Exhibition: Children of Indigo by Caroline Gutman

The City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs presents two photography exhibitions that examine personal and cultural histories of the Lowcountry. Calling Me Home: A Visual Ode to the Low-Country by Marcus Middleton and Children of Indigo by Caroline Gutman will be exhibited at City Gallery December 13, 2024, through February 9, 2025. Children of Indigo is a documentary project that explores the plant’s painful history in South Carolina and spotlights women in the Lowcountry today who have revived indigo cultivation and dyeing, building a flourishing community of textile artists and homesteaders. Calling Me Home: A Visual Ode to the Low-Country is a tribute to Wadmalaw Island and its environs.

In Children of Indigo, Caroline Gutman (b. 1987) explores how the commodity and its dye fueled slavery in the American colonies. Her body of work shows the remaining historical sites in contrast with contemporary textile artists and farmers confronting indigo’s difficult past and reclaiming it. Like cotton, indigo carries inseparable links to centuries of American chattel slavery. Today, women in the Lowcountry have revived indigo cultivation and dyeing, building diverse communities of textile artists and farmers. “Indigo is the voice of our ancestors,” textile artist Arianne King Comer has said. National presentation of the Children of Indigo project, exhibition, artist tour, and panel discussion has been supported by the Pulitzer Center.