Promiseland, 2020
Aiken-Rhett House
Charleston, South Carolina
About the Work (4-MIN read)
Promiseland is a site-specific installation that transforms the historic Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston, South Carolina, into a landscape of memory, critique, and reflection. Installed along the museum’s guided tour path, each artwork in the exhibition directly responds to the house’s architecture and history, prompting visitors to reconsider the narratives embedded in its walls and grounds.
The exhibition’s core visual motif—the picket fence—appears in sculptural and drawn forms throughout the compound. Reclaimed wooden pickets, often bent, stacked, or contorted, are used to create both literal and metaphorical boundaries. This recurring element establishes a consistent visual language that connects works across the work yard, enslaved quarters, dining room, parlors, piazzas, and bed chambers, each context revealing new layers of meaning.
Work Garden anchors the installation in the central work yard. Constructed from salvaged pickets, rebar, tin roofing, and heart pine, the structure echoes vernacular Lowcountry architecture while occupying the operational heart of the former urban plantation. Surrounded by dried palmetto fronds and reclaimed bricks, Work Garden evolves with the weather, its materials shifting in color and texture over time. The yard itself is enclosed by a brick wall, a reference to the barriers constructed throughout Charleston after the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, evoking histories of surveillance and control. Inside the enslaved quarters, the sculpture Pickets fills a cramped, heat-exposed room above the kitchen. Made from reconfigured pine fence posts painted black, the dense, intertwined forms echo both the structure of a fence and the presence of bodies confined within a restrictive space, offering a visceral reminder of the lived realities of those forced to occupy it.
A pair of paintings, Untitled, are hung back to back between the enslaved quarters and the dining room, creating a powerful visual dialogue. The first painting, visible from the window of the enslaved quarters and facing into the dining room, depicts a closed, impenetrable fence—symbolizing the inaccessibility and division enforced upon the enslaved. The reverse side, seen from within the dining room, shows the same picket fence now opened, signaling freedom of passage and unobstructed visibility for those inside. This installation communicates the sharply contrasting experiences of exclusion and privilege within the house, underscoring both the persistent barriers faced by the enslaved and the ease of movement afforded to the elite. The double parlor features two large, Untitled, figurative drawings in black and white, their clustered vertical marks suggesting bodies leaning together for support. Opposite, En Masse presents a dense field of picket forms, blurring the boundary between architectural structure and collective human presence. These works disrupt the ornate interior, introducing the specter of those excluded from the house’s official narrative.
On the first-floor piazza, a drawing of a loose pile of white pickets on blue, Untitled, interrupts the classic veranda view, suggesting disorder and compressed bodies rather than the usual picturesque landscape. In the bed chambers upstairs, the picket motif shifts into portals: one work, Untitled, forms a diamond-shaped opening, another, Untitled, arranges pickets in a circle as if framing the sky, introducing possibilities of escape or transcendence within spaces of confinement. A highlight of the exhibition, Homegoing (formerly Gift to a Gardener), is installed on the upstairs piazza. This ceremonial sculpture combines salvaged tin roofing, an inverted wooden picket base, and a blanket of thousands of handwoven Charleston palmetto roses. Homegoing transforms the porch into a funerary or commemorative environment, honoring generations of Black Charlestonians whose stories remain largely unrecorded. The palmetto rose, crafted by the artist, references the famous Flower Ladies of Charleston, who once sold wildflowers until the practice was restricted, leading to the symbolic palmetto rose.
Eden, installed in the drawing room, marks a pivotal moment in the exhibition—a large composition of fragmented picket forms on an expansive blue field. Its evocation of paradise or a promised land underscores the unrealized aspirations of the enslaved people of the Aiken-Rhett House. Eden does not conclude the exhibition; rather, it culminates the theme of "ascension to the promised land," a contradictory framework imposed by Williams. After experiencing Eden, visitors descend the main staircase lined with reclaimed white pickets, Untitled. Each picket occupies a step, physically mapping the path enslaved servants would have taken from the Kitchen House to the Servants Hall and on to the Dining Room and other spaces where their labor was required. This installation highlights the literal and symbolic transitions between spaces of servitude and privilege. The descent—a movement to or from the Servants Hall—compels visitors to confront the physical and social routes navigated by those whose labor sustained the house, grounding the exhibition in the realities of movement, separation, and service.
Through these interconnected works, Promiseland transforms the Aiken-Rhett House into a critical space—one that challenges viewers to confront the tangled histories of property, labor, race, and aspiration in the American South. The exhibition’s material choices—salvaged tin, heart pine, palmetto fronds, Spanish moss, historic bricks—deepen its connection to Charleston’s architectural landscape and its layered past. Each artwork acts as both a commemorative gesture and a pointed intervention, threading together themes of exclusion, resilience, and the ongoing negotiation of history.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Co-Curator
Kelly S. Turner
Exhibition Documenation
Rick Rhodes Photograpy
Fletcher Williams III
Fabrication of 2D Displays
Daturm Workshop
Support & Funding
This exhibition is made possible by lead support from a The Dean Collection 20 St(art)ups grant.
South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Expansion Arts Fund of The Coastal Community Foundation of South Carolina and the Lowcountry Arts Grants Program, administered by the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs and the City of North Charleston Cultural Arts Program.
Historic Charleston Foundation and Fletcher Williams expresses appreciation to private donors for their generous financial support of the Aiken-Rhett House Museum and of the Promiseland exhibit and catalog.
Catalog Design
Ballyhooo
Works Exhibited (Works on paper)
Exhibition Catalog
24 (6 x 8 in.) Full Color Plates
Catalog Edition Size - 250
Signed and editioned by Fletcher Williams III
