

TREMAINE EMORY
Denim Tears from the Pool of Black Genius | Sept. 14, 2026–Jan. 11, 2027
Tremaine Emory is the founder of Denim Tears, a self-described African American sportswear label that tells a story about the African Diaspora with each new collection, addressing our complicated national history and collective cultural heritage. This retrospective look at his practice showcases highlights from his endlessly inventive creative output and numerous collaborations. The exhibition incorporates Emory’s manifold influences, in the titular “Pool of Black Genius,” with works by Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, Faith Ringgold, and others from the SCAD Museum of Art Permanent Collection, as well as an extensive display of contemporary works by his collaborators and other artists he is in dialogue with, including Arthur Jafa, Hank Willis Thomas, David Hammons, and more. Emory translates these various strands and important historical references into cultural touchstones, using fashion as a form of conceptual art. Reconfiguring hierarchies and provoking crucial conversations with inclusive gestures, Emory offers us all an opportunity for reflection, learning, and growth.

NH DEPASS
Nicolo | | Oct. 12, 2026–Feb. 7, 2027
NH DePass (SCAD B.F.A., graphic design, 2017) combines traditional craftsmanship with contemporary technologies, working across carpentry, digital modeling, oil painting, drawing, and found materials. In this exhibition, DePass presents a collection of meticulously layered assemblages centered on the character of Nicolo, a young Italian artist-prodigy who becomes both a subject and a vehicle through which DePass explores new modes of making. An elaborately framed painting of Nicolo anchors the space, flanked by two custom-built units containing artworks and personal belongings attributed to him, alongside drawings, wall-relief sculptures, and an artisanal chair. Together, these elements demonstrate identity as a construct shaped more by aesthetic choices than physical likeness, revealing how creative expression is oftentimes most evocative of the self. By bringing design strategies into fine art, embracing stylistic pastiche, and negotiating the relationship between human craft and machine production, DePass’s practice complicates notions of authorship, shifting viewers’ attention from who the maker is to how and what is being made.
 

FEATURED PROGRAMMING

All events are free and open to the public and take place at the SCAD Museum of Art, 601 Turner Blvd., Savannah, Ga.

Monday, Sept. 28
11 a.m. | Lecture: Marshall Price on Stephen Antonakos
2 p.m. | Artist talk: Othiana Roffiel
5:30 p.m. | Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecture: Tremaine Emory with Acyde

Tuesday, Sept. 29
11 a.m. | Artist talk: Andrew Kuo
5–5:30 p.m. | Members preview reception
5:30–7 p.m. | Fall opening celebration

Wednesday, Sept. 30
11 a.m. | Artists talk: Sara VanDerBeek, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, and Matthew C. Lange on Sarah Charlesworth
2 p.m. | Lecture: Masako Miki
5:30 p.m. | Lecture: Christian Sottile

Learn more at scadmoa.org/programs.

SCAD MUSEUM OF ART

The SCAD Museum of Art features more than 10 dynamic gallery spaces presenting exhibitions and commissioned works by international emerging and established artists. The museum serves visitors and students alike, enriching both the high caliber of education at SCAD and the cultural life of the Savannah community and beyond. Exhibitions range from painting, sculpture, and photography to digital media, fashion, and jewelry, complementing the artistic disciplines offered at the university. The museum also hosts public programming year-round, including lectures, gallery talks, workshops, and film screenings.

SCAD MOA has presented exhibitions by artists including Miya Ando, Radcliffe Bailey, Nick Cave, Doreen Lynette Garner, Katharina Grosse, Subodh Gupta, Hassan Hajjaj, Alfredo Jaar, Isaac Julien, Shirin Neshat, Rashaad Newsome, Raúl de Nieves, Lorraine O’Grady, Ebony G. Patterson, Rose B. Simpson, and Saya Woolfalk, as well as site-specific installations by Rachel Feinstein, Jorge Pardo, Odili Donald Odita, Daniel Arsham, Jose Dávila, and others.

An award-winning architectural icon, the museum attracts visitors from around the world to the heart of Savannah’s vibrant downtown historic district and incorporates the oldest surviving pre-Civil War railroad depot into its striking contemporary design. Recognized with awards from the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the Congress for the New Urbanism, the International Interior Design Association, and the Historic Savannah Foundation, the museum received the American Institute of Architects Honor Award for Architecture, a pinnacle achievement.

Established in 2011, the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Center for African American Studies celebrates the imaginative breadth and expressive legacy of African American art and culture. Since its founding, the Evans Center and SCAD MOA have presented internationally heralded exhibitions focused on the legacies of Elizabeth Catlett, Frederick Douglass, Aaron Douglas, and Jacob Lawrence, as well as contemporary exhibitions by artists including Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kenturah Davis, Chase Hall, Nina Chanel Abney, and Awol Erizku. Visit scadmoa.org.
 

SCAD: THE UNIVERSITY FOR CREATIVE CAREERS

SCAD is a private, nonprofit, accredited university, offering more than 100 graduate and undergraduate degree programs across locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia; Lacoste, France; and online via SCADnow. SCAD enrolls approximately 18,500 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 100 countries. The future-minded SCAD curriculum engages professional-level technology and myriad advanced learning resources, affording students opportunities for internships, professional certifications, and real-world assignments with corporate partners through SCADpro, the university’s renowned research lab and prototype generator. SCAD has earned top rankings for degree programs in interior design, architecture, film, fashion, digital media, and more. Career success is woven into every fiber of the university, resulting in a superior alumni employment rate. A 2026 study found that 99% of recent SCAD graduates were employed, pursuing further education, or both within 12 months of graduation. SCAD provides students and alumni with ongoing career support through personal coaching, alumni programs, a professional presentation studio, and more.