Jonathan Green paints scenes that look, at first pass, like celebrations — bright fabric, wide hats, women gathered in clearings. The Cameron Art Museum's Rooted in Memory exhibition, on view through January 24 in Wilmington, North Carolina, makes the case that this first impression is a trap. Curator Ben Billingsley's organizing insight is that Green's work is 'deceptively simple,' and the show is built to slow you down until you see the hundreds of brushstrokes per square inch and the choices buried inside them. The exhibition draws from a private collection amassed over three generations by an anonymous donor family, supplemented by loans from the South Carolina State Museum, the Gibbes Museum, and the Charleston Museum. Billingsley uses the multi-generational collection itself as a curatorial object — showing how taste, commitment, and cultural stewardship compound over decades. Green, born in Gardens Corner, South Carolina, and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, works squarely within Gullah Geechee visual tradition. His women are frequently turned away or hatted, their faces obscured. Billingsley reads this not as evasion but as a deliberate universalizing move — faces hidden enough that the viewer projects their own grandmother, their own neighbor, into the frame. It creates what he calls 'an interesting tension' between intimacy and anonymity. The show's strongest thread connects Green's contemporary paintings to traditional Gullah Geechee craft: sweetgrass baskets, quilts, dolls. This is not mere context-setting. It argues that Green's art lives inside a continuum of making — that the paintings and the baskets share root logic even when their materials diverge. Four watercolors stand apart from the rest. Commissioned as costume designs for a Sapelo festival production of Porgy and Bess, they pose a counterfactual: what if West African textile traditions had arrived through willing immigration rather than forced labor? It is Green's most explicit speculative gesture, and it reframes the entire exhibition retroactively — every other painting becomes a record of what survived despite the Middle Passage, not merely a depiction of rural life. Billingsley's favorite piece, Time to Rejoice (2005), anchors the show. Nine women in vivid contemporary clothing gather around a tenth who dances with arms wide, hat lifting off her head, eyes closed. The blue chains and modern fabric place the scene firmly in the present. The composition echoes Baby Suggs's clearing in Toni Morrison's Beloved — 'In this here place, we flesh' — and that echo is load-bearing. Green isn't illustrating Morrison; he's making the same argument in paint: that the body, celebrated in community, is a site of resistance. The exhibition doesn't try to be comprehensive. It's a focused, personal collection given institutional framing, and it works precisely because it doesn't overreach. What it offers is enough time and enough objects to see past the surface warmth into the structural ambition underneath.
