Between North Carolina’s Outer Banks and Jacksonville in northeast Florida, the barrier islands of the southeastern United States coastline stretch more than 500 miles. They are called “barrier” islands because they hug the mainland, providing a critical natural barrier from storms.

The ecosystems there–the saltmarshes and dunes and coastal hammocks and maritime forests–have evolved over thousands of years to provide protection to the land, acting like bumpers on a car against hurricanes, the car crash. That was before the barrier islands became one of the most popular tourist and retirement destinations in the world: OBX, Myrtle Beach, Charleston, and Hilton Head, S.C., Tybee Island and Jekyll Island in Georgia, and Amelia Island and St. Augustine, FL.

Development has scraped much of the barrier islands’ natural habitat clean, replaced by hotels, condos, and second homes.

In addition to tourists and retirees, the barrier islands along the southeastern coast provide habitat for a range of threatened and endangered animals including sea turtles and North Atlantic right whales.

Artists, too, have long been drawn to the solitude and spectacular sunsets found along the barrier islands. The Telfair Museums in Savannah, GA explores for the first time the profound impact an undeveloped, 26,000-acre barrier island 30 miles south of the city–Ossabaw Island–had on artists. “Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now” focuses on the Ossabaw Island Project and Genesis—a pair of revolutionary multidisciplinary residency programs in operation on the island from 1961–1982—and their legacies in establishing Ossabaw as a site for creative experimentation.

“Ossabaw Island had a major impact on American art history and it's a story that hasn't been told,” Erin Dunn, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Telfair Museums and exhibition co-curator, told me via video interview. “What we did was track down artists who had been and made work inspired by their time there, and, in fact, were catalyzed by their time there. Not just making work that reflected the landscape, but changing directions in their career, learning about this landscape, and then pursuing it in different directions. We saw that happen over and over again, and even in notes and journals, reaching out to artists, we would hear about what a transformative experience it was for them.”

The presentation takes its name from a poem written by Genesis member Henri Cole (b. 1956).

Running through September 6, 2026, at The Jepson Center for the Arts, the exhibition features the work of 32 multidisciplinary artists who have considered the Island through historical, environmental, social, cultural, and personal lenses over the last 65 years.

Ossabaw Island

Humans have been living on and visiting Ossabaw Island for roughly 5,000 years. The name “Ossabaw” is believed to be an Anglicized pronunciation of a Creek Indian word referencing the Island’s abundance of Yaupon Holly trees.

Ossabaw Island saw Indigenous residents, settler colonialism, plantation slavery, freedmen, and wealthy northerners. In 1924, two such wealthy northerners, Harry Norton Torrey and Nell Ford Torrey, purchased Ossabaw Island from the Strachan Shipping Company partners that previously owned it.

When the Torrey’s died, the island was passed to their daughter, Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West, and the four children of their late son, William.

Sandy West and her brother’s children conveyed Ossabaw Island to the State of Georgia in 1978. In a landmark act of environmental preservation, West worked with then-Georgia governor Jimmy Carter to establish the Island as the state’s first Heritage Preserve “...to protect, conserve, and preserve the natural and cultural resources of this Island for the benefit of present and future generations.”

The residencies ended after ownership was passed to Georgia.

Remarkably, the exhibition’s co-curator, Beryl Gilothwest, Deputy Director of Research and Exhibitions at Calder Foundation, New York, is the grandson of Sandy West.

Today, the non-profit Ossabaw Island Foundation manages access under the Heritage Preserve’s stipulation that Ossabaw “shall only be used for natural, scientific, and cultural study, research, and education, and environmentally sound preservation, conservation, and management of the Island’s ecosystem.”

Not Only Artists

Artist residencies occur across the world and largely follow the same formula: artists are invited to spend a few weeks in a new location taking inspiration from that location and the other artists and instructors who may also be attending. The Ossabaw Island Project radically diverged from that structure in one important way.

Unlike similar programs tailored exclusively towards artists, the Wests invited intellectuals in the sciences, linguistics, history, mathematics, law, religion, and other disciplines to Ossabaw in addition to painters, photographers, sculptors, writers, musicians, and other artists

“Sandy and (he husband, filmmaker, and muralist) Clifford had a wide network of people they thought would be interested in participating in this,” Dunn explained. “The first advisory group they brought over in June 1961, there was a businessman, there was a lawyer, there was a scientist, there was an artist, and what they saw was these people interacted in ways that pushed their practice more than it would if just artists were talking to artists.

One such example is recalled specifically.

“There was a scientist named Colin Pittendrigh and he was talking to the artist Harry Bertoia (1915-1978), and it made Harry Bertoia think about his work differently,” Dunn continued. “(Sandy West and her husband) saw it in action the very first time they were putting this together, and they realized that's what they wanted to do.”

In 1961, that interaction and the powerful natural forces at play on Ossabaw’s beaches inspired Bertoia to create an entirely new method of molding bronze he dubbed “spill casting” for a major commission at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. He continued using the same technique in a series of standing works over the ensuing years, two of which are featured in “Off the Coast of Paradise.”

West, who passed in 2021 at the age of 108, detailed her idea for a residency integrating artists with professionals from other disciplines to the directors of similar programs and was told flatly that it wouldn’t work, that no artist is going to want to talk to businesspeople. She was resolute and proven correct.

“People know about the bigger artist residencies, but it's important that people know about this one, and the incredible artists who went and made fantastic work about it, and that the American South is just as inspirational for an artist as other places in the world,” Dunn said.

The Ossabaw Island Foundation in partnership with Savannah’s Arts Southeast are returning an artist residency to the Island this fall.

Allison Janae Hamilton

For the exhibition, Telfair commissioned Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984) to create a new film inspired by Ossabaw; the full, 18-minute version plays on a loop in the galleries, while a compressed 4-minute highlight reel screens nightly between 7:30 and 8:30 on the façade of Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center.

“Allison's work is very much focused on the landscape as a protagonist,” Dunn explained. “She is based in New York, but she grew up in Tallahassee, (Florida) and she has a family farm in Tennessee, so the Southern landscape is part of her work. Our initial idea was a short, moving image or film about the Island because we felt it was important to bring the atmosphere of the Island into the exhibition space. That's the one thing that's hard for visitors to understand through individual artworks.”

Ossabaw Island is available to limited public visitation and accessible only by boat.

Drawing on her own experience as a Black Southerner, Hamilton engages with the history of enslavement on Ossabaw through the lens of marronage in Venus of Ossabaw (2026). After her protagonist, Venus, escapes from a plantation on the island and makes her way down Georgia’s coast to Spanish Florida, she faces a choice in terms of her freedom. She can either join the Catholic church in Saint Augustine or remain with the maroons who helped her along the way.

A scantly recognized reality of American history places the country’s first “underground railroad” along the southeastern coast leading into Spanish Florida, not through the upper South leading to the North and then Canada. Remember, Spain colonized what is now Florida between the late 1500s and early 1800s. Its system of slavery varied greatly from British colonial and later American slavery to the north in Georgia. That included allowing for the possibility of manumission following conversion to Catholicism on Spanish soil. Spanish Florida and future freedom lied 100 miles from Ossabaw Island.

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