JACQUELINE BISHOP: A Way Outa No Way – Charleston Ladies

ABOUT “A WAY OUTA NO WAY – CHARLESTON LADIES”

More on Jacqueline Bishop HERE

Like the Caribbean market women whom I have depicted throughout my career, the Charleston flower sellers demonstrate how Black women transformed intimate knowledge of the natural world into economic possibility. After emancipation, formerly enslaved women associated with a South Carolina plantation sought new means of survival and independence. They turned to gathering, arranging, and selling wildflowers on the streets of Charleston. What began as economic necessity became a distinctive cultural tradition rooted in botanical knowledge, entrepreneurship, labor, and community memory. a way outa no way pays tribute to these women. The title borrows from an African American expression that speaks to the ingenuity through which Black communities have repeatedly fashioned lives of dignity and possibility despite systems designed to deny them both.

The flower sellers are important to my practice because their story extends beyond the marketplace itself. Their knowledge of plants, seasons, gathering, arrangement, and exchange became a form of economic agency. Like the market women of the Caribbean, they understood the natural world not simply as landscape but as resource, livelihood, and inheritance. Their work asks us to reconsider what constitutes an archive and whose knowledge is worthy of preservation.

This series is presented on porcelain manufactured in the United States. The plates are not simply surfaces upon which images are placed; they become active participants in the narratives they hold. Porcelain has long carried histories across the Atlantic, entering domestic spaces as an object of beauty, refinement, and cultural aspiration. Here, the plates become vessels for another history: one in which formerly enslaved Black women transformed botanical knowledge and labor into economic possibility.

The series proposes that the marketplace begins in cultivation. Before there were vendors, there were growers; before there was exchange, there was knowledge of the land. The Charleston flower sellers reveal how Black agricultural knowledge could become a foundation for new forms of independence after enslavement, while also preserving cultural memory across generations and throughout the African diaspora.

These plates propose an archive in which the histories of ordinary Black people are no longer absent from view but occupy the center of the object. a way outa no way asks us to look again at the seemingly ordinary acts through which communities survive: gathering flowers, cultivating land, carrying goods, arranging beauty, and finding ways to make a living. Ultimately, the work suggests that some of our most enduring histories reside not in monuments or official documents, but in agricultural knowledge, embodied labor, and everyday acts of care that have sustained Black communities across generations.

–Jacqueline Bishop, 2026

RECENTLY ON VIEW

JACQUELINE BISHOP in: After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora

2026 | Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) | San Francisco, CA

September 30, 2026 – May 30, 2027

Featuring Jacqueline Bishop 

View the exhibition page HERE