The Lowcountry Rice Culture Project - Jonathan Green
SCOUTED || Noted art critics and reviewers consider Jonathan Green one of the most important painters of the southern experience. His work, which has been exhibited in major venues nationally and internationally, reflects an intrinsic sense of history and place. Jonathan Green is founder of the non-profit, The Lowcountry Rice Culture Project and his latest initiative - The Women's Economic Empowerment - embodies his passion for art and the community of Charleston. This represents a significant collaboration for Jonathan Green with the local community on the Lowcountry Lunchbox purses that are handcrafted to benefit this initiative.
The Jonathan Green Lowcountry Lunch Box Purses are constructed to represent many symbolic meanings of items, symbols, colors, shapes, and natural elements found in the Lowcountry and as a result of the residuals of Lowcountry Rice Plantation life and culture. Many of these representations can be traced back to Africa and the Enslaved African people brought to labor on these Lowcountry Rice Plantations.
Excerpt from ‘The Historical Meaning & Symbolism of the Jonathan Green Lowcountry Lunchbox Purse Brochure:
The Lowcountry Rice Culture Project is a 501(c)3 organization and serves as a clearing house and partnership builder for activities that explore, reveal, and reclaim the shared cultural inheritance of the southeastern Lowcountry Rice Plantation legacy as the basis for promoting community development and advancing the cause of human dignity. The Lowcountry Rice Culture Project proposes to discover and revive the significance of rice cultivation and its residuals, and to use this history as a launching off point for broad discussions of race, class, art, trade, history, and economics -- in short, the various aspects of culture in the Southeast. For a century, Charleston, South Carolina was among the richest communities in the world thanks to the labor of enslaved Africans and the business enterprise of a small and powerful landed class. Agriculture -especially rice cultivation, but also indigo, cotton and tobacco in addition to tea farming - was the economic engine that enabled these planters to establish a ruling class, wield political influence, and build the most dynamic and cosmopolitan urban center in the Southeast.
The Women’s Empowerment Initiative of the Lowcountry Rice Culture Project and The Jonathan Green Lowcountry Lunchbox purses are individually handcrafted by senior and disabled women as a means of providing supplemental income for them.
The history of the lunchbox in the Lowcountry and for African Americans, in general, is born of necessity. “It is an historical legacy, that when African Americans traveled, they traveled with food and they traveled with enough food to share some if needed. Further, these unique ‘works of art’, compare to a Memory Box. A Memory Box, is typically made from wood, and is used for storing mementos of a special time, event or person. The are often created or purchased to mark life’s major events like a christening, wedding or birthday.
As cultural artifacts memory boxes have their own long history. The can be interpreted as expressions of the self, as vehicles of memory as well as transmitters of material reminiscences of the past to the future. Many enslaved persons crafted rough pine boxes to encapsulate their few earthly possessions which consisted of things of no monetary value, but precious indeed to people who had been striped of everything including their humanity. These boxes might have included snips of hair from the precious heads of babies snatched from their mother’s arms; lost baby teeth, wooden combs, sea shells, string, rice and other seeds, and herbs and precious spices.
For more information and to purchase:
https://jonathangreencollection.com/
Current prices for the Lowcountry Lunchbox purses are as follows (price subject to change):
Small evening purse $200 7 3/4" X 3 1/2" X 5 1/2"
Medium $250 9 3/4″ X 3 1/2" X 7"
Large $300 12" X 4" X 8 1/2"
