Haint Blue

It is with great pleasure that we announce the upcoming exhibition, “Haint Blue”, which will take place February 6 – March 1, 2025 at the New York Artists Equity Gallery (NYAE), located at 245 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002. With an Opening Reception on Thursday, Feb 6, 2025 from 6-8pm

Curated by Michael Gormley, Executive Director of NYAE, and Ulysses Williams, Executive Director of ArtCrawl Harlem, “Haint Blue” aims to explore the interplay between color, culture, and emotion through contemporary art. 

To get through February we imagine sitting on a shady porch in Birmingham with a blue ceiling and matching shutters, sipping mint tea and breathing in the smell of freshly cut grass.   In the Southern United States, the pale blue-green paint adorning old houses is called Haint Blue.   The tradition originated with the Gullah, an African American subgroup who painted their homes with the blue pigments derived from crushed indigo plants--the latter a common plantation cash crop.   

The word haint is an alternative spelling of haunt and the Gullah believed that haint blue warded off haints, or ghosts, by tricking them into thinking that the painted surface was sky and could be passed through; alternatively, the color mimicked the appearance of water, which ghosts cannot cross.  Not all Gullah believed in the protective powers of haint blue; yet the dependence upon the labor of enslaved Africans for the cultivation of indigo foregrounds the color as an important cultural signifier representing the 18th century transatlantic slave trade. 

Curators Gormley and Williams have assembled a cohort of artists that either directly employ,  or reference, indigo dye in their respective studio practices and hence collectively announce a radical reclamation of a severed ancestral culture and an accompanying recognition of the ascendant power of enchantment as an alchemical flash point illuminating cultural identity and societal change.  

Participating artists include Sandy Clafford, Aaron Cobbert, Francks F. Deceus, Yvette Lamar-Rogers, Fitgi Saint Louis, and Jaleeca Yancey.