Image: SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah
The SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, is presenting an exhibition devoted to the photographer Sarah Charlesworth and to the artists closest to her, on view from 17 August 2026 to 4 January 2027. Organised by the museum’s chief curator, Daniel S. Palmer, the show sets Charlesworth’s images alongside work by three artists with whom she had important exchanges during her lifetime.
They are Laurie Simmons, a close friend and fellow member of the Pictures Generation; Sara VanDerBeek, who learned from Charlesworth and worked with her to show key pieces at a gallery the younger artist ran; and Charlesworth’s daughter, Lucy Charlesworth Freeman, whose practice draws on faith and on studies in psychiatry and medicine. According to the museum, the three act as interlocutors, offering a fresh view of Charlesworth as a foundational figure for understanding photography’s place in the world today.
Charlesworth (1947–2013) built her reputation with conceptual, photo-based works that took apart and reframed cultural imagery. Her solo exhibitions include the survey Doubleworld at the New Museum in New York in 2015, which travelled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Stills at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Among the works SCAD highlights is Self Portrait (1989), a Cibachrome print in a lacquered wood frame.
Simmons, born in 1949, has staged scenes for the camera since the mid-1970s; her retrospective Big Camera/Little Camera was shown in Fort Worth and Chicago in 2018–19. VanDerBeek, born in 1976, has had solo exhibitions at institutions including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Freeman, born in 1988, began her practice in 2017. Working digitally and on canvas, she combines diagrams, text and scientific imagery to map inner states of consciousness, drawing on training in medicine, public health, psychiatry and theology.
As part of the programme, VanDerBeek and Freeman joined Matthew C. Lange for a talk on Charlesworth’s legacy on 30 September.
