ARTS Southeast, an artist residency nonprofit based in Savannah, Georgia, will launch a new residency program on Ossabaw Island, the state’s third-largest barrier island.
The Ossabaw Island Residency will host two week-long sessions, one in fall 2026 and one in spring 2027, with six artists for each session. The fellows will receive a stipend for their participation, as well as have their travel and accommodations to Savannah and to Ossabaw covered. Because of the length of the residency, there is no expectation for production of any kind of work while in residence, with the purpose being on exploring the various parts of the island, which comprises 26,000 acres, nearly 9,000 of which are high ground, and convening for meals and conversation each evening.
“The Ossabaw Island Residency [gives] artists the opportunity to have a unique experience in a magical, remote, wild place,” ARTS Southeast executive director Emily Earl told ARTnews in an interview. “This place is still totally raw for the most part. It’s never been paved over. It has 500-year-old trees. There are alligators, snakes, bugs, donkeys—it’s truly wild.”
She continued, “You get the distinct feeling that you’re at the mercy of nature when you’re out there. It can be an uncomfortable experience for anybody, even if you are an outdoorsy person. But it’s an opportunity to really connect with nature in a way that we just don’t get the opportunity to do anymore. We just want to give artists the space to have that experience— whatever that means for them.”
The first cohort, running October 24–31, includes Jessica Rankin (New York), Le’Andra LeSeur (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Michi Meko (Atlanta), Blanche Nettles Powers (Savannah), Dana W. Richardson (Savannah), and Claire Sherman (New York). The second cohort, who will head to Ossabaw Island from April 27 to May 4, includes Shanequa Gay (Atlanta), Marsalis Eason (Savannah), Sonya Yong James (Atlanta), Dionne Lee (Columbus, Ohio), Beili Liu (Austin, Texas), and Jerome Meadows (Savannah).
The selected artists were invited to apply to the residency program from a pool of around 70 applicants nominated by the residency’s advisory committee. A smaller selection committee also chose the winning fellows, with a focus on assembling a multidisciplinary cohort.
“The hope is to bring together artists working in different ways so that the conversations on the island can move beyond any one medium or discipline,” Earl said. “We want the artists to have room to think broadly—about place, history, ecology, process, and whatever else the island opens up for them.”
The Ossabaw Island Residency is somewhat of a revival of a legendary residency program that ran on the island from 1961 to 1982. Founded by island co-owners Sandy West and Clifford B. West, the Ossabaw Island Project (OIP) hosted artists such as Agnes Denes, Amy Sillman, Anne Truitt, and Harry Bertoia; authors Margaret Atwood, Annie Dillard, and Ralph Ellison; and composer Samuel Barber. (The history of the residency program is currently the subject of an exhibition at Telfair Museums in Savannah.)
“I think people just had a deep experience out there. They’ve never forgotten this place. They had these experiences that changed them forever,” Earl said. “We are taking a lot of inspiration from how Mrs. West did things. She didn’t want to tell anybody what to do or what their experience should be.”
Ossabaw Island also holds a special place in Earl’s own family history. Her parents met on the island as OIP residents in the 1970s. “My mom was from New York, and my dad was from a tiny town in Georgia; the two of them were never going to meet,” she said. “If Mrs. West and Mr. West hadn’t made the decision they made to protect that island and bring all types of creatives there, I probably wouldn’t exist—and I wouldn’t be here to bring people back.”
The West family sold Ossabaw Island to the State of Georgie for $8 million in 1978. Shortly afterward, it was named Georgia’s first Heritage Preserve by US President Jimmy Carter. The Ossabaw Island Foundation, which is partnering with ARTS Southeast on the new Ossabaw Island Residency, was formed in 1994 with the mission to promote “exceptional educational, cultural and scientific resources that are designed to maximize the experience of Ossabaw Island, while minimizing the impact on its resources,” according to its website.
Earl began visiting Ossabaw Island about a decade ago and began to connect with the Ossabaw Island Foundation team. Then, around four years ago, she met Betsy Cain, a local artist who was a friend of Sandy West, and Beryl Gilothwest, a curator who is Sandy West’s grandson. Over the years, there had been growing interest in reviving the residency program on the island, Gilothwest had told her. “It was meaningful that they thought of us and believed in us enough to ask us to take it on,” Earl said.
Earl soon formed a committee that included Gilothwest and Cain to begin formalizing the residency program and to map out what it would look like and which artists would be invited.
In the decades since, the Ossabaw Island Foundation has also facilitated the visits of numerous other artists, including Suzanne Jackson, who has lived in the Savannah since the 1990s when she took up a teaching post at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She had taken one-day trips out to the island before but a 10-day session with other artists left a lasting impact.
“We walked jagged paths. We were guided to interior forests, aged tabby houses and waterway edges. We indulged our pleasures by painting, drawing, writing, music, photography and daydreaming together—sometimes in solitude,” Jackson recalled in an email to ARTnews. “Magic Ossabaw Island is a raw, untamed, mystical, memory-embedded history.”
Her foundation, the Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation, is among the Ossabaw Island Residency’s supporters, funding the fellowship for one artist in each cohort. Alongside the Judith Alexander Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Laney Contemporary, a commercial gallery in Savannah.
ARTS Southeast officially became a nonprofit five years ago, but its history dates back to 2014 as an artist-led space that was set up as an LLC, though “we weren’t super interested in making a profit,” said Earl, who was one of the three founders. “The initial mission and interest was just to give artists space and to create community around art in the South.” That led to the creation, in 2018, of the On:View Residency, which at first focused only on local artists. Since 2022, it has expanded to include international artists for the month-long program. Two years later, ARTS Southeast launched the Incubator Artist Initiative, which supports emerging Savannah-based artists with free studio space for six months to a year. The organization now has 20 studios in Savannah’s Starland District available for both programs.
“I feel like I didn’t really understand the importance of providing space in that way for artists until several years in,” Earl said. “Now, we’re excited to take those residency ideas and bring them to a really beautiful, magical place, a hard-to-get-to but important place [near] Savannah that’s not an urban setting at all.”
