In Time to Rejoice, a 2005 oil on canvas painting by artist Jonathan Green, nine women, each dressed in vibrantly colored shirts and skirts, with wide-brimmed hats obscuring their faces, gather in a clearing. They’re facing one woman who dances in the center, her arms outstretched, seemingly in ecstasy, a leg towards the sky. Her hat hovers off her head; only her face is visible, though, with her eyes closed, she doesn’t gaze at the viewer. It is an intimate scene, perhaps of sisters, friends or comrades.
The painting evokes a moment from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, in which Baby Suggs offers freedom and peace to formerly enslaved people who are gathered with her in a clearing: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them … and all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver – love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too.”
Time to Rejoice is curator Ben Billingsley’s favorite in the Cameron Art Museum’s new exhibition, Rooted in Memory: The Gullah Geechee Vision of Jonathan Green, on view now through 24 January in Wilmington, North Carolina.
“You can see that they’re wearing blue chains, very contemporary kinds of clothing,” Billingsley said. “So suddenly this is not the 18th century, this is not the 19th century, this is here and now. It really ties together the contemporary culture to this longstanding tradition that has been there since these people arrived on these shores.”
Green was born in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His Gullah Geechee heritage greatly informs his work.
An anonymous family of donor members of the museum has collected Green’s work for three generations. The family temporarily loaned some of their personal collection to the museum, allowing them to “not only honor [Green’s] work, but also show the behind the scenes of how a collection develops and how generational collecting can develop over time”, Billingsley said.
As the museum was creating the exhibition, Billingsley realized that it made sense to include art and objects that highlight the broader Gullah Geechee culture. The resulting exhibition, which ties together contemporary art and history, also includes traditional Gullah Geechee creations, such as sweet grass baskets, quilts and Gullah dolls. The museum also received works on loan from the South Carolina State Museum, the Gibbes Museum and the Charleston Museum for the exhibition.
In some ways, the art is “deceptively simple”, Billingsley said. It’s easy to look at Green’s work, to process the full image. But the more viewers sit with the work and take it in, the more detail they discover.
“There are hundreds of brushstrokes per square inch, and the deeper you get into looking at them, the more you start to uncover what I think he’s really saying about his own experience and the experience of the people that he paints,” he said.
Rooted in Memory includes some of Green’s paintings of women, which Billingsley said, “create an interesting tension”.
“Most of the time, the women’s faces are somewhat obscured – either they have their back to the viewer or maybe they’re looking down, they may have a hat brim covering the face,” he said. “It makes me want to know what they’re doing, what they are thinking. It also allows them to somewhat be almost like universal avatars. You can imagine people you know in your life in that scenario because of the degree of anonymity in the face, especially if you’re in the rural south-east of the country. It very much feels like familiar territory.”
Included in the exhibition are four watercolors by Green that diverge from his traditional style and stand out in contrast to his other work. The watercolors are costume designs that Green was commissioned to paint for the Sapelo festival for a production of Porgy and Bess.
“His inspiration for these was to imagine what if the fashion, the fabric traditions, the printing traditions, weaving traditions from west Africa had come into our culture, not through forced labor and forced arrival,” Billingsley said. “But if they had arrived here through willing immigrants who continued to bring their culture into the contemporary mainstream.”
