IDENTIFY: Sheldon Scott

For more than a year, Sheldon Scott has been on a journey to create a commissioned IDENTIFY performance for the National Portrait Gallery. “Precious in Da Wadah: A Portrait of the Geechee” reflects on his roots in the Gullah/Geechee region of coastal South Carolina. Scott and his cast of nine performers will form a conceptual portrait that allows audiences to consider the innovation of the enslaved Africans—Sheldon’s ancestors—who developed indigo and rice growing irrigation practices. These techniques preserved the rice crops through care and cherish of the plants as they grew, and the performance will illuminate the violence of cultivation as the body itself becomes a commodity.

Scott’s project has involved rice producers in the Carolinas, Smithsonian Gardens, the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center and the Archeology Department of the National Museum of Natural History. Scott says, “Working on this performance for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery has afforded me to work with the broader Smithsonian Institution and has been a fascinating experience. Sometimes the stories behind the objects we see in museums are as remarkable as the objects themselves!”

The IDENTIFY series brings Portrait Gallery visitors into the poignant realm of an artist’s lived experience through the embodiment of memory and history. The experience of witnessing these commissioned performances and the powerful sense of community formed is unlike any other experience one could have in the museum because the artist is present.

Join us for this groundbreaking performance at 5:30pm, beginning in the Kogod Courtyard and progressing to the Great Hall, the historic site where President Lincoln greeted his guests for his second inaugural ball.