SAVANNAH, Georgia — Contrary to his gentle voice and friendly manner, Lavar Munroe’s first U.S. museum exhibition, Journey Elsewhere: Musings from a Boundless Zoo, is filled with grotesque half-animal, half-human figures wielding hostile gloves and knives like predators. Currently on display at the SCAD Museum and the Gutstein Gallery in Savannah, Georgia, the Washington, DC–based artist’s paintings, sculpture, and installation explore the politics of power, subjugation, and othering. Munroe’s personal version of the contemporary zoo was inspired by his interest as an undergraduate in the “human zoos” that exhibited Native Americans and Africans through the 1950s, as well as his memories of death and violence while growing up in the Bahamas.
