During the years that S.C. Humanities sponsored the South Carolina Book Festival in Columbia, the work of one artist was chosen repeatedly as the featured image on posters advertising that annual weekend event. That artist is Jonathan Green, whose vibrantly colored paintings and prints celebrate the Gullah culture of the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country.
Until the end of August, the Morris Museum of Art will be hosting a special exhibition titled “Jonathan Green: The Aesthetics of Heritage.” This show of pieces from the museum’s permanent collection represents the largest assemblage of the artist’s work in a public repository.
Born and raised in the hamlet of Garden’s Corner, Beaufort County, Green knows Gullah culture from the inside. His maternal grandmother taught him the language, an English-based, primarily oral tongue heavily influenced by African vocabulary and grammar. He also immersed himself in the everyday activities of his small, closely knit community; in fact, so many of the artist’s images can be seen as his attempt to capture boyhood memories.
The 23 works on view in the museum’s Harriet and Martin Dolin Gallery through Aug. 31 can be divided into subject areas reflective of the shared experience of generations of the descendants of the West African people enslaved and brought to this country in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A number of works make reference, for example, to the harvesting of the bounties of both land and sea. The coastal plain of our state was, according to some estimates the most heavily enslaved area of the South, largely because British colonists intent on cultivating rice needed a labor force conversant with managing that particular cash crop. They told slave traders to bring them natives of the so-called Guinea Coast, and these coastal people brought with them a knowledge of growing plants without soil.
Thus, so many of the men and women in Green’s art are comfortable in that realm of “marsh and sea and sky” so lyrically described in Sidney Lanier’s poem “The Marshes of Glynn.” In “White Pony,” for example, a straw-hatted male equestrian sits astride his mount in a stream of pulsating blue. In another painting titled “Sitting by the River,” the eye is initially drawn to two figures seated on the shore, with a fish bucket and red dog nearby. Are they engaged in angling or are they mesmerized, along with the viewer, by what Lanier described as the “sinuous folds of land” that “fringe” the water as it empties into the sea beyond?
Besides the many images of a population in tune with their environment, Green returns time and again in his work to the social activities of the Gullah people, particularly those linked to musical performance. Over time, African rhythms have informed the evolution of a number of American musical genres whose popularity persists to this day. The large-scale oil on canvas entitled “The Silver Slipper Club,” for example, features seven couples dancing to some unheard melody, the female figures sport full skirts whose bold patterns are a signature of the artist. It is because of this confluence of decorative designs that Green’s essentially representational works sometimes border on the abstract.
Another large-scale oil “The Congregation” offers an additional example of this visual strategy. The lilac-robed choir in the background is overshadowed by the cluster of worshippers facing the viewer in the foreground. Our eyes are attracted to their hats and bedecked torsos, which read collectively like a patchwork quilt.
Accompanying the main exhibition until June 29 is a display of around 30 portraits of the artist himself, all mounted on the walls of the SRP Auditorium on the museum’s ground floor. Among these works is a standout piece by photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the widow of tennis star Arthur Ashe.