I first learned of Ossabaw Island from Musa Mayer’s Night Studio (1988), a memoir of her life as Philip Guston’s daughter. At the time I was writing a short story about Guston and had grown fixated on his wife, Musa McKim, who’d given up painting for poetry. McKim’s time at Ossabaw in 1974 was one of the few occasions when she left his side, for a two-week residency to work on a manuscript. It offered a moment of revelation, or at least reversal. A letter Guston sent to McKim during her “vacation” is obsessive, spiraling, as if the magnetic center of his life had been temporarily removed: “Every minute my thoughts are with you—seeing you picked up at the DeSoto Hotel—by whom? Going to the Island—how?” he writes. “If only I knew—had seen Ossabaw—I would feel a little better—but as it is, I feel so lost, so alone without you.”

Ossabaw is a 26,000-acre heart-shaped barrier island off the coast of Georgia—a patchwork landscape of salt marshes and maritime forests, tidal creeks and interdune meadows, feral hogs and plovers, lofty cabbage palms and live oaks hung with portieres of Spanish moss. Its name, AW-suh-bah, from the Muscogee word for land of holly, is unhurried and airy, yet somehow also imbued with gravitas, more lavish than those of the other barrier islands: Cumberland, Sapelo. The Sea Islands, a three-hundred-mile archipelago that hugs the Eastern seaboard from South Carolina to Florida, have a long history of colonization, from the displacement of the Indigenous Guale and Mocama peoples by Spanish settlers in the sixteenth century to the British seizure of the territory around two hundred years later. The latter introduced a plantation economy centered on the cultivation of cotton, rice, and indigo, which required the labor of enslaved Africans; their appearance on Ossabaw was first recorded in 1763.

Following the Civil War, several freedmen were given tracts of land under Special Field Order No. 15—which Andrew Johnson soon overturned. Black sharecroppers continued to farm the island until a succession of violent hurricanes at the end of the nineteenth century caused many to flee. Several decades later, in 1924, the Torrey family, heir to the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company and Wyandotte Chemicals Corporation fortunes, purchased the property after a catastrophic fire destroyed their storied Savannah plantation Greenwich Place, which allegedly rivaled the opulence of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1960–Now—a marvelous exhibition at the Jepson Center at Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia—celebrates the island’s lasting, understudied imprint on American cultural history. Curated by Erin Dunn and Beryl Gilothwest, it presents a survey of more than thirty artists who participated in multidisciplinary retreats on Ossabaw, primarily in a pair of programs that ran from 1961 until 1982. Known as the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP) and Genesis, they had distinct yet complementary aims. The preservationist Eleanor “Sandy” Torrey West, the projects’ elegant patrician benefactor, founded OIP in 1961 with her second husband, Clifford Bateman West, a painter and educator, to provide time and space for established practitioners. They were given handsome accommodations in the Main House, a 20,000-square-foot pastel-pink Spanish Colonial Revival estate with fifteen bedrooms, or in its fairly plush auxiliary buildings. Genesis—OIP’s scrappier younger sibling, founded by the Wests nearly a decade later—had a more rough-and-tumble, DIY ethos, inviting early-career artists and graduate students to pursue a cooperative living model among the humble cabins of Middle Place Plantation, a former lumber camp without running water or electricity; each participant was responsible for five hours of chores and one meal per week. Ticks, chiggers, and bloodsucking conenoses were constant threats.

Ossabaw’s ventures often draw comparisons with fabled residencies in the northeast like Yaddo or MacDowell, but they were far more heterogeneous from the start. A list of visitors to Ossabaw reads like a Who’s Who of twentieth-century American cultural history, from writers like Ralph Ellison, Margaret Atwood, Annie Dillard, and Henri Cole to artists, composers, and architects including Sally Mann, Amy Sillman, Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Ellen Lanyon, Betty Tompkins, Arnold Blanch, and Doris Lee. But they also hosted scientists, historians, literary theorists, naturalists, religious leaders, philosophers, businesspeople, and anthropologists, including the linguist Roman Jakobson and Eugene Odum, remembered today as the “father of ecology.”

Many of the most celebrated cultural exports from OIP and Genesis—including Harry Bertoia’s bronze spill-casting technique, which culminated in his monumental Dulles International Airport commission, and  Olive Ann Burns’s novel Cold Sassy Tree (1984)—are the direct or oblique results of conversations among individuals from different disciplines. Bertoia drew inspiration for his method, which involves heavily manipulating the surface of molten bronze, from “the constant battle of the elements” he witnessed on Ossabaw’s sand flats, as well as conversations with the biologist Colin Pittendrigh. Burns, who had worked primarily as a journalist, claims she never would have finished her manuscript without the encouragement of the literary theorist Menakhem Perry, a fellow OIP member, during her stay on the island.

Sandy West inherited the island from her parents in 1958 and soon felt a duty to share the place with artists and thinkers who might commune with and translate its unspoiled mystery. It was partially Sandy’s irrepressible belief in Ossabaw’s spiritual significance that convinced then-Governor Jimmy Carter, after a two-day visit in 1972, to sign the State of Georgia’s Heritage Preserve Act into law several years later. With his encouragement, she sold the island to the state in 1978 for half its estimated value of $16 million, forgoing private offers (including a substantial bid from Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis) to ensure that it would be sanctified as Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve. Unlike Hilton Head, a nearby barrier island now considered the “Hamptons of the South,” Ossabaw remains almost entirely pristine and undeveloped, per Sandy’s wishes.

Today a vocabulary of enchantment still hangs over the island, mostly furnished by Sandy West, who called it “a tremendous catalyst” for creative experimentation and intellectual cross-pollination. Clifford West was similarly adamant that Ossabaw offer uninterrupted time and space for people who seemed patient, and perhaps suggestible, enough to thrive in the island’s resplendent seclusion. (Gilothwest, who currently serves as deputy director of research and exhibitions at the Calder Foundation, is the Wests’ grandson.) Both maintained a strong belief that creativity required freedom and inefficiency, and that these gifts should be given without any pressure to produce. Their goal was simple—to “get the right kind of people and then leave them completely alone”—and they understood that a direct encounter with the island would not necessarily yield immediate results. “You could come here and seem to be doing nothing at all,” Sandy once told a journalist, “but that’s when your imagination is really going into high gear.” This quiet faith in the pleasurable but fickle processes of creation was a principle from which the Wests never strayed.

Those who experienced Ossabaw in that era often speak of its sublimity and grandeur in superlatives that sound effusive to the point of panegyric, as if it were a land outside time. Miriam Schapiro wrote that Ossabaw was “nature at her romantic best”; press clippings refer to the island’s “wild beauty.” Yet residencies were hardly a holiday. “Ossabaw is not for everyone,” wrote the painter Jean Zaleski, “certainly not for the timid.” And if “this air supports miracles,” as the poet Carol Burdick wrote, it also bore extreme elemental volatility. Many visitors acknowledged the quasi-erotic thrill of nature’s indiscriminate rages: punishing storms overhead, venomous cottonmouths underfoot. Isolation from modern life meant that amenities such as hospitals and shops were not readily accessible. Signs on closet doors in the Main House read: “TIDES – SNAKES – GETTING LOST are ever present dangers. THIS IS IMPORTANT.”

Ascending the light-dappled stairs in the Jepson’s atrium, designed by Moshe Safdie, visitors to Off the Coast of Paradise confront a video montage that serves, in equal measure, as incantation and evocation: egrets scattered like specks of tow in a stretch of maritime forest; windtracked coastline flocked with sculptural driftwood; plain-faced tabby houses, charming and squat, set in a modest row. Inside, the exhibition opens with Marcy Hermansader’s Secrets of the Heart (1983), a magnetic, darkly brooding mixed-media arrangement of nested images that serve as portals into Ossabaw’s hidden depths.

Framed in a proscenium of clawlike branches is a primal scene of creation, a mesmerizing, whorling pastiche of the artist’s memories of a terrain that left a deep mark on her practice. Tantalizing forms emerge from the void: gently undulating ridges or waves recall early modern mappamundi; weeping-willow motifs quote early American mourning pictures. Slashes in the picture plane reveal miry substrates, while strips of mosquito netting (cast as Spanish moss) are spangled in ghostly swathes and embellished with embroidery—a textured surface to rival the island’s often treacherous topography. “Being on Ossabaw was for me like being at the center of all creation,” Hermansader has said. “It was a place where life was so abundant and varied it was like a living textbook of ecological connections.”

One of the most remarkable images in the exhibition is also one of its humblest: Anne Truitt’s Ossabaw Island, 25 March ’75, a spare abstract drawing of two graphite points with vectors radiating from their centers, washed in fine white acrylic to suggest the divine spark of creation, seeds from which the cosmos might unfold. Fiat lux! (March 25 is also the Feast of the Annunciation.) Enclosed in a vitrine nearby is a first edition of Truitt’s memoir, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, which she initially conceived as a work of serious literature while staying on Ossabaw in 1975. Something about the island’s rhythms clarified her belief that these habitual diary entries, started the previous year after her furious preparations for two major career retrospectives, might take the shape of a proper text. Published by Pantheon in 1982, it has remained in print ever since, one of the most enduringly popular and beloved artist journals of the twentieth century.

Mythologies of place are always, in some way, about the search for origins—and the exhibition makes much of the notion that Ossabaw was a primordial stage for the drama of humanity’s entanglement with the natural world. A suggestive divot on the shoreline captured in Agnes Denes’s photograph Life Beneath the Surface (1981) recalls a kind of cosmic navel; Leslie Ferst’s vertical glazed clay sculpture The Circumnavigation (1983) evokes an omphalos. The Michigan-born artist Thomas Marker, who served as OIP’s first executive director and was known as the island’s “chief magician,” is represented by two of his drawings from the program’s first year, including Things on Ossabaw (1961): a fanciful yet spare arrangement of amphibians and insects somewhere between loose-leaf doodle and scientific illustration.

Ossabaw stands for the forest primeval in a selection of powerful, large-scale tableaux from Michael Mazur, which convey a sense of womblike enclosure under an intricately scaffolded canopy or within a dense thicket of palmetto leaves. Commissioned by the United States Department of the Interior to represent “the remains of American wilderness,” Mazur’s photorealistic pastels are monumental in scale, nearly immersive, executed with a bravura that might feel suffocating if it weren’t so obsessively finessed. (They contrast satisfyingly with Betsy Cain’s loose, spectral rendering, in oil and Yupo paper, of the endangered longleaf pine.) A suite of Jack Leigh’s striking black-and-white photographs shifts the focus from overall environments to individual specimens: a majestic live oak pierced with shafts of light; a solitary tree at sunset, captivatingly bare and coralline; a palm bent over a fog-enshrouded shore, reaching toward the horizon like an outstretched limb.

The intrepid spirit of Genesis is best channeled in the photography of Helen Hamada and Nancy Marshall. Hamada’s droll self-portraits depict the artist, often nude, seeming to meld with the landscape: barnacled to a tree trunk, face down in the tide. Her group portrait of Genesis members ranged around a gargantuan piece of driftwood is Ossabaw’s unofficial album cover, a distillation of the community’s maverick sensibility. Marshall’s images take a more straightforward approach, presenting subtle yet highly evocative scenes from the treehouse and cookshack alongside a magnificent palladium print that succinctly relays the island’s untainted, prehistoric spirit: a stand of towering palms reflected in a pool of golden water. Irene O’Garden’s macabre ink drawings, entitled Easter Sunday (1981), impart the intensity of island life with sly wit. The series depicts particular moments from the process of raising, slaughtering, and preparing an Easter turkey, with each vignette captioned in girlish cursive: “this drawing was made with a quill from this turkey.”

By 1982 the Wests’ funds were almost entirely depleted, and the programs shut down. While guests continued to visit Ossabaw for shorter periods on a more ad hoc basis, nothing since has approached the largesse of OIP or even Genesis. Today access to the island’s interior remains strictly limited, though entry is permitted by appointment via chartered boat for educational or research purposes. Until her death in 2021, on her 108th birthday, Sandy West waged battle with the State of Georgia whenever they flirted with plans for development or public recreation. “I fought. And I won,” she told a journalist, at the age of ninety-eight, explaining how she managed to keep the island nearly untouched for decades. “Unbelievable. An old crock like me.” Private donations, including from Sandra Bullock, have helped restore various buildings; most recently the Main House and several neighboring structures have been refurbished. Now the newly established Ossabaw Island Residency (a project of the nonprofit ARTS Southeast) prepares to host a fresh cohort of artists, inviting six in the fall and another six in the spring.

Two video works conclude the exhibition. One is an excerpt from Ross McElwee’s landmark documentary Sherman’s March (1985), which focuses, in part, on the filmmaker’s budding romance with Genesis’s codirector Wini Wood, a graduate student in linguistics who expounds charmingly on referential opacity while kneading bread in the cookshack. (She also delivers the classic line, “For a very long time I believed that the only important things in life were linguistics and sex.”) Their relationship blooms and later unravels over hours of languid talk and labor, a delicate flower in the program’s hothouse laboratory that cannot contend with the outside world—or the distressing encroachment, following McElwee’s two-month absence, of Michael the geologist, Wood’s codirector and another suitor.

Allison Janae Hamilton’s short film Venus of Ossabaw (2026), commissioned by Telfair Museums, makes its debut in the galleries, with excerpts projected on the Jepson’s facade for a portion of the exhibition’s run. By turns lyric and feral, the film tracks a young woman’s flight from captivity on an Ossabaw plantation to a life of marronage, tracing her course down the coast of Georgia and into Spanish East Florida—a harsh, unpredictable environment that Hamilton views as both “hostile territory and potential sanctuary.” After encountering a crew of Spanish representatives of the Catholic Church, Venus must decide whether to convert in Saint Augustine and receive conditional manumission through spiritual submission, or to continue into the wilderness, self-possessed and unbroken, proud member of a fugitive tribe.

Hamilton is among a number of artists and academics who, in recent decades, have shed additional light on the Black presence in the Lowcountry. Suzanne Jackson visited the island in 2010 during a brief period when the Ossabaw Island Foundation hosted artists in exchange for artworks that could be sold at its annual fundraiser. Her exuberant and highly expressive watercolors, which often explore the symbolism and ancestral significance of trees, provide a vibrant rejoinder to the sobriety of much traditional Southern landscape painting. Rashod Taylor’s crepuscular tintypes achieve a pleasing thickness of atmosphere, heavy with mood and shadow, while Tyrone Mitchell’s Buzzard Vine (1983) is a wry surrealist object that extracts a visual riddle from the island, presenting a length of braided, varnished vine to mark the moment from his stay when a buzzard defecated on his head.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog with insightful contributions from, among others, the writer and curator Thomas Lax—who considers the aesthetic influence of the barrier islands and Gullah Geechee culture on artists like Jackson, Beverly Buchanan, Cameron Rowland, and Julie Dash—and Wini Wood, the young linguist of Sherman’s March. (She did, in fact, marry Michael.) This polyphonic approach further underscores the variety of connections that Sandy promoted on Ossabaw between humans and the natural world, and among practitioners across disciplines—a distinctly nonhierarchical mode of engagement that the writer Megan Mayhew Bergman astutely describes as “ecofeminist” avant la lettre.

What is Ossabaw’s legacy today? The Wests’ relationship to the island stands in stark contrast to the reigning economic paradigm in the US, which fetishizes efficiency at all costs and treats the earth as an endlessly plunderable resource for capital accumulation. But the Wests always privileged the magical over the practical. “Could it have all been done smarter? Probably,” the Wests’ son later reflected on the family’s financial struggles. “Could it have been done better? I don’t think so.”

The story of Ossabaw is a kind of miracle: a proudly eccentric heiress with haughty disdain for convention lavishes her fortune on the leading thinkers and makers of her time, splurging on their freedom so they can accomplish extraordinary feats of imagination. If the results of the Wests’ noblesse oblige are impossible to measure, it might be because their reward is beyond remuneration. One of the exhibition’s coups is to give concrete form to the many ways that a direct experience of wilderness can influence artistic and intellectual endeavor. “All I wanted to do is give people a place that had no demands on them,” Sandy once said. “I didn’t care what they did here. I cared what the island did to them.”