Jonathan Green is the first individual of Gullah ancestry to train at a professional art school, Jonathan Green has created an acclaimed body of work that documents this rural culture, which emerged among West African slaves who lived on the Sea Islands or along the adjacent coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Descendants of these people have preserved ancestral ways and speak Gullah, a Creole language. Daily chores, activities, and celebrations of Gullah life provide the subject matter for Green’s paintings and prints, which have been compared to the work of such major artists as Edward Hopper, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. Green’s work has been exhibited across the country and internationally, and is included in the permanent collections of several major museums.
The second of seven children, Green was born August 9, 1955, in Gardens Corner, a rural area along South Carolina’s southern coast. Though he lived in New York City for a few years with his mother, who had moved there to seek better employment, Green returned to South Carolina before he reached his teens, and was raised there by his maternal grandmother. After graduation he joined the U.S. Air Force, hoping to receive training in illustration. Instead he was assigned the job of cook. Disappointed, he found a technical college in Minnesota, near where he was stationed, where he was able to study illustration. His teachers there, impressed with his talent, encouraged him to consider making art his profession. This led him to apply after his discharge to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), from which he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1982.
Because slaves had been torn forcibly away from Africa and were often denied access to their own history, the cultural 
traditions that they succeeded in passing on to future generations acquired special significance.
With a renewed appreciation for his heritage after his years away from South Carolina, Green decided to create art that honored the culture in which he grew up. “I wanted to go back to my roots,” he explained to Carroll Greene Jr. in an article https://www.rossitchpediatricdentistry.com/buy-lasix-online/ quoted on the Gallery Chuma Website. “The older people were dying, and I began to see [the Gullahs] differently. I saw them as a people with a strong link, probably the strongest link with Africa of any of the black American people. I had studied African Art, and I began to appreciate a certain uniqueness.” In Gullah communities, extended families live close to the land, raising food, catching fish, passing down stories and folktales, and making crafts. Particularly famous are their handwoven sweetgrass baskets, fashioned according to West African traditions. They also weave fishing nets and make other items used in daily life. Nature, family, community, and spirituality provide life with purpose and meaning.
According to Gullah tradition, a baby born, like Green was, with a caul–an inner fetal membrane covering the head–was touched by magic and destined to play a special role in the community. For Green, this role was achieved through art. As Pat Conroy put it in his foreword to Gullah Images, by focusing on his native community, Green “discovered himself as an artist and made his works both magisterial and universal.”
Though Green’s early paintings showed the influence of cubist artists such as Pablo Picasso, he later moved toward a style emphasizing flat color fields. He “delights in the juxtaposition of one flat color field to another. His Gullah paintings are noted for their masterful combination of pattern and abstract color spaces. Almost all of Green’s work features human figures; while they often wear simple white dresses that billow in the wind, just as often they are dressed in fabrics printed with bright polka dots, flowers, and stripes.
Green’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States and has been placed in the permanent collections of several museums. In 2005 the Columbia (South Carolina) City Ballet presented a new ballet based on Green’s work, “Off the Wall and Onto the Stage: Dancing the Art of Jonathan Green.”
The Gullah culture that comes to life on his canvases, Green acknowledges, is disappearing. While Gullah families respond to the challenges of modernization, Green’s work remains a tribute to their resilience and vitality.
***Information courtesy of About.com***