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"Mention Savannah and most people think of creepily beautiful fingers of Spanish Moss, or the haunting events captured in \u201CMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.\u201D But this idyllic Georgian city is also the home of the Savannah College of Art and Design, which \u2014 despite being founded only in 1978 \u2014 is now a sprawling, deep-pocketed institution that hosts the annual deFine Art festival. (SCAD has also turned out some top-notch alums, like Wendy White, Michael Scoggins, Whitney Stansell, and Marcus Kenney.) This year\u2019s deFine Art, from February 18 through 21, featured exhibitions from Alfredo Jaar (2014\u2019s honoree and keynote speaker), Dustin Yellin, Matthew Brandt, Nathan Mabry, and others, as well as the premiere of a dance performance by curator and choreographer Jonah Bokaer. Truck driver-cum-art critic Jerry Saltz was also on hand to lecture students on the road to success.&amp;nbsp;At the SCAD Museum of Art \u2014 where most shows are on view through June or July \u2014 Jason Middlebrook hung his signature painted planks in the lobby, along with a \u201Cmedieval chandelier\u201D that he\u2019d constructed from yellow pine wood reclaimed from Savannah\u2019s former piers. Tim Rollins and K.O.S. unveiled works that referred to Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Huck Finn, made in collaboration with local junior-high students; South African artist Sam Nhlengethwa presented mixed-media paintings and photographs that, in one instance, were shown alongside collages by Romare Bearden, a clear (at times overbearing) influence.&amp;nbsp;Matthew Brandt brought photos from his \u201CLakes and Reservoirs\u201D series, for which he photographs bodies of water and then submerges the prints in that same water, generating brilliant effects: flying debris, melting blobs, fiery bursts of yellow, orange, or magenta. In the courtyard outside the main galleries, Nathan Mabry installed \u201CProcess Art (B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E),\u201D a bronze sculpture inspired by Rodin\u2019s \u201CThe Burghers of Callais\u201D (in this case all of the figures are wearing the sort of animal masks you\u2019d see on sports mascots). Viviane Sassen\u2019s inclusion in deFine Art nodded to SCAD\u2019s focus on fashion \u2014 Andr\u00E9 Leon Talley is on the Board of Trustees \u2014 and featured a slideshow of editorial images that happily blurred the lines between commercial and fine art photography.&amp;nbsp;Alfredo Jaar debuted a new work at SCAD: \u201CShadows,\u201D which used a traumatic image taken in 1970s Nicaragua by Dutch photographer Koen Wessing as its centerpiece. The shot \u2014 which captured two female relatives of a man who has just been murdered \u2014 was presented without much context, but rather as an iconic image of suffering. Jaar, during his keynote lecture, would nonetheless stress that \u201Ccontext is everything,\u201D and that his practice involves a \u201Cconstant effort to try to change the order of reality.\u201D A survey of past works certainly attested to that activist mission, ranging from interventions in Montreal to spotlight the city\u2019s homeless problem to a unique memorial for los desaparecidos at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile. Jaar\u2019s lecture also divulged two fun facts: He was once a magician; and one of his first artworks was a nearly 10-minute video that featured him heroically blowing into a clarinet until he succumbed to exhaustion.New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz spoke the night after Jaar, with considerably more levity. While his talk was titled \u201CThe Good, The Bad, And The Very Bad,\u201D he mainly kept things positive \u2014 despite a brief dig at Dustin Yellin\u2019s reliance on craftsmanship over content, and a reference to the current school of NYC abstraction that he\u2019s on the record as despising. Saltz had a smattering of advice for SCAD students: Marry money, if you have to; \u201CBring the chaos\u201D and \u201Cbypass the gatekeepers\u201D; don\u2019t worry about making sense with your work. He also gave some insight into the music he\u2019s able to listen to while writing. (SPOILER ALERT: It\u2019s Enya and Alannis Morisette.)&amp;nbsp;Saltz went on to bemoan the hermetic state of the art world \u2014 \u201Cthe same 255 people doing the same 55 panels on the same 55 subjects\u201D \u2014 before assuring the student body that there was no need for them to relocate to New York in order to launch their careers. \u201CYou\u2019ve got everything you need,\u201D he said. \u201CIt\u2019s your turn. You\u2019ve got to fix this.\u201D&amp;nbsp;"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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