Telfair Museums will present an exhibition titled "Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now" starting March 13, 2026.

The exhibition highlights artists whose work was inspired by their time on Ossabaw Island, a 26,000-acre undeveloped barrier island.

It features 65 works by 32 artists, including a newly commissioned film by Allison Janae Hamilton.

Over the past few years, Erin Dunn, Telfair’s curator of modern and contemporary art, and Beryl Gilothwest, guest curator and the grandson of Eleanor “Sandy” Torry West, the matriarch of Ossabaw Island, have been developing an exhibition focusing on the history of Ossabaw through the lens of visual art. Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now opens on March 13, 2026 and is of deep cultural and scholarly significance to the Lowcountry in particular, and to the history of art in America in general.

Things come full circle; Dr. David Brenneman, former CEO of Telfair Museums wrote in the forward to the show’s accompanying book, “In April 1962, Telfair’s director, David M. Reese, wrote to Clifford West, 'I feel that what you are doing there is of such importance that it is bound to succeed. If there is anything that we at the Telfair can do, please feel free to call on us.' More than 60 years later, Telfair Museums is honored to mount Off the Coast of Paradise on the occasion of our 140th anniversary.”

Erin Dunn relates that this letter is just one of many she and her co-curator unearthed during their extensive research “going through box after box” at the Georgia Historical Society. The level of scholarship behind this project is, undoubtedly, the most important to date of Dunn’s already storied curatorial career.

Ossabaw, as most Savannahians know, is an undeveloped 26,000-acre barrier island off our coast, saved from development by Torry West when she sold it to the State of Georgia in 1978 as a heritage preserve. In 1994 the nonprofit Ossabaw Island Foundation was formed to manage educational, scientific, and cultural programming on the island through a public-private partnership with the state. What many Savannahians may not know, is that in 1961 Torrey West and her husband Clifford B. West founded a multidisciplinary residency program called the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP), and in 1970 founded the Genesis Project.

Both residencies ran until 1982 and during that time many of the era’s most important thinkers, writers, architects, artists and scholars spent time on the island. As Elizabeth DuBose, Executive Director of the Ossabaw Island Foundation opines, “The Wests intuitively understood the benefits of bringing a mix of people from myriad disciplines together to inform and inspire each other through creative and intellectual engagement. Outside of their classrooms, libraries, laboratories and studios, OIP and later Genesis members gained new perspectives in the maritime forest, tidal creeks, salt marshes, and boneyard beach of Ossabaw Island.”

And as Beryl Gilothwest writes, “The immersive environment of the island acted as a conduit to fresh ideas and new ways of thinking.”

Dunn and Gilothwest have chosen work by internationally renowned artists who participated in one of the two residency programs, or who have spent time on the island since. They include Harry Bertoia, Betsy Cain, Agnes Denes, Marcy Hermansader, Suzanne Jackson, Jack Leigh, Sally Mann, Ross McElwee, Athena Tacha, Anne Truitt and many others.

The hardbound book that accompanies the show is truly marvelous: deeply researched, thoughtfully written, inclusive of all viewpoints, and beautifully presented with informative essays by each co-curator; images of work and biographies of each OIP and Genesis member the co-curators feature; a conversation between the West’s son Justin West (Beryl Gilothwest’s father) and Al Bradford, a Genesis member and sometime director, and director of OI from 1978-1982; an homage to Sandy West’s “ecofeminist vision” of stewardship rather than ownership by environmental journalist Megan Mayhew Bergman; an account of the indigenous and enslaved inhabitants of the island by MOMA curator and writer Thomas Jean Lax; and the story of Cyrus Martin, a Gullah Geechee man who worked on Ossabaw for most of his 94 years as told by Vaugnette Goode-Walker, director of the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum.

Dunn says the show features 65 works by 32 artists: “It couldn’t be an artist who just went to Ossabaw; It had to be an artist who then made work inspired by their time there, whose practice was somehow impacted.”

The resulting selections are divided into three main sections.

“The first section is ‘the catalyst’ which is a term that Sandy [West] used for how people came to the island and experienced change. We have seven artists that we consider having been catalyzed by the island.”

For example, mid-century master Harry Bertoia was inspired to create an entirely new method of molding bronze that he dubbed “spill casting” for his commission at Dulles International Airport, and examples are included.

“The second section is called ‘the terrain’ and that is artists who are approaching the landscape in a new way. For example, Betsy Cain is in that section, and we have two of her drawings created en plein air on the island, which is not her usual practice. And the third section is called ‘the paradox’ and that’s speaking to the fact that even though this is a place that a lot of people may consider a paradise, it also has a violent history. How are artists addressing that through their work? Suzanne Jackson [an internationally acclaimed Savannah-based visual artist honored with a retrospective of her five-decade career at the Jepson in 2019] is in this section, as is Roshod Taylor, a Black photographer who uses a 19th-century tintype or wet plate technique to give the landscape a kind of weighted memory of that history of enslavement.”

Additionally, Dunn relates how “Beryl and I knew that we wanted the show to have some of-the-moment work” and through Beryl’s connections at the VIA Art Fund in New York, Telfair Museums commissioned a major new video work from artist Allison Janae Hamilton.

Hamilton, who holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, writes, “My film Venus of Ossabaw [primarily filmed on the island in November 2025] unfolds directly from my larger trajectory as an artist. A wilderness narrative set in the late 18th century, the film follows a teenage girl named Venus who escapes captivity on Ossabaw and journeys through the treacherous terrain of South Georgia toward St. Augustine in Spanish East Florida. Her story draws inspiration from historical accounts of Maroons and freedom seekers who fled the Sea Islands in pursuit of liberation.”

The video plays continuously in the Kane Gallery, and excitingly, the Telfair Contemporaries supporter group sponsors a public projection of the film on the museum’s façade each night from March 13 through June 21.

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the exciting work being spearheaded by local nonprofit Arts Southeast in facilitating the return of an artist residency to Ossabaw Island in the fall of this year. Nature photographer and jazz musician John Earl was an OIP and a Genesis member who met his second wife, Susan Earl, at the OIP. (Several of John’s images and Susan’s portrait of Cyrus Martin are included in the show.) The Earls’ daughter Emily serves as executive director of Arts Southeast, and she, along with her program director and partner Jon Witzky, West’s grandson Beyrl, artists, former Genesis member Helen Hamada, Ossabaw Foundation board members, and others are helping to birth a momentous full circle moment in the story of the revolutionary and innovative residencies of Ossabaw Island.

Do not miss this landmark show at the Jepson. In Dunn’s words, “We are showing that the context of place - specifically an island off the coast of Savannah - spread across the United States. It’s really an American art history.” It is truly momentous.