Harvesting Heritage

The South Carolina State Museum is proud to host Harvesting Heritage, a culinary journey highlighting the past and future of creativity, innovation, and artistry in Black foodways throughout our state. In partnership with a rising star of Southern cuisine, Chef Amethyst Ganaway, this ongoing programming series honors the contributions of generations of Black South Carolinians in shaping one of the most remarkable food traditions in the world. Food wasn’t just eaten here – it built something lasting. Harvesting Heritage tells that story—how Black innovation turned survival into something worth exploring, preserving, commemorating, and celebrating. 

Born and raised in North Charleston, Amethyst Ganaway is an internationally recognized chef, writer, and curator, and proud South Carolinian. A namesake to the state stone, Amethyst tells the stories of the region’s history, culture, art, cuisine, and environment, specializing in Southern and African American foodways and foodways of the African Diaspora, including the history of Black communities using food as protest and liberation. In 2023, she headlined Charleston Wine + Food Festival with a dinner event, staffed entirely by Black women chefs. The dinner was a tribute to the “Matriarchs of the Lowcountry,” Black women elders that cast a long shadow in the culinary world of coastal South Carolina – legendary chefs like Emily Meggett, Charlotte Jenkins, and James Beard Award-winning chef Sallie Ann Robinson. Artist and storyteller of Gullah Gullah Island fame, Natalie Daise, painted portraits for each of the matriarchs, which caught the attention of SCSM Curator of Cultural History, Dr. Ramon Jackson.  

By May 2024, the portrait series was in the Museum’s collection, and SCSM and Chef Ganaway had launched the Harvesting Heritage series with a special program: a conversation featuring Natalie Daise, followed by a reception with tastes of Black culinary traditions in South Carolina. For over two years, Harvesting Heritage has welcomed chefs, farmers, scholars, artists, fisherman, crabbers, and more. We have devoured oysters, pulled pork, chicken bog, okra stew, blue crabs, red velvet cake, and much more. Throughout, we have learned how foodways preserve memory, sustain community, shape identity, and express creativity, care, resistance, and cultural power throughout South Carolina and beyond.