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November Issue
2008
Coastal Discovery Museum at Honey Horn
on Hilton Head Island, SC, Features Works by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe
Coastal Discovery Museum at Honey Horn on Hilton Head Island, SC, will present the exhibit, Daufuskie Island, featuring photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, on view from Nov. 14 through Feb. 28, 2009.
Between 1977 and 1985, photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe made several trips to the barrier islands off the coast of South Carolina. The resulting work, Daufuskie Island, is a collection of 80 silver-gelatin black and white images.
When Moutoussamy-Ashe first traveled to Daufuskie, roughly eighty permanent African American residents lived on the island in fewer than fifty homes. Many of the people still spoke their native Gullah language. The island had only one store, a two-room school, a nursery, and one active church. Even as she was photographing the community, it was expected that Daufuskie would soon be transformed into a coastal resort like neighboring Hilton Head, altering forever the unique island culture that survived largely unchanged for the preceding half-century.
Moutoussamy-Ashe's photographs show family gatherings, crabbing and fishing, children at play, spiritual life, and the toils of everyday existence. With the utmost respect for her notoriously shy subjects, she captures a powerful vision of their rough-hewn but rewarding life independent from many of the modern conveniences of the time. Moutoussamy-Ashe's photographs document what daily life was like for the last generation of inhabitants to occupy the land prior to the onset of tourist developments. In the thirty years since she was welcomed into and allowed to photograph the community on Daufuskie, much has changed. Her photographs, which would be impossible to recreate today, are a lasting testament to a unique American community.
In 1982 she toured a more limited exhibit of Daufuskie images in conjunction with the release of her original book. Upon reissuing the 25th Anniversary edition Daufuskie Island: Photographs by Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the artist decided to put together this new, expanded exhibition as well. It was previously on display at the Leica Gallery in New York City. The 25th Anniversary edition of Daufuskie Island will be available for purchase at the Coastal Discovery Museum. In addition, limited edition and signed gelatin prints of the images are for sale.
"These photographs present a valuable picture of a culture that is rapidly vanishing. Paradoxically they also exist as a record of Daufuskie's existence, hence its preservation," says Deborah Willis, from the preface of the book.
About the artist: Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe has had frequent group and solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world - including the Leica Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; the Smithsonian and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC; Galerie Herve Odermat in Paris; and the Excellsior in Florence. Moutoussamy-Ashe's work has been featured in Life, the New York Times, and People. Her other books include Viewfinders: Black Women Photographer. She lives in New York City.
This exhibit is sponsored, in part, by The Bargain Box, Accommodations Tax funds from Hilton Head Island and Beaufort County and The Humanities Council-SC, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities; inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage. Hilton Head Regional Healthcare is the sponsor of the Museum's Temporary Gallery Space.
For further info check our SC Institutional
Gallery listings, call the Center at 843/689-6767 or visit (www.coastaldiscovery.org).
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