New exhibition explores artists’ ties to Ossabaw Island

Telfair Museums opened a major exhibition March 13 examining the artistic legacy of Ossabaw Island and the residency programs that operated there for more than two decades.

Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now will be on view through Sept. 6 at the Jepson Center for the Arts, 207 W. York St. Savannah, GA. The exhibition features work by 32 artists who have engaged with the 26,000-acre barrier island off the coast of Savannah over the past 65 years.

The show focuses on the Ossabaw Island Project and Genesis, multidisciplinary residency programs that ran from 1961 to 1982. Organizers say the programs brought together artists, writers and scholars for collaborative experimentation in a remote coastal environment.

Artists represented in the exhibition include Harry Bertoia, Agnes Denes, Suzanne Jackson, Doris Lee, Jack Leigh, Sally Mann, Michael Mazur, Ross McElwee, Athena Tacha, Betty Tompkins and Anne Truitt, among others. The exhibition also includes a new commission by Allison Janae Hamilton.

The works on display span painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, film and textiles and are drawn from public and private collections across the United States. The exhibition explores themes of environmentalism, identity, spirituality and race in relation to Ossabaw’s natural landscape and cultural history.

Telfair Museums has commissioned Hamilton to create a new film, Venus of Ossabaw (2026), which will be screened nightly on the exterior façade of the Jepson Center during the run of the exhibition. The film engages with the island’s history of enslavement and imagines the journey of a woman who escapes from a plantation on Ossabaw and travels south along the Georgia coast.

The exhibition is organized by Erin Dunn, curator of modern and contemporary art at Telfair Museums, and Beryl Gilothwest, guest curator and deputy director of research and exhibitions at the Calder Foundation.

Founded in 1886, Telfair Museums describes itself as the oldest public art museum in the South. Its campuses include the Jepson Center for the Arts, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters and the Telfair Academy, all located in Savannah’s historic district. Find more information on their website telfair.org.