Savannah is always bringing in new creative talent.
Between the three major universities in town, the opportunities presented for ambitious transplants, and the relatively untapped public art potential, many artists see the Hostess City of the South as a welcoming destination where they can make their mark.
Here are three young creators who you might not have heard of yet, but that will likely be making waves in the art scene in the years to come.
Jeanette McCune, owner, Cleo the Gallery
"[I] just liked the name," McCune laughed when I asked her why Cleo.
It was a surprising admission from the gallerist given how hands on and detail-oriented she is in her curatorial work. Stopping in to speak with her at the new, hopefully permanent home for the gallery at 104 E. 40th St., Studio B, in the Starland District (the space had previously been housed inside Abode Studios off of Skidaway Road), she was busy building a new movable wall for the gallery, as well as contriving the layout for Melted Moment Mid Sip, the gallery’s next exhibition, opening Aug. 5.
“In this next upcoming show we have a gal from Montreal, we have a girl from upstate New York, we have New Orleans and then we have Chad Austin, who is just down the street,” she said of the artists set to be featured. “I just want [the] conversation to include contemporary artists that are living and making work that can be easily put together with the Southern art scene.”
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
“I feel like Savannah could be this amazing cultural hub,” she added.
McCune and Cleo the Gallery are filling a void in the local creative community by bringing in young, emerging artists from other cities to show at the alternative space.
Other than Arts Southeast's On: View Residency space, and a few national "call for artists" group exhibitions at Sulfur Studios and in other places around town, there really isn't a gallery devoted to showcasing un-established creatives that are primarily working outside of Savannah.
Beyond that, McCune is also bringing a new and innovative approach to how a gallery can be run, one that she hopes others will take lessons from.
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
In more practical language, this means that McCune hopes, in the long run, to compensate artists with a minimum of 5-10% of their sale price just for exhibiting in the gallery, whether or not the pieces actually sell during the run of the show. This is on top of handling shipping expenses and helping with display costs, like framing.
Moreover, she is being entirely transparent about money coming into and out of the gallery.
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
Credit: Courtesy of Cleo the Gallery
“I came in with a lot of ambitious plans,” McCune admitted. “It’s 2022 and we need to have a very frank conversation about how small businesses are run and who runs them and how the budgets are laid out. I want to lean into every single part of that.
“The amount of work that artists get asked to do just for publicity is [shameful]” she went on to say. “I’ve gotten so much positive feedback from my artists for just paying [a small amount].”
“I’m a very small entity in this larger, big discussion in the art world in general,” she continued. “And if we can start that ripple effect, maybe this becomes the stock standard.
Cleo the Gallery is open each First Friday in Starland, including for the opening of Melted Moment Mid Sip, the gallery's next exhibition, on Aug. 5, as well as by appointment.
Additionally, McCune has curated a two-person show featuring the work of Adam Amram and Carolina Casusol that is on view at Atlanta Contemporary through Sept. 4.
Find the space on Instagram @cleo_the_gallery.
Jenna Wilusz, Illustrator and First Fridays in Starland Organizer
First Fridays in Starland have been happening for over 20 years, and, to a certain extent, they have gathered their own momentum. Locals tend to expect that if it's the first Friday of a month, then there will be something going on in Savannah's artiest of art districts.
But, until recently, it had been a couple of years since a truly organized First Friday slate of events was taking place. That's not to say that places like Sulfur Studios or Cedar House Gallery weren't continuing to provide quality artistic content month after month; they were. Just that since the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020, there didn't seem to be a space, either digital or in print, where art lovers could go to really take in all that the area had to offer.
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
That was until Feb. 26 of this year, when Dreamhouse Studios illustrator Jenna Wilusz published a sort of "menu" of activities for the March First Friday in Starland via her new Instagram account @starlandfirstfridays. It was an idea born of her time spent in a much bigger city over 1,500 miles away.
“I actually did an internship about a year ago now…at this little niche museum outside of Denver, Colo.,” Wilusz explained. “In that time I was able to explore the big art scenes in Denver. I got to go to two (first Fridays) in two art districts.
“One thing that was really cool, [one of my fellow interns] sent me this link to a kind of map, that had all of the studios pinpointed. I just helped you navigate where to go if you were unfamiliar with the area.”
Upon returning to Savannah, she was invited to join the aforementioned Dreamhouse Studios, an art workspace catering exclusively to women, artists who share a stylistic similarity to Wilusz.
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Talking to her new studio mates, she was excited to learn that First Fridays were happening in Savannah just as they are in Denver, but dismayed that there was no real resource for art lovers to discover all that was going on. Hence her motivation to launch @starlandfirstfridays on Instagram, picking up the mantle that had been carried previously by past Starland stalwarts such as Desotorow Gallery and Art Rise Savannah.
“I just started a big group chat with a bunch of the businesses in the Starland District,” she related. “I was like, ‘Hey guys, would you be interested in this?’ Literally in the first month there were maybe 12 participating businesses.”
The most recent iteration of the First Friday map that she created — a visually appealing guide to various stops in Starland that were featuring special events this past July — had increased that list of businesses to over 20.
Credit: Courtesy of Starland First Friday
Credit: Courtesy of Starland First Friday
It’s not as big of a happening as Wilusz hopes it will someday become, but it’s a promising re-start of the kind of organized monthly event that Savannah had become accustomed to prior to the pandemic.
“I just kind of wanted to provide a little bit of what I saw going on in Denver here in Savannah,” she continued. “And it honestly has met a need that I didn’t even know existed in the art community here.”
Follow @starlandfirstfridays on Instagram to see what's going on in Starland each month. Find Jenna Wilusz @jennawilusz and via the Dreamhouse Studios website at dreamhousesavannah.com.
Tafy LaPlanche, Multidisciplinary Artist
Tafy LaPlanche has only been in Savannah for just over a year, having moved to the south from New York. But she's already making her mark on the local art scene as the Jepson Center's 2022 Boxed In/Break Out artist, her project N/um chosen to activate the window boxes along Bernard Street.
"I remember looking at [Amiri Farris' Boxed In/Break Out project 'Breakout!'] thinking, 'Yeah, one day I'm gonna have my stuff in those windows!'" She recalled. "Not thinking that it was gonna be like a year later."
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
Credit: Courtesy of the artist
As you might have guessed from her initial reaction to seeing the display for the first time, her decision to even apply to the coveted Telfair Museums showcase was as much happenstance as it was ambition. The annual call for submissions came across her desk long before she thought she was ready to even consider doing something for the space, but sometimes the creative muse has its own timeline.
“I had had this sketch that I’d worked on because I was trying to finish a sketchbook,” she admitted of the inspiration behind what would ultimately become her proposal.
“I had seen all these people do these really cool mini-sketchbook stories, where it was just series of these same kinds of paintings or drawings in a sketchbook, but it was a cohesive mini gallery. [I thought] that would be neat, and it would push me to finish a sketchbook.”
Credit: Adriana Iris Boatwright / For Savannah Morning News
Credit: Adriana Iris Boatwright / For Savannah Morning News
Working from that premise and the already-completed single drawing, a figure overlaid with its spinal column and botanical elements, she created a second drawing, realizing right away that she was onto something artistically and thematically. She decided she would do a painting, a plan that turned into something much larger when a friend of hers offered to give her a canvas just about as large as the windows that would come to house N/um.
The resulting composition was proof that the concept could work at a larger scale, and all that she needed as motivation to create rough sketches of the remaining images in the series.
Now complete and on view outside of the museum through April 2023, the collection of five paintings portray the phases of a Haitian dance of healing with a contemporary twist, acting as both a nod to her personal and ethnic roots, as well as a doorway for inquisitive art lovers to discover their own truths about the work.
Credit: Adriana Iris Boatwright / For Savannah Morning News
Credit: Adriana Iris Boatwright / For Savannah Morning News
“As an artist you always have your version of what it’s supposed to mean,” LaPlanche noted. “And it’s not until other viewers come to it that it starts unlocking it’s full potential. I love how people react to it as a whole, and that they find it to be a strong series, and a very emotional journey.”
LaPlanche is currently neck deep in several new series, including one acting as a callback to her mother’s upbringing in Spanish Harlem in the 1970s. There’s no timetable as to when we can expect to see a show of what’s next after Boxed In/Break Out, but the new-to-Savannah artist is excited to be a part of our up-and-coming creative community.
You can visit her and see her work at City Market upstairs in studio 6, and she is one of the vendors at The Culturist Union at 3129 Bull Street. You can also find her work on Instagram @lepouf_art.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: These three Savannah artists are creators to watch as the art scene continues to flourish
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