The topic of indigo crops up in the Charleston arts scene as reliably in the rotation of local exhibitions as if it were the very plant that famously produces the blue hue.
In these parts, its centuries-old status is rooted in the 1700s, when plantation manager Eliza Lucas Pinckney first tried her hand with it to launch one of the state’s most valuable commodity crops. These days, textile artists and cultural organizations frequently mount shows and offer workshops to inform and instruct.
Indigo: Variations in Blue, presented by Historic Charleston Foundation at the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, may seem to the casual Charleston culture vulture to be a not too terribly varied variation.
But this immersion in the hue of blue goes deeper and reaches wider, also taking leave of the local to connect with other moments and markers in its 8,000-year worldwide history, one mainly manifest in textiles. From the palest whisper of a tint to inky saturations, from the endless calibrations of indigo’s palette and processes, this sliver on the spectrum flows across time and continents far beyond this city.
Here, a range of those gather in a single and singular spot, the Aiken-Rhett House Museum, coming together from near and far in the august receiving rooms to glean points of commonality and departure. By swath and skein and stain, suspended and prone, mounted and knit, these countless variations on blue layer and grace, thread and weave, transforming the 19th-century, “preserved-as-found” urban plantation that both revisits and renews.
For the exhibition, which runs through June 28, the foundation tapped curator Tushara Bindu Gude, who gathered eight artists to consider this centuries-old dye within the context of the house museum, drawing from their wide-ranging artistic and personal backgrounds.
Five are local, from the Charleston and Southeast region: Arianne King Comer, Hank Herring, Precious Jennings, Monique de La Tour and Jim Martin. The other three — Amina Ahmed, Nyugen E. Smith and Genesis Tramaine — are based in New Jersey and came to town in recent months or years as artists-in-residence at the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts, a nonprofit organization based in Charleston and New York City that highlights artists for whom spirituality is integral to their practice.
Indigo immersion
In the striking state of decay that is the Aiken-Rhett House, indigo in a sense meets its Charleston maker. It was hard not to think of Pinckney in the remnants of a once grand manse built by a similarly elite Charlestonian, as well as the mutually foundational forced labor, its now peeling wallpaper and time-worn patinas underscoring how it is in the dustbin of history.
Anyone darkening its ornate doorway can attest there is a lot going on there – both visually and historically. There’s even more with this exhibition. Starting in the cellar, Nyugen E. Smith’s video projection, produced in collaboration with Jim Martin at Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, features the artist in indigo animating sculptures of crossroads guardians, which originated in central Africa.
Upstairs, Comer’s intricately rendered large-scale batik gently billows on a bamboo stand between lavish gilt mirrors under a vast crystal chandelier. On a nearby mantel, master stamp maker Hank Herring’s trio of ceramic tiles elegantly rests. Spilling down a grand staircase, Precious Jenning’s lush, entangle of wool converses Herring’s conjoined tiles descending down each spiral center with each bearing Ghanan Adinkra symbols that here narrate the journey of the transatlantic slave trade.
Outside, Monique de la Tour’s azure conch shells arranged in a line point to the common work area of the enslaved, and its flanking workhouse and quarter. Beyond, the artist swaddles a massive live oak tree in a calming blue knit, on which visitors have tied shells. The work honors her former partner, the late, great self-dubbed “bluesologist” Gil Scott-Heron.
Inside the former quarters of the enslaved, Genesis Tramaine, an artist who regularly works in words and often with found paper, has placed on a stack of bricks a dyed observation of her foray into this fraught historic place: “No words. Amen.”
Also in the space, Amina Ahmed, who is Muslim and has worked with indigo regularly, considers it as a symbol of transformation. In one room, a banner bears a saying banned in Israel: “Only God is victorious.” A dimly lit tomb centers a room, offering a moment of remembrance and prayer.
Like drops in a vast ocean of blue, Charleston’s engagement with indigo is vital in its own right. Indigo: Variations in Blue drives this home, while offering something more: its infinitesimal, integral place in the great beyond, too.
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