SAVANNAH, GA, Feb. 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — This spring, Telfair Museums presents Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now,the first major exhibition to explore the profound impact of an undeveloped, 26,000-acre barrier island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, on artists working in the United States. Opening on March 13, 2026 and running through September 6, 2026 at The Jepson Center for the Arts at 207 West York St. in Savannah, the exhibition features the work of 32 artists who have considered the island through historical, environmental, social, cultural, and personal lenses over the last 65 years.
The exhibition focuses on the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP) and Genesis—a pair of revolutionary multidisciplinary residency programs that ran on the island from 1961–1982—and their legacies in its examination of Ossabaw as a site for creative experimentation. Taking its name from a poem written by celebrated poet and Genesis member Henri Cole, Off the Coast of Paradise features the work of Harry Bertoia, Agnes Denes, Marcy Hermansader, Suzanne Jackson, Ellen Lanyon, Doris Lee, Jack Leigh, Sally Mann, Michael Mazur, Ross McElwee, Athena Tacha, Betty Tompkins, and Anne Truitt, among many others, as well as a major new commission by Allison Janae Hamilton.
“While the Ossabaw Island Project was operating at the level of such legendary residencies as Yaddo and MacDowell by the end of its twenty-one-year run, it remains little known today,” said curators Erin Dunn and Beryl Gilothwest. “Off the Coast of Paradise aims to bring this important history to the fore, not only revealing how Ossabaw has been a sanctuary for artists, but also how it has profoundly influenced them.”
Spanning painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, film, and textiles, among other media, the works in Off the Coast of Paradise are drawn from public and private collections around the United States. The exhibition traces how a diverse range of American artists have grappled with nature, identity, environmentalism, spirituality, and race in the context of Ossabaw’s unique natural and cultural histories. The show also considers how the residency programs that ran on the island from the early 1960s to the early 1980s facilitated the production of work that is both deeply specific to Ossabaw and resonant on an international stage.
Telfair has commissioned Allison Janae Hamilton to create a new film specifically for the exhibition that will be screened nightly on the façade of Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center. 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.
Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now 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 Calder Foundation, New York.
About Telfair Museums
Opening in 1886, Telfair Museums is the oldest public art museum in the South and the first U.S. museum founded by a woman. The museum features a world-class art collection in the heart of Savannah’s National Historic Landmark District and encompasses three sites: the Jepson Center for the Arts, the Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, and the Telfair Academy. For more information on Telfair Museums, please visit www.telfair.org.
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For more information, please contact Lesley Francis at [email protected], Genelle Williams at [email protected], or the LFPR team at 912-417-LFPR (5377).
- Marcy Hermansader (b. 1951); Secrets of the Heart