Grammy-nominated tenor Victor Ryan Robertson will visit Athens for a performance of 19th-century Gullah Geechee spirituals and a public conversation at the historic Morton Theatre as part of UGA’s 2025 Spotlight on the Arts festival. The evening begins with a public reception in the Theatre’s Pharmacy space, with the performance by Robertson, pianist Adrianne Duncan, and special guest Athens cellist Dr. Eunice Kang at 7 p.m. A panel discussion and audience Q&A will follow the performance, including Robertson; Dr. Robert Adams, Jr., executive director of the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, SC; musicologist Dr. Eric Crawford, author of Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands and adjunct faculty member in the music department at Morehouse College; and Deacon James Peter Smalls, caretaker of the Mary Jenkins Praise House on St. Helena Island.

Victor Ryan Robertson is the 2025 artist in residence for Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a Mellon Foundation-funded partnership between the Penn Center and UGA's Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. This event is part of that residency and is presented by the Willson Center, the Penn Center, and the Culture and Community project.

Robertson is an American musical artist who performs in genres including classical, contemporary, pop, and Broadway on both opera and theatrical stages. He recently sang the roles of Elijah and Street in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X on the Grammy Award-nominated cast recording and at the Metropolitan Opera of New York.

In 2016, Robertson was given an out-of-print volume of sheet music for little-known 19th-century Gullah Geechee spirituals from the islands off the coast of his home state of South Carolina. The songs’ history, melodies and lyrics resonated with him deeply. In 2022, he invited his friend and colleague, the pianist, composer and Georgia native Adrianne Duncan, to set the a cappella melodies to music that reflected their backgrounds in opera, jazz and classical music. Robertson and Duncan gave a performance in which they shared and discussed a selection of their freshly conceived versions of these rediscovered hymns – many of which had gone largely unheard for as long as a century – as part of an April 2024 Penn Center Community Conversation before an audience that included more than 100 community members from St. Helena Island and nearby.