For the 20th year of the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Lecture, Telfair presents a screening of Venus of Ossabaw followed by a conversation with artist and filmmaker Allison Janae Hamilton, who is represented by a work in the exhibition Off the Coast of Paradise: Artists and Ossabaw Island, 1961–Now. Hamilton is a New York-based visual artist working in sculpture, installation, photography, and film. She was born in Kentucky, raised in Florida, and her maternal family’s farm and homestead lies in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee. Hamilton’s relationship with these locations forms the cornerstone of her artwork, particularly her interest in landscape. Using plant matter, layered imagery, complex sounds, and animal remains, Hamilton creates immersive spaces that consider the ways that the American landscape contributes to our ideas of “Americana” and social relationships to space in the face of a changing climate, particularly within the rural American South. Hamilton’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad and is held in numerous private and public collections. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton received her PhD in American Studies from New York University and her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.

Image: Allison Janae Hamilton on Pine Barren Road, Ossabaw Island, September 2025. Photograph by Jade Takes Pictures.