The Unibrow Interview: Daniel S. Palmer

As we spend the week at Savannah College of Art & Design Museum of Art’s opening of their fall exhibitions, we revisit our conversation in Issue 03 with chief curator Daniel S. Palmer on the topic of “The Living Museum,” and the unique space and place the museum holds in the city. As it turns 15 years old (the building is much older, obviously), it feels like a special time for the museum, and Palmer was both reflective and looking forward. Here is an excerpt from our conversation, and my introduction:

Museums have spent too long asking people to come prepared: to arrive already knowing; to stand at a respectful distance from the work and feel grateful for the access. That era is over—or at least, it should be. The best museums right now are doing something different: flinging the door open, pulling up a chair, saying, “This space belongs to you.” They are becoming less about preservation and more about permission—permission to question, to feel lost, to find yourself somewhere unexpected on the walls. A museum is not a tomb. It never should have been.

I’ve been fighting for a way to say this for a long time, but over the last two years, I’ve noticed that museums are both responding to and redefining what they mean to people—internationally and locally, internally and externally. On the occasion of the SCAD Museum of Art’s 15th anniversary, I wanted to speak with chief curator Daniel S. Palmer, because of my personal experience visiting the museum as both an audience member and a reporter. The SCAD MOA occupies a genuinely difficult position: it is the university’s most visible face to the rest of the world and simultaneously a museum in service of students who are still finding their own creative path. It balances retrospectives against debut solo exhibitions, the experimental against the warm, cross-pollination against individual discovery. In an era of colossal upheaval in America and the redrawing of the maps of our history, art has been attacked and, at times, has quietly retreated in response. I wanted Palmer to explain how a museum can meet this moment.

Savannah, the city of the Oglethorpe Plan, is a stunningly beautiful place near Georgia’s Atlantic Coast. It is also ground zero for what can only be described as America’s complicated relationship to the structures connected to the history of enslavement. The museum is housed in an old train station constructed of Savannah Gray Brick—brick made by enslaved people—that has now been reclaimed for the potential expansion of, rather than the denial, of freedom. This is why I wanted to speak with Palmer. To better understand the place, its history, its reclaiming of possibility, and the role a museum can play in our past, present, and future. This fall, the museum will open a new series of exhibitions, one of which will be a celebration of how the architectural firm Sottile & Sottile transformed that railroad depot into one of America’s great enduring spaces for art. What follows is a conversation about all of it—the bricks, the light, the students, the art—and what it means to build something that outlasts the history you live in.

Evan Pricco: This conversation is multifaceted—it’s the SCAD Museum of Art’s 15th anniversary, there are new shows opening in the fall, and you came down to Savannah from New York. What’s your overall sense of where the SCAD MOA stands at 15?
Daniel S. Palmer: My connection to this museum actually goes back to the very beginning. My first trip to the South was to attend an art history conference that SCAD hosted on the occasion of the museum’s inauguration, so I saw the very first round of shows. It was my introduction to SCAD, my introduction to Savannah, and I was floored. I knew from that moment that the standard of excellence here—exhibitions with international, media-diverse artists like Kehinde Wiley, Bill Viola, Liza Lou, Xu Bing—was at the core of this institution’s mission. And especially meaningful to me, given my background in art history, was that the educational dimension—the fact that this is a teaching museum—is at the root of its DNA and its founding ethos.

In the intervening years when I wasn’t here, that introduction invited me to remain aware of what was happening at the museum. I followed the program over the years and the incredible curators who worked here: Isolde Brielmaier, Storm Janse van Rensburg, Humberto Moro and many others. The museum has such a great lineage of exhibitions, and always a forward-thinking approach. There was a real appetite—from SCAD, from the students, from the Savannah community, and from visitors who come from around the world—for this museum to be a leading contemporary art institution functioning in a genuinely fascinating way within the global contemporary art ecosystem.

Now, I’m more than four and a half years into my time here. It has been a true honor to pick up that mantle and continue to invite the world’s foremost artists to share their work in truly ambitious, accessible and profoundly meaningful ways.

EP: Every museum has a slightly different function. The MoMA isn’t necessarily speaking to local New York, and neither is the Met or the Louvre. But some museums carry multiple conversations at once and I’d argue yours does this exceptionally well. You’re speaking to an international community through the university and the city. You’re speaking to artists at very different phases of their careers. You gave Anna Park her first museum show, and right now you have an Anish Kapoor exhibition. And you have a built-in audience in the students themselves. Does that feel liberating when you’re curating?
DP: I love that our primary audience is the students, and we program with the direct intention of speaking to a younger generation. This is a very globally and culturally diverse group of people who come from so many different perspectives on art, design, and contemporary culture. That’s what makes this museum so special and keeps things moving forward. The goal is to bring a diverse range of artists simultaneously in each season, while also keeping pace with what genuinely needs to be shared at any given moment. And what I find personally meaningful about that is that it requires asking what can hold up right now to the task of inspiring a young person.

That’s not to say you pander to whatever the trend is. In fact, sometimes the answer is something very traditional, very established—a senior, eminent artist who can build a deeper art-historical awareness. And then equally, to your point about the incredible first museum shows, that list keeps growing throughout the museum’s history—Anna Park, Chase Hall, Awol Erizku, Eva Jospin. It’s like saying, “See it here first at the SCAD Museum of Art.” Which is, in so many ways, exactly what SCAD has always been about, in so many realms beyond just the museum.

The other thing your question points to is the beautiful diversity of our student body. A lot of museums are seen as places for people who already speak the language, who already know the references. What’s so special about how we think about our program is that we’re speaking to painting and fine art students, but equally to students studying furniture design, fashion, illustration, animation, sequential arts, VR—the list goes on. We look at everything from an interdisciplinary perspective. I just think, why would you create any limiting factor that makes someone feel like this isn’t for them?

Some of those students are away from home for the first time, going to an art museum on their own for the first time. And beyond the students, we extend that welcome to the Savannah community, to visitors from around the country. Maybe someone came to Savannah for the food, or they just want to walk the parks, and they stumble upon the museum because it’s sweltering hot and they’re looking for air conditioning. It has always been my firmly held belief that when people come to the door of a museum, we need to fling that door wide open. We never need to dumb things down, but we should be speaking in a language that brings people into the fold. I truly believe that if you can make somebody feel like art is for them, you’re changing them for the rest of their lives. And you’re changing the world.

EP: I think those connecting points between disciplines are so vital, when someone who’s deeply into furniture design is suddenly moved by a Frank Stella painting, or a painting student discovers something new through a ceramics show. That cross-pollination is everything.
DP: Absolutely. We just had an alumnus come back to town, an incredible painter, who told us that a Carlos Cruz-Díaz exhibition here at SCAD had completely changed how she thought about her own practice. She points to that work as what encouraged her to think outside the box—to make the work that became her signature style. And for me, speaking personally, it can be as simple as seeing an artwork or an exhibition, or reading a book, or seeing a film that makes you see things differently. That can genuinely change the course of a life. And maybe it makes me sound like I’m proselytizing for art, but I think in this day and age, artists are truly visionaries that I want to advocate for.

EP: I think we can both say that art is genuinely popular right now in a way that feels different. Post-pandemic, museums have done a remarkable job of becoming more approachable. Galleries can be slightly intimidating; there’s a commercial undertone, a sense that maybe you’re supposed to buy something. Museums feel different.
DP: I agree. One of my favorite aspects of the SCAD Museum of Art is our student docent program. It’s a real extension of our commitment to accessibility in every sense of that word, from literal physical access all the way to something bigger and more philosophical. Museums in the past have sometimes reinforced those dynamics you’re describing: a sense that this is a place for people who already speak the language. That is what we so vehemently want to break down.

Part of it is language—exhibition texts that are genuinely open, not the kind of contemporary art English that alienates people who don’t catch a reference. But what’s so special here is that we have students from all different backgrounds doing a work-study program as docents. They’re there to share about the work, to answer questions, but more than that, they walk up to visitors and say, “Let me tell you about this.” When somebody is there, eager to share, art becomes less inscrutable. It opens the work up. It unlocks it.

And even before that, we ask hard questions about whether a given work is right to show here. There are times when something is very hot in the contemporary art scene and we as a curatorial team are personally excited about an artist, but we feel like that work isn’t really going to find its mark with our audience. That’s a real metric, and an important one.

Read the rest of the interview here.