» Brittney Ferrette Washington Presents: Saltwater Lineages

Brittney Ferrette Washington (b.1987) brings Saltwater Lineages to the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.

Saltwater Lineages is an intergenerational, diasporic offering that situates Gullah Geechee culture not as a relic of the past, but as a living, adaptive force moving toward the future. At its center, Light Everlasting (named after her great-grandmother’s word for the flowering herb featured in the painting) operates as an Afrofuturist invocation—placing Gullah life firmly in the present tense while imagining what endures, evolves, and becomes.

Surrounding this vision are portraits of Septima P. Clark and Millicent Brown, towering figures in Lowcountry civil rights history whose legacies of education, resistance, and cultural stewardship shape the ground we stand on. Photographic portraits extend the lineage outward, honoring Gullah Geechee descendants alongside members of the broader Afro-Caribbean diaspora, tracing shared histories of water, movement, and survival across the Atlantic world. A drawing of a young Black man flashing his grill brings the lineage fully into now—claiming style, joy, and self-fashioning as acts of
presence and power.

Presented at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, this exhibition is held within a living archive—one that understands history as ever-present and flowing. Avery serves as an aligned host and steward for this work: a site where past, present, and future remain in conversation, and where Black life is honored as sovereign, self-determined, and sacred.

This show will be on view for the Winter and Spring season.