Olivia Williams, director of culture and programming for the Eastern Wharf’s Thompson Savannah, has the enviable job of generating programming, partnering with local artists, and supporting nonprofits while fulfilling a directive to ensure “Culture lives here.” The hotel’s brand initiative is built on being perceived as an arbiter of culture, curating work by cool and noteworthy creators, or “culture shifters” as the Thompson likes to label them. The latest lobby art installation, entitled I Sing The Body Electric, featuring paintings by Jon Witzky and sculptures by Ivy Laurel Anderson, fits this bill to a tee.
Williams said that her 2015 visit to Sulfur Studios [now part of Arts Southeast], made shortly after moving to Savannah, left a lasting impression. “The space radiated raw, genuine authenticity, and over the years, it has grown into a cornerstone of our community. What makes Sulfur Studios truly special is how they nurture and mentor artists, curators, and gallerists, fostering a collaborative environment that is rare and invaluable.” Since assuming her role at the Thompson, Williams said, “ARTS Southeast has been on my mind as a perfect partner. Their commitment to art, music, and community mirrors our own, and I’ve been brainstorming ways to collaborate meaningfully ever since.”
Williams contacted Witzky and invited him to be the Thompson’s next featured artist in the hotel’s Lobby Gallery. “I also suggested he collaborate with Ivy Anderson, whose work I’d first encountered at Gallery 2424. I love curating artists whose styles sharply contrast with those in our previous exhibits. Jon’s bold, dark, and masculine pieces paired with Ivy’s intricate, whimsical textures create a striking juxtaposition to the soft, feminine beauty of our previous artist, Katherine Sandoz. Together, their work promises to captivate and challenge the senses, and I couldn’t be more excited for our guests and locals alike to experience their work.”
Anderson is a recent graduate of the MFA Fibers program at the Savannah College of Art and Design [Williams staged her solo thesis show, Somewhere between Something and Nothing, at Gallery2424 in May of this year.] Hailing from Spring Lake, Michigan, she earned her BA from Indiana University Bloomington, with a concentration in wearable sculpture. Indeed, she said, she originally enrolled in the fashion program at SCAD, but within a week realized her passion lay more in exploring the actual fibers and materials than in navigating the vicissitudes of the fashion industry. She switched to the university’s fibers department, based out of Pepe Hall, exploring and making her own textiles on knitting machines, and endeavoring to find the best way “to make them structural, sculptural and have form.”
After taking a second-level knitting machine class, Anderson started creating fabric constructed from vibrantly colored elastic. This, she discovered, was the perfect textile to give sculptural form to the nylon-encased array of random objects she uses as the basis of her assemblages. She is not interested in explaining or revealing the objects inside her assemblages (piles of random things like clothes pins, toys, or kitchen tools collected from Goodwill and second-hand stores that she glues together and then paints in a monotone color), preferring to explore the color play between the interior encasing nylon and the exterior stretched elastic material. The resulting sculptures are both misshapen and eye-popping, strangely beautiful, and other-worldly.
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“To abstract them further, they needed this visual tension and vibration,” she told me. “I was interested in using opposing color combinations so they feel almost alive on the surface.” For the new pieces in this show, she uses colors that are less stark than usual, striving to create dialogue with the hues she sees in Witzky’s paintings.
Anderson is an artist to watch.
“Moving forward, if given the opportunity,” she said, “I would be so excited to present this type of work in installation in large quantity, or to create it on a much larger scale.” With a beautiful website detailing her already impressive resume (a 2024 Artist-in-Residence at the Grand Rapids Children’s Museum, a December 2023 trip to Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo, and Shikoku Island to research traditional Japanese fiber processes, an internship with Re:Purpose Savannah, and a studio assistant gig for Savannah-based fibers and installation artist Trish Andersen), she is sure to be accepted into prestigious residencies and exhibitions as she pushes the boundaires on what it means to be a contemporary fibers installation artist. This young woman is going places.
Witzky works out of an upstairs studio space of the Starland District’s Arts Southeast where he serves as the director of exhibitions and of the ON::View Residency. An artist and educator from Columbus, Ohio, he earned a BFA from Ohio State and an MFA in Painting from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Coming to Savannah in 2018 to teach at Georgia Southern, he immediately took a space at Sulfur Studios and was integral to the work of their reorganization as a nonprofit in 2021. His teaching position was eliminated during the pandemic, but in retrospect, he considered it “an amazing thing” to work with Arts Southeast rather than in academia.
Most often painting in a dark palette of blacks and cobalt blues, Witzky creates atmospherically layered pieces containing hints of ghostly figures in mystical landscapes. (Local architect Patrick Shay recently commissioned one to be installed as a 9-foot-by-13-foot tile mosaic in a forthcoming new entrance to the eastern reaches of River Street.)
The new pieces for the Thompson are, the artist explained, “super-dependent on color. I’d been so busy I hadn’t made any paintings in at least a year, so when Olivia [Williams] asked me to do this show, it gave me the impetus to get up early to paint, and when she said she wanted to pair my work with Ivy’s, it gave me a whole fresh perspective on how to move forward.”
Echoing Anderson’s amorphous shapes, Witzky has created paintings of similarly amorphous body shapes, often employing bold greens and reds. Each has a similar sensual motif and shape – “legs” that resemble mountain peaks – a shape that regularly appears in his older work too. “It’s something I’ve been working with for maybe 20 years. I finally figured out it originated in the shadows my curtains cast on the ceiling while I was in art school.”
Creating this new body of work in just three months while listening to “weird, avant-garde classical music,” Witzky said he used “ Anderson’s work as a jumping-off point, ”drawing shapes directly onto the canvas and letting the ideas come out intuitively, before applying the oil paint in his usual multi layers. This work feels closer to me than any I have ever made. I feel really good about it.”
With an upcoming solo show of large-scale paintings at Gallery 2424 in early 2025, this busy nonprofit director says again, “I thank Olivia for kicking me in the butt to make me create!”
Thursday’s art opening also marks the launch party for Arts Southeast’s newest issue of IMPACT Magazine, Savannah’s only dedicated arts and culture publication. Described by the nonprofit as “heavy on visual content,” it is a full-color, glossy, 9-inch-by-12-inch magazine featuring some of the South’s most exciting artists, writers and creatives through longform interviews and profiles. It publishes twice a year.
Together with the supremely talented Emily Earl, Witzky’s partner and the executive director of Arts Southeast, Witzky co-edits this impressive magazine, borne out of the lack of an art publication in our city: “Emily and I just love art books and art magazines, old literary magazines, all those weird expressions of culture. And Savannah didn’t have that. We just really wanted to do it. We had this naïve confidence.”
The freshly released issue features an exciting roster of regional creatives including the 2024 U.S. representative to the Venice Biennale, Jeffrey Gibson; 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship Recipient Jiha Moon (currently with pieces at Laney Contemporary); nationally acclaimed rising star Anthony Akinbola (currently with pieces at SCAD MOA); -based conceptual artist Gonzalo Hernandez; and visionary Savannah-based multimedia artist and curator Will Penny.
“I think it’s our best issue yet,” Witzky declared.
If You Go >> The public is invited to the opening of I Sing the Body Electric, new work by Jon Witzky and Ivy Laurel Anderson, and to the launch of IMPACT Magazine’s Volume 3, Number 2 from 5 to 8 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 10, in the Lobby Gallery of the Thompson Savannah, 201 Port St. There will be live music by Rachel Shaner and light bites and cocktails. RSVP’s are preferred and can be made under the “Book Experiences” tab at ThompsonSavannah.com.