The Campus Chronicle

Volume 3, No. 31
August 1, 2003

“Sophie and Stella from Above” (2002, inkjet print) by professor Steven P. Mosch is on display in the exhibition that ends Aug. 30.

SCAD shows off on the Seine

By Nicole Dekle Collins

Savannah native Karen Cassard was strolling along the Seine River near the Eiffel Tower on a trip to Paris in July when she spotted something she didn’t expect: a large white banner announcing an exhibition presented by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Intrigued, she headed toward the mansion bearing the banner and found herself at the group show titled “Pour l’Amour des Chiens” (“For the Love of Dogs”).

On display through Aug. 30, “Pour l’Amour des Chiens” is the third exhibition that SCAD has mounted in Paris, and the second at the Mona Bismarck Foundation. Endowed by the wealthy American who lived in these stately rooms until her death in 1983, the foundation has acquired a reputation for presenting top-notch exhibitions free of charge in a city where hundreds of museums and galleries compete for attention from the press and the public. The exhibition space usually is empty in July and August, but this summer the chandeliered rooms are alive with an affectionate tribute to man’s loyal four-legged friend by SCAD students, alumni and professors.

In addition to student and faculty work, the exhibition includes pieces by renowned figures of the contemporary art world such as Benny Andrews, Sandy Skoglund, Joyce Tenneson and William Wegman, all of whom have had long relationships with the college. One entire room of the show is devoted to a series of large-format Polaroids by Wegman, whose Weimaraner photographs are perhaps the most well-known dog images in the world.

In her introduction in the show’s catalogue, SCAD President Paula S. Wallace, whose idea it was to take this show to France’s dog-loving capital, describes the exhibition as “light-hearted in subject while serious in artistic expression.” Photos and paintings predominate among the 50 works, but jewelry, furniture design and fashions for Fido form an essential part of the show’s unusual charm and joie de vivre. For viewers who like musical accompaniment when they are looking at art, SCAD commissioned a “dog chorus” of multi-toned barking, howling and tag-rattling from California-based sound collage artist R. Weis. The score has a cutting-edge wit that the French like to call “delirant,” which means delirious.

The exhibition has a sober side, too, however. In an installation called “Mapping Home,” by SCAD alumna and current Working Class program director Cory Mahler, spectators wander through partitioned spaces that evoke an abandoned cottage. There is no sign of Fido at first glance, but observant viewers eventually discover a circular mark on the linoleum floor, a scar that marks the place where a beloved pet’s food bowl once was a permanent fixture. “Mapping Home” is about loss, absence, memory and presence.

An earlier version of this exhibition debuted at SCAD’s Red Gallery last summer under the title “Dog Days of Summer.” Reworked and expanded for its transatlantic premiere, the exhibit has attracted a great deal of notice in the City of Light, both in the press and from the public. Paris Capitale, a glossy monthly, devoted a double-page spread to the show, pronouncing it “the most original and most amusing exhibition of the summer.” The August issue of French Cosmopolitan also featured the show, as did the July 14 issue of Elle, which linked the show to a long European tradition of “la peinture animalière” or animal painting.

French visitors to “Pour l’Amour des Chiens”— which has welcomed 70 to 100 viewers a day since it opened on July 2 — have commented less on the exhibition’s links to European art than on what they see as its quintessentially American novelty and sense of humor. The two adjectives most often employed to describe the show are “humorous” and “original.” This is high praise indeed in the country that coined the term “avant-garde.”

The exhibition has also attracted some high-profile visitors. Legendary fashion designer Pierre Cardin and well-known French actor and film director Jean-Marc Barr were among the celebrities who attended the exhibition’s opening reception July 1. In the following weeks, Gretchen Leach, wife of the U.S. Ambassador to France, Howard Leach, was among the VIP guests who dropped by for a tour.

In August, a profile of “Pour l’Amour des Chiens” is scheduled for national TV broadcast in France. On July 25, the country’s No. 1 TV show about animals, “30 Millions d’Amis” (“Thirty Million Friends”), filmed a segment that included an interview with a young French teenager named Mathilde, who chose as her favorite piece in the show a large green mixed-media work by recent M.F.A. graduate Katie Runnels. The painting, which shows a young girl skipping in an eternal spring and a tiny white dog nipping at her heels, “expresses the self-confidence of innocence,” said Mathilde’s mother. Before leaving the foundation, Mathilde and her mother asked to be notified when Runnels brings her own show to Paris. Et voilà, another SCAD student has been “discovered.” It’s precisely this type of discovery that Wallace aims for in organizing these group exhibitions far beyond the Savannah city limits.

Collins is assistant to the president and is in Paris through the end of August to answer foundation patrons’ questions about the exhibition and the college.