Savannah College of Art and Design president Paula Wallace was honored at a White House ceremony Thursday night, where she was bestowed the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Joe Biden.
Wallace, who co-founded SCAD in 1978, was among 20 national recipients of the medal — the second-highest honor a civilian can earn, behind only the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
“Our democracy begins and ends with the duties of citizenship,” Biden told honorees inside the East Room of the White House. “That’s our work for the ages. And that’s what all of you — and I mean this — all of you embody.”
Biden himself did not introduce medal recipients as they were brought onstage, but he described the educators among them as citizens who “kindled new flames of imagination.”
His administration also provided a statement describing in brief the contributions of each honoree, including Wallace, whom the White House wrote of as a “lifelong educator and trailblazer of the arts” whose vision for SCAD “would transform how we think about professional education” in creative industries.
Originally a grade school teacher in Atlanta during the 1970s, Wallace later moved to Savannah, where, at 29 years old, she and three others remodeled a dilapidated armory building downtown into the college’s first classroom.
Since then, SCAD has grown from a relatively obscure regional institution with just a few dozen students into a nationally renowned art school boasting an enrollment of roughly 18,000, as well as two satellite campuses in Atlanta and Lacoste, France.
The college has been partially credited with revitalizing blighted properties in Savannah’s historic downtown, helping to restore Georgia’s oldest city to its original charm.
Wallace was not the only medal recipient with a Georgia connection. The White House also honored Dr. Frank Butler, a former Navy SEAL and eye surgeon whose work advanced trauma care on the battlefield, who graduated from the Medical College of Georgia in 1980 after attending Georgia Tech.
This story comes to The Georgia Sun through a reporting partnership with GPB a non-profit newsroom focused on reporting in Georgia.
Benjamin Payne | GA Today
Benjamin is the Savannah-based reporter for GPB, where he covers Coastal Georgia.
Prior to coming to Savannah, he freelanced in Bellingham, Washington, for public media outlets including NPR, Marketplace, and PRX. Previously, Benjamin hosted Morning Edition for WVIK, his hometown NPR member station in Rock Island, Ill. Before that, he served a news internship with NPR member station WBEZ in Chicago.
