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Poetter Hall was purchased by the SCAD founders in March 1979. Classes began in September of that year.  
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SCAD Atlanta Features

SCAD Atlanta - Features
 
SCAD artists participate in Rosa Parks commemorative project
Seat 

Sophomore Rex Hausmann’s design concept is featured in the Atlanta-based exhibition “Seats for Social Justice: A Rosa Parks Commemorative Project.” The pictured artwork represents the artist’s preliminary rendition and not the final work.
By E. Christina Spitz
Published: Friday, January 20, 2006
Rex Hausmann, a Savannah College of Art and Design sophomore majoring in painting, and alumna Elisabeth Gambino (M.F.A., illustration, 2005) are two of five artists who will have their work displayed in a public art project in Atlanta.

The exhibition, titled “Seats for Social Justice:  A Rosa Parks Commemorative Project,” is a unique public art concept that unites up-and-coming visual artists with community volunteers to transform salvaged bus seats into pieces of art that pay tribute to civil rights pioneer Parks.

The exhibition will be presented by Delta Air Lines Inc. and Hands On Atlanta, a nonprofit organization that helps individuals, families and groups find volunteer opportunities at more than 400 service organizations and schools that directly impact the community.

The artists supplied the concepts and designs, and the volunteers helped to implement the artists’ vision onto the seats. Most of the seats were created Jan. 16 as part of the Hands On Atlanta Martin Luther King Jr. Service Summit’s Day of Service, an annual event hosted by Hands On Atlanta, the King Center (the official, living memorial dedicated to the advancement of King’s legacy) and Delta. They will be exhibited at nonprofit and corporate sites throughout Atlanta Jan. 20 - Feb. 28. Seats also will be installed at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site Jan. 20 and exhibited at the state capital building in the next few weeks. At the end of the exhibition, the seats will be gifted and auctioned.

The exhibition serves as a tribute to Parks, referred to by many as the “mother of the civil rights movement,” who passed away in October 2005 at age 92.

“When she died I was really kind of grieved and not really sure how to express that grief,” said Samuel McKenzie Jr., Hands On Atlanta project manager and curator of the Parks exhibition. “So I thought about doing something with the bus seat. I’m so inspired by the bus seats because, when I think about the civil rights movement and social justice, the bus for many poor African Americans and people of color was the first place every day where they encountered racism. Before they got to work, before they got to school, before they got to church, they left their houses where they were the rulers of their domain and they stepped into a bus, and that was the first reminder of racism and discrimination.”

Gambino’s concept commemorates four girls who were killed in a church bombing in Alabama in 1963. She created a sketch of the four silhouettes of the girls, which was later branded onto a bus seat.

“I feel like general knowledge about the civil rights movement tends to focus on the iconic figures like Dr. King and Rosa Parks,” Gambino said. “They’ve become elevated to a point that they’re difficult to relate to, to understand on a more emotional gut level, because they are so idealistic. I thought that these figures would be more human in a sense, and more of a reminder of what a struggle it was day to day in real terms. And so the design itself is fairly simple.”

Hausmann, who conceived his designs with his Texas-based brother, Erik, will have three bus seat concepts on display in the exhibition. The first features the images of Parks, King, John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, stenciled and spray-painted in symbolic colors onto the seat with quotations while speakers installed in the seat play recordings of speeches by some of these individuals. Across the seat rim on the front side appear the words conceived by Erik Hausmann: “May the voice of our actions continue to speak long after the sound of our words has faded.”

The second bus seat concept consists of a collage of different images of the civil rights movement — taken from speeches, newspaper articles and flyers — along with, on some, a television installed in the back of the seat. The television showcases different film images of the civil rights movement, but without any sound. The seat features a quotation from photographer Ansel Adams: “Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.”

The third bus seat simply has the words “Sit Here” stickered onto it. There will be a projector and screen on which the viewer will watch a reenactment of Parks’ historic refusal to give up her bus seat. Patrick Warner, a SCAD sophomore majoring in animation; Drew Cherry, a sophomore majoring in film and television; and Alex Goose, a sophomore majoring in graphic design, are working on it as well. The details and logistics of this seat are still being refined.

“It’s really simple, really graphic, will look really neat, but the things that will speak the volumes are the quotes and the moving images and just the way it’s presented,” Hausmann said.

McKenzie said the response from SCAD was greater than that of any other college where project representatives recruited. “I have been very impressed with the SCAD student and alumni submissions,” he said. “I would say the most impacting and impressive submissions have come from the SCAD folks.”


Spitz is senior publications editor.