Artist Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green

One of the most important contemporary painters of the American Southern experience.

Jonathan Green was born in Gardens Corner, a rural area along South Carolina’s southern coast. He is the first individual of Gullah ancestry to train at a professional art school. He has created an acclaimed body of work that documents his rural culture, which emerged among West African slaves who lived on the Sea Islands of South Carolina.

After his discharge from the United States Air Force, he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from which he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1982.

With a renewed appreciation for his heritage after his years away from South Carolina, Mr. Green decided to create art that honored the culture in which he grew up. His explorations of Gullah traditions are documentation of the daily rituals of people’s lives in a traditional African American community unmarked by the process of assimilation. He often paints people working

their fields, fishing at the shore, dancing, swimming or going to church. Mr. Green’s paintings are noted for their masterful combination of pattern and abstract color spaces. This is well exemplified in “Pride”, an oil painting he created in which a woman and two girls in striped dresses and ribbons sit in a leafprinted chair on a patterned carpet, all against wallpaper printed with huge roses and leaves.

Mr. Green’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and has been placed in the permanent collections of several museums, including the Morris Museum in Augusta, GA, the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Penn., the Naples Museum of Arts in Naples, FL, the IFCC Cultural Center in Portland, Oregon. In 2005 the Columbia, South Carolina City Ballet presented a new ballet based on Mr. Green’s work, entitled “Off the Wall and Onto the Stage: Dancing the Art of Jonathan Green.” In 1996 Mr. Green received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from the University of South Carolina. He has received numerous awards including the Martin Luther King, Junior Humanitarian Award from the City of Beaufort, South Carolina in 1993; the Clemente C. Pickney Award from the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1997; A History Makers Award in the Fine Arts in 2002; the Order of the Palmetto Award in 2002; the Man of Distinction Award from the Education Foundation of Collier County in 2003 and the Century of Achievement Award from the Museum of the Americas in 2003.