Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe @ Whitney Museum of American Art

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Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe @ Whitney Museum of American Art

December 7th, 2024 by fstop

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe: the Last Gullah Islands
December 5, 2024 – May 2025

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe and the Last Gullah Islands features 13 black-and-white photographs and two publications documenting the insular Gullah Geechee community of Daufuskie Island and the other surrounding South Carolina Sea Islands.

Presented for the first time in a New York museum, this moving body of work, drawn from the Whitney’s collection, serves as a testimony to the complex history and rich culture of Daufuskie Island, which has experienced rapid change since the mid-1900s. Portraits of children and elders, images of homes and the shoreline, people at work and at rest, and church services together form an impression of a community on the cusp of great change.

Since the early 1970s, artist, activist, and scholar Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951, Chicago, IL; lives and works in South Kent, CT) has made photographs that testify to the beauty and complexity of Black life, honoring the rhythms of the everyday and marking important rites of passage for the people who appear in them. After studying with street photographer Garry Winogrand at the Art Institute of Chicago, Moutoussamy-Ashe was admitted to the Cooper Union in New York and got her professional start as a photojournalist for the television station WNBC, while also contributing to popular magazines including Ebony, Essence, and Life.

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014

Location: Online Type: Black and White, Community, Exhibition

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