The Penn Center National Historic Landmark District on South Carolina’s Saint Helena Island debuted “A World Within Worlds: The Visionary Art of Sam Doyle” last September. Highlighting renowned artist Sam Doyle, the exhibition was made possible thanks to a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation.
Awarded to Barbara McCaskill, a UGA professor of English and an associate academic director of the Willson Center, the exhibition was on view at the York W. Bailey Museum of the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District through December 2023. McCaskill has been working on a variety of projects with the Penn Center in recent years, with an aim to highlight Gullah Geechee heritage and culture. Other associated projects have also been funded by the Mellon Foundation.
To curate the Doyle exhibition, McCaskill reached out to Shawnya Harris, Georgia Museum of Art Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson Curator of African American and African Diasporic Art. “I researched objects owned by several area and other institutional collections, as well as the artist’s exhibition history,” said Harris. “But we soon realized there were sufficient works in the Penn Center’s own collection to tell a story about life on the island.” The resulting exhibition helped add context to the artist’s works and the history of the island at large.
The Penn School, later renamed Penn Center, was established as a school for newly freed African American slaves. Many students chose to study fields that would prepare them for jobs that were in high demand at the time, such as a medicine, agriculture or education, but Doyle used the opportunity to study art. Doyle (1906-1985) grew up in St. Helena, and through his art, he chronicled the history and changes on the island—the landscape and culture, the island’s oral storytelling, and people from Jim Crow through the mid-century civil rights era and integration. Doyle’s works are invaluable to understanding the history of the island today.
His works help document the change in access to the island when a new bridge was built, McCaskill noted. There is a very common saying on Saint Helena Island and the surrounding islands. “There is life before the bridge, and life after the bridge.” The island and surrounding islands were secluded before the 1960s when the southern states began to invest in infrastructure, resulting in the building of bridges connecting the mainland to the islands, she said. Many of Doyle’s paintings communicated this and the effect that it had on the slow pace of life on the islands.
Sam Doyle also dedicated several of his paintings to civil rights. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Saint Helena Island many times to work with other members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights organizations who would come to the island in the 1960s because it was isolated from the mainland, therefore their meetings would not be disrupted. Members of the community would protect these civil rights organizations from disturbances and hate crimes. Because of the security provided by the Island and its people, Martin Luther King Jr. was able to begin numerous drafts of his famous’ I Have a Dream’ speech in Saint Helena Island. Sam Doyle chronicled the island’s civil rights efforts in many of his paintings.
As one essay on Doyle’s works noted, the history of the Gullahs as we know it today is, in many ways, a result of his body of work.
Many studies have been made of the Gullahs. It is probably the most scrutinized folk culture of black America. Numerous books, articles, photographic essays, and films document the sea island’s civilization. Certainly one of the most insightful and informative chronicles of Gullah life is the body of paintings produced by Sam Doyle. He felt a responsibility to record what he saw and knew. One week before his death at age seventy-nine, he explained, “These are some things that happen a long time ago. They want me to get the history the first thing. Well, I go from seventy years ago. Get the history of this island or the things that happened when I was a kid. What I paint is history.”
Doyle’s decision to pursue his passion ultimately paid off beyond his historical documentation of the island as well. He became a world-renowned folk artist whose work was exhibited (and continues to be exhibited) in such prestigious art institutions as the Smithsonian, The National Gallery and the High Museum of Art.
To read more about Doyle’s work and contributions, visit: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/artist/sam-doyle
Authored by:
Rachel Dantes-Palmer
