David Rattray and Donnamarie Barnes, co-directors of the Plain Sight Project, will discuss their ongoing research on enslaved persons and free Blacks living for centuries on the East End, in a live-stream talk from the Parrish Art Museum on Friday, February 19, at 5 PM.
Plain Sight was created to identify these individuals, and to locate and preserve burial grounds, habitations, and work sites. The project’s archives will provide a significant resource for artist Tomashi Jackson’s research for her Platform project, The Land Claim, opening at the Museum in July.
The talk will be moderated by Corinne Erni, the Senior Curator of ArtsReach and Special Projects at the museum, as part of the Parrish’s Friday Nights Live! series.
“I’m excited to explore this important research project of Long Island’s East End with David and Donnamarie, who are unearthing a substantial part of this area’s history,” said Erni. “This research will provide invaluable stories and imagery for Tomashi Jackson’s new paintings and installations at the Parrish this summer.”
A joint effort of The East Hampton Star newspaper and the East Hampton Free Library, Plain Sight Project was created in 2016 by Rattray, the Star’s Executive Editor, and Barnes, Curator & Archivist at Sylvester Manor on Shelter Island. By compiling a comprehensive, public list of enslaved persons from the Colonial period to the last recorded slave in East Hampton in 1830, the Plain Sight Project is reconciling a forgotten history of the East End, while taking a step to place these individuals and their stories into the nation’s founding narrative through in-class outreach to public and private schools.
The Plain Sight database of “confirmed identities” has grown to more than 250 individuals — from a woman named Boose in 1657 to a girl named Tamer in 1829. Some of the enslaved were farm hands, while others performed daily chores in small households or worked alongside their so-called “master,” who might be a leather tanner, brickmaker, or weaver. In contrast to living among hundreds of others in a row of sweltering plantation cabins, as in the South, East Hampton’s enslaved residents were more likely to have slept in the eaves and attics of modest saltbox houses like those still standing on the Village’s Main Street.
Access to the Plain Sight Project will provide Tomashi Jackson with invaluable historical information about Blacks of the East End for her exhibition, The Land Claim. For the project, Jackson focusses on issues that have consistently linked historic and contemporary lived experiences of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families on the East End: housing, transportation, livelihood in relation to migration, and agriculture.
Jackson has been conducting research for nearly a year, interviewing community members, historians, and leaders of the Eastville Historical Society of Sag Harbor, Bridgehampton Child Care & Recreational Center, the Shinnecock Nation, and OLA of Eastern Long Island.
To register for the talk, visit parrishart.org.
