#106: Living the Vision: From the Kiah Museum to SCAD's Kiah Hall

"I loved art, but I couldn't go to a museum because my skin was black. I told my

mother that someday I'd like to have a museum everybody could go to."

—Virginia Jackson Kiah

Living the Vision: From the Kiah Museum to SCAD's Kiah Hall

In 1959, Virginia Jackson Kiah established the Kiah Museum in her home in the historic Cuyler Brownsville neighborhood in Savannah. Jackson had moved to Savannah in 1951 to teach art at Beach High School. Her husband served many years as a professor at Savannah State University.

The Kiah Museum offered her community a genuine neighborhood art museum to appraise, as Jim Crow laws in Georgia often made traditional museums unavailable to her fellow African Americans. Virginia designed the home-based Kiah Museum as a 'museum for the masses.'

Kiah studied portraiture at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, graduating with honors in 1931. She later obtained her Master's Degree from Columbia University in New York City.

Her work is now in the permanent collection at the SCAD Museum of Art. This summer, an online exhibition of her work was launched entitled Live Your Vision. Her portraits are wonderfully engaging, especially for this SCAD graduate who created an extensive portrait collection for my senior project.

Today, Kiah's vacant 106-year-old house, located at 505 w. 36th Street, is on the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation's current list of Places in Peril.

A local group of citizens, the Savannah Archeological Alliance, has been trying to restore the original Kiah home and museum. But first, various application approvals, legal remedies, and fund procurements need to be finalized. The Historic Savannah Foundation has shown keen interest in the project.

Virginia Jackson Kiah was born in Baltimore in 1911 to a politically active family working toward equality and Civil Rights in Maryland. Her mother was President of the NAACP in Baltimore, providing her daughter a great mentor to emulate.

Kiah's energetic and decades-long community service in Savannah brought her an honorary Doctorate in Humanities from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 1986.

In 1987, Virginia joined the SCAD Board of Trustees, on which she served over a decade. She donated several of the paintings that are now part of SCAD's Kiah Collection. Her donation letter explained her motivation: "It is my desire that the Kiah collection serves as an inspiration to future artists so that they, too, may live their vision."

In 1993, this restored building — painted here, en Plain air — was renamed SCAD's Kiah Hall in her well-deserved honor. Virginia Jackson Kiah's unassailable belief in humanity remains an inspiration to art students at SCAD. A SCAD painting scholarship is awarded each year in her name.

SCAD's Kiah Hall was initially built in 1856 by the Central of Georgia Railway as the company's executive and administrative offices. Located nearby SCAD's Clark Hall (see PFS-91), also built on Martin Luther King Boulevard, Kiah Hall anchors one of the largest antebellum railroad complexes still in existence.

This Central of Georgia Railway building was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. National Parks Service in 1976. William Washington Gordon (see PFS-65) and Hugh Moss Comer (see PFS-40) each served as the President of this essential Savannah-based railroad company.