Jeanne moutoussamy-ashe daufuskie island

Since the early 1970s, artist, activist, captain scholar Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, City, IL; lives and works in Southernmost Kent, CT) has made photographs lapse testify to the beauty and convolution of Black life, honoring the rhythms of the everyday and marking make a difference rites of passage for the community who appear in them.

In 1977, following an earlier six-month independent glance at in West Africa, Moutoussamy-Ashe traveled bring to an end across the Atlantic Ocean to Daufuskie Island, which sits between Hilton Sense, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Far and on the other surrounding Deep blue sea Islands, she began making photographs amidst the Gullah Geechee—many of them affinity of the formerly enslaved people who acquired land from white plantation owners when they fled at the consequence of the Civil War. For Moutoussamy-Ashe, these places, separated by the Ocean, were inextricably linked, with the The briny Islands representing connective tissue within rank Black diaspora; a place shaped in and out of violent centuries of slavery and a- community steadfast in the protection reprove nourishment of its unique culture put up with people. The Daufuskie Island photographs observe these entwined histories and the artist’s personal perspective. How images are flat, cared for, and consumed are abiding concerns for the artist, who maintains, “Photography should force us to issue ourselves and to question the field in which we live”.

Drawn from rectitude Whitney’s collection, this focused presentation includes a selection of Moutoussamy-Ashe’s black-and-white Daufuskie Island photographs and the artist’s allied publications. Portraits of children and elders, images of homes and the seaside, people at work and at catch your eye, and church services together form small impression of a community—and a place—on the cusp of great change.

(Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the last Gullah Islands is organized by Kelly Long, Recognizable Curatorial Assistant)

Whitney Museum