Daufuskie Island in New York City: Photography exhibit at the Whitney Museum captures Gullah life on the island
Starting December 5, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City’s West Village will feature an exhibit of photographs taken on Daufuskie Island. The exhibit, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands, includes 13 black-and-white photographs and two books featuring a selections of her photographs.
Many of the photographs were shown at the Columbia Museum of Art in 2016. The Whitney exhibit will be available until April 2025.
Yvonne Wilson, a long-time Daufuskie resident and activist, recognized nearly all of the people photographed in the series, and she is proud that her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren get to see the island’s history through the photographs.
“It’s beautiful to see. I thank God that I was able to live this long where I can see something like that, a celebration of Daufuskie, the Gullah-Geechee dialect and people that are still living here on the island,” Wilson said. “We are fighting here everyday just trying to hold on with our fingernails to keep things still going.”
According to the Whitney Museum, since the early 1970s, Moutoussamy-Ashe has made photographs that “testify to the beauty and complexity of Black life, honoring the rhythms of the everyday and making important rites of passage for the people who appear in them.”
Moutoussamy-Ashe studied with street photographer Garry Winogrand at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Cooper Union, a private college in New York. She started as a photojournalist for the television station WNBC. After six-months of independent study in West Africa, she came to Daufuskie and the other Sea Islands in 1977 to make photographs capturing the spirit of the Gullah-Geechee people.
For Moutoussamy-Ashe, even though the two places are separated by the Atlantic Ocean, they are “inextricably linked, with the Sea Islands representing connective tissue within the Black diaspora,” according to the museum’s information.
The photographs in the exhibition span the late 1970s and early 1980s and feature portraits of children, elders, and even a wedding party in front of the First Union African Baptist Church that is currently operating.
The Whitney will also host a public program featuring Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe in conversation with Gullah scholar Emory Shaw Campbell, who was born on Hilton Head Island, in February.
This story was originally published December 6, 2024 at 7:59 AM.
