Root and remember — the African American Lowcountry, painted with reverence.
The Root & Remember Gullah Geechee folk art collection is a body of original paintings by Robert Lawrence honoring the Gullah Geechee people of the South Carolina and Georgia coastal Lowcountry. The series is reproduced as museum-grade giclée canvas prints and made available through Melanin Art for collectors who want this corner of African American heritage on their walls.
Each piece in the series captures something specific to Gullah Geechee material and spiritual culture — the sweetgrass baskets coiled by hand on porches in Mt. Pleasant, the indigo vats that once stained the sea-island earth blue, the praise houses where shouts and ring spirituals carried across the marsh, the oyster harvests at low tide.
The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of West and Central Africans who were enslaved on the rice, indigo, and sea-island cotton plantations of the coastal Lowcountry — a region stretching from southern North Carolina down through South Carolina, Georgia, and into northern Florida. Geographic isolation on the Sea Islands, combined with the brutal demands of rice cultivation that kept enslavers off the land for much of the year, allowed the enslaved community to retain more of its African linguistic, spiritual, and material culture than almost any other African American community in the country.
That retention produced a distinct Creole language (Gullah, sometimes called Geechee), a distinct foodway (rice-based, with West African roots running through every staple), and a distinct visual culture — coiled sweetgrass baskets descended from West African rice-fanner baskets, indigo-dyed textiles, ironwork, story quilts. In 2006 Congress designated the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, formally recognizing the community's contribution to American history.
To paint the Gullah Geechee is to paint a living thread that runs from West Africa, through the holds of slave ships, across the rice fields, through the praise houses, and out into the present day.
The Gullah Geechee Lowcountry is one of the most spiritually and culturally significant regions in African American history, and one of the most under-represented in mainstream art and home decor. You can walk into a hundred home goods stores and find a thousand pieces of generic "boho" or "coastal" wall art that flatten this specific, rooted, irreplaceable culture into a style trend.
The Root & Remember collection refuses that flattening. Each piece names what it is — sweetgrass, praise house, indigo, marsh — and paints it with the reverence due to a tradition that survived the Middle Passage and built something extraordinary on the other side.
The full Gullah Geechee Lowcountry folk art collection is available at melaninart.com/collections/root-remember-gullah-geechee-folk-art. Each piece is offered as stretched canvas, framed canvas (Black, Gold, Silver, or Walnut), or rolled canvas print, made-to-order in the USA.