Race in America: How art, and a St. Helena champion, open world’s eyes to SC’s Gullah
Mary Inabinett Mack is a nurse by profession, but she brought healing to the South Carolina Lowcountry in a different way.
She has helped the visual arts community open people’s eyes to the beauty of the Gullah culture.
For the past 30 years she has helped newcomers and visitors from all over the world understand that black lives matter.
It wasn’t through lecturing or marching in the streets, but by operating the Red Piano Too Art Gallery in the heart of downtown Frogmore, the capital of St. Helena Island.
She closed the doors in June, finally retiring a few months short of her 84th birthday.
At the same time, she received the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Governor’s Awards for the Arts, the highest honor the state gives in the arts.
She was feted for using her gallery to launch and embellish the careers of scores of artists. Most of them were Black people telling a Gullah story that not long ago was hidden, and considered shameful, but is now being celebrated nationwide.
Art would seem a far-fetched notion on the Colleton County tobacco farm where Mack was born. Her brother, the late Heyward Inabinett, told of that hard life, and the special, lifelong challenges of being a light-skinned Black who spent decades being identified as a white. In his latter years, he put it in a book, “Triangular Pegs: A Story of an African American Family and the ‘One-Drop’ Rule.”
Mack’s mother moved them to St. Helena Island shortly before Mack turned 12 and enrolled in the historic Penn School.
She would get a nursing degree in New York City, raise a family there, and move back home for good in 1977. She was deputy director of the Beaufort-Jasper-Hampton Comprehensive Health Services by day, and an art framer by night.
In New York, Mack’s husband took her to an outdoor art display in Greenwich Village, and her walls were never again bare.
“Art fulfills a need,” she said. “It’s like a passion. It lifts my spirit.”
As a student at Penn, Mack sat next to Sam Doyle Jr. They called him “Chubby.”
The teacher asked them to bring in something from the community to reflect their lives. Chubby brought one of his daddy’s paintings.
We can look back now and see how it changed the course of history.
Jonathan Green
Artist Jonathan Green has done as much as anybody to bring the Lowcountry’s unique Gullah culture out of the shadows.
“The Gullah people depicted in Jonathan Green’s world look like they got dressed while staring at rainbows,” Pat Conroy wrote.
Green was reared in the Gardens Corner area of northern Beaufort County.
He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, but found his voice and fame by, as Conroy said, narrowing his vision “to illuminate the life of his community along Highway 21 from Gardens Corner to Yemassee.”
In doing so, Green no doubt influenced other artists who graced the Red Piano Too, like Cassandra Gillens and Diane Britton Dunham.
The Rev. Johnnie Simmons, Sandra Smith, Joe Pinckney and James Denmark put Gullah images on canvas, raising the curtain on a world outsiders did not see.
And Green himself was surely influenced by the likes of Romare Bearden, Horace Pippin and Jacob Lawrence, who also celebrated the way they were raised.
“Primarily, the art to a great extent chronicles the Gullah lifestyle,” Mack said.
But it all began with St. Helena Island’s Sam Doyle, a self-taught artist who used house paint on scrapped tin and wood to fill his yard with art.
He called it his “Outdoor World-Wide-International Gallery.”
Before Doyle died in 1985, his artwork was collected and shown by Andy Warhol. And he would shake hands with first lady Nancy Reagan after a fretful flight with John Trask Jr. to Washington, D.C., where Doyle was part of the “Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980” exhibit at the Corcoran Museum of Art.
He painted famous Black people, but mostly the noteworthy of his own secluded community, still steeped in traditions for Sierra Leone. The first Black lady undertaker. The first Black doctor. The Penn baseball team. Biblical scenes, patriotic scenes, midwifery, fishing and net-making, as well as root doctors, ghosts, transvestites and prostitutes he called “good time girls.”
“It’s a culture and a people,” Mack said of Doyle’s work. “It’s a history. It’s like the encapsulation of African American history. He laid the way for everybody else. The newer artists elaborated on that.”
Along the way, the mainstream in a Lowcountry swamped by newcomers quit overlooking the Gullah.
“Art had a part in that,” Mack said.
MLK’s cottage
Luanne LaRoche of Bluffton opened the Red Piano Too.
She said Mack influenced her to do it — expanding beyond her Red Piano, Hilton Head Island’s first art gallery.
LaRoche and Mack served together on the Penn Center board. LaRoche was an early collector of Sam Doyle paintings, and was introduced to Gullah through them.
“I saw in it the education, the pride and the self-reliancy that Sam Doyle was celebrating and wanted the world to see in his front yard,” LaRoche said.
She rented a marshside cottage Penn built for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to stay in for his Penn retreats. King never got to stay there, but LaRoche recalls that it became a place where whites, particularly from Hilton Head and Bluffton, could come for exhibits and events to learn about a different culture living right here.
“There was a curiosity but not a feeling of comfort, or a feeling of knowing the people,” LaRoche said.
Art — and a warm welcoming by Mack and Penn Center director Emory Campbell — opened eyes.
A number of things pushed society, and the Gullah culture itself, to appreciate what we have here.
In 1970, Vertamae Grosvenor published “Vibration Cooking,” a sassy, raw look into Gullah homes; the New Testament was translated into Gullah on St. Helena; Sierra Leone President Joseph Saidu Momoh visited Penn Center in 1988; Edith Dabbs published the all-but-lost St. Helena photographs of Leigh Richmond Miner in the 1970 book, “Face of an Island”; St. Helena’s Ron and Natalie Daise made “Gullah Gullah Island” a national television hit; the Hallelujah Singers group was born in 1989; and Julie Dash filmed “Daughters of the Dust” on St. Helena in 1991, which The New York Times praised for its “spellbinding visual beauty.”
Today, the federal government recognizes the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and has established the Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in Beaufort County.
LaRoche believes the visual arts laid a groundwork for today’s frank national discussion on race following the May death of George Floyd in the custody of police in Minneapolis.
“Part of the instrument of change is letting people know someone from another culture,” she said.
“You have to know a person to know a culture. You have to have a place to do that, and a place to bloom. Artists have had a chance to do that.”
Mack said the gallery attracted people from around the world.
“It was like, ‘build it and they will come.’ It’s more like we found each other,” she said.
And it taught her this:
“There’s a lot of talent here.”
This story was originally published July 17, 2020 at 4:21 PM.
