March 24, 2021

Presentation

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American Byways: A Sense of Place through Past and Present

 

“American Byway” is a solo exhibition of color photographs by SCAD professor, Rebecca Nolan. Edited from an exceptional body of work that she has focused on for the past 15 years, Nolan’s large format color prints offer a document that is both objective and personal. It’s nominal subject is Highway 80, a bicoastal road which runs from Tybee, Georgia to San Diego, California. Completed in 1926, and made irrelevant by subsequent superhighway construction, it was this particular vein, running through the American corpus, that charmed and inspired the artist with its quirky and adamant connections to the past. Both nocturnal and diurnal, like the artist herself, Nolan’s images precisely describe relations between the man-made and the natural, an awkward interface that reveals succinctly how we Americans work, play and survive.

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A write up from an exhibition from some of the work "American Byway: US Highway 80" by Steven J. Bliss.

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Rebecca Nolan

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Rebecca Nolan grew up in Twin Lakes, Wisconsin. She is a fine art photographer whose work has been exhibited internationally. She earned a B.A. in communications, the study of humanities and photography at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. She attended the University of Oregon, Eugene to earn an M.F.A. Nolan has lived all over the U.S. in a range of communities from Washington Island, Wisconsin to Chicago and St. Louis. She now resides in Savannah, Georgia, where she has been teaching at Savannah College of Art and Design since 2001 and acted as Department Chair from 2011-2016. Influenced by wanderlust of America, Nolan's work deals with the ideas of place, culture, society, environment, and how these concepts influence us as individuals. She has been involved with the Society for Photographic Education since 1988 and is currently serving her second term on the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee.