The conversation about where American creative culture lives tends to gravitate toward the coasts, but the SCAD student artists emerging from Savannah and Atlanta are making a case that the South has been quietly building something of its own. The Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), founded in 1978, now offers more degree programmes and specialisations than any other art and design school in the country, and the work coming out of its recent graduating cohorts suggests the institution has moved well past its regional reputation.
Three graduates in particular, fashion and textile designer Jane Jurchak, fine arts painter and installation artist Kehua Wu, and photographer Mike Posner, illustrate the range of what SCAD currently produces: work that is formally ambitious, personally rooted, and difficult to place within any single regional tradition.
SCAD student artists Savannah: where Southern Gothic meets material experimentation
Jane Jurchak arrived at SCAD from Belmont, North Carolina, already familiar with the American South’s particular atmosphere. Her senior thesis collection, Forsaken, leaned into that familiarity rather than away from it. Drawing on Southern Gothic imagery and what she describes as ‘the emotional landscape of queer adolescence’, Jurchak built a collection around distressed corsets, exaggerated silhouettes and latex detailing, a set of forms that register simultaneously as historical and visceral.
The collection was presented in May at SCAD FASHION, the university’s annual runway showcase. ‘The collection allowed me to set free my anxieties of identity and step into discovery myself,’ Jurchak has said. Material experimentation is central to her practice, and Forsaken used that experimentation to navigate themes of isolation, shame and spiritual tension rather than simply to demonstrate technical range.
Where Jurchak works through the weight of place, Kehua Wu works through the weight of distance. Wu, a recent master of fine arts graduate who came to SCAD from Changsha, China, presented a graduate exhibition titled Home that used mixed media paintings, a video piece and an installation to explore belonging and cultural identity. At SCAD, Wu built on painting techniques developed in China, integrating traditional Chinese materials including rice paper and ink into a practice that is now explicitly cross-cultural in its references and its methods.
‘I regard my act of creating art as a cultivation,’ Wu has said. ‘Through the process, I engage in deep introspection (exploring, unearthing and ultimately embracing myself) while simultaneously seeking the truth of life and coming to terms with the world.’ That language of cultivation is apt: Wu’s work does not simply document displacement but treats the making of art as the site where displacement is actively, if incompletely, worked through.
Photography and the fictional: Mike Posner’s digital landscapes
Mike Posner, a recent graduate of SCAD’s photography programme, works under the professional name Fictiveillusion, a label that signals his preoccupation with the constructed and the imagined. Though his subjects are frequently musicians, the resulting images are not conventional portraits. Posner places his subjects inside heavily worked digital landscapes, using cinematic lighting and post-production to produce images that demand a second look rather than confirming what the viewer expects to see.
The name Fictiveillusion is a deliberate declaration: these are photographs that do not pretend to document so much as to transport. The camera, in Posner’s framing, is less a recording device than a portal.
SCAD supports this kind of professional self-definition through structures that go beyond the studio. SCADpro, the university’s research and prototype lab, connects students with corporate partners. The Style Lab, a mentorship programme within the SCAD School of Fashion, has brought in figures including Christopher Brumfield, Tremaine Emory, Bruce Pask and Yu Fukumoto. The institution’s Savannah campus, surrounded by the region’s willow trees, accommodates programmes ranging from animation to sneaker design, a breadth that makes the coherence of its graduates’ visions all the more pointed. Jurchak, Wu and Posner each arrived at SCAD with a different set of preoccupations and leave with practices that are fully, recognisably their own.
