Allison Janae Hamilton: Venus of Ossabaw 

Production | Acquisition Grant

Allison Janae Hamilton’s newly commissioned film Venus of Ossabaw will be projected on the façade of Telfair’s Jepson Center every evening from 7:30-8:30PM through June 21  as part of the 2026 exhibition Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961-Now. Both Hamilton’s art and film practices have long been defined by a deep connection to and engagement with the landscapes of the American South. Her films are populated by the sights and sounds of nature from Tennessee to North Florida, from which the artist hails. Swampland, Spanish moss, alligators, palm trunks, tall grasses, and wild horses come together to create richly evocative portraits of place. Though Hamilton’s work has often grappled with the historically complex relationship between Black Americans and the Southern lands on which they have lived and worked, in Venus of Ossabaw the artist will explore for the first time the history of marronage—the formation of remote communities by those escaping enslavement. Informed by recent scholarship bringing to light the life of Titus—an enslaved man who fled to the Georgia coast in the late 1700s, forging community with other escapees—Hamilton’s film will follow the titular “Venus” in her journey across Ossabaw, South Georgia, and into northern Florida. Overlaid with an animated storm and filmed in a palette of warm golden amber and deep blue the color of the indigo-dye wash in reference to the local crop, Venus of Ossabaw foregrounds the natural environment that was home and refuge to these maroon communities.

Emphasizing the film’s primacy to the exhibition, it will be projected every evening on the exterior of the museum building, transposing the coastal landscape into the environs of downtown Savannah for all to see, inviting them back in time to experience Ossabaw through Venus’s eyes.