The Arts Center at Duck Creek is please to present a lecture series by David Rattray and Donnamarie Barnes of the PLAIN SIGHT PROJECT. These FREE talks will take place OUTDOORS throughout the month of August. Video of these talks will be posted below. Please feel free to share the links on your own site!
Seats are limited (no rain dates) so please RSVP: duckcreekarts@gmail.com.
About the Plain Sight Project: Along with many northern communities, East Hampton is disconnected from its slave-owning past. By compiling a comprehensive, public list of enslaved persons from the Colonial period to the last recorded enslaved person in East Hampton in 1830, the Plain Sight Project is reconciling with this forgotten history while taking a step to place these people and their stories back into our nation's founding narrative with in-class outreach to public and private schools. www.plainsightproject.org
Saturday August 15, 5pm: Africaville author Jeffrey Colvin
Donnamarie Barnes and David Rattray of the Plain Sight Project will be joined by author Jeffrey Colvin to discuss how his recent novel Africaville, which tells the story of three generations of a family in a small Nova Scotia town settled in the 1800s by the freed slaves from the Caribbean and United States. They will relate to the stories in his book to those of enslaved people on the East End of Long Island, and share their thoughts on how both his Out of the Loop installation at Duck Creek and their Plain Sight Project seek to support our “national will to do better.” Mr. Colvin’s Out of the Loop installation on the grounds at Duck Creek This talk and Colvin’s installation at Duck Creek are part of Present Tense: Black Lives Matter(ed), a Weekend of Theatre, Art, Literature, History and Activism Education centered around Colvin’s novel. Co-Hosted by Guild Hall, The Church, Arts Center at Duck Creek, and Sponsored by Sag Harbor Partnership with support from L+W Market, Harbor Market, Honest Man Restaurants, The East Hampton Star, Canio’s Books and Rove.
Purchase Africaville through Canio’s Books: https://bookshop.org/shop/caniosbooks
September 12, 3pm: The Future of the Plain Sight Project
Donnamarie and David discuss the end of slavery in the North, and their goal to make the Plain Sight Project a template for groups and individuals in the Upper Mid-Atlantic, New York State, and New England regions, who want to develop their own archives of enslaved persons. They hope this project will create a granular national database that can used to understand the relative presence and location of enslaved persons in the region through time, and that the names of the enslaved will be honored and their stories inserted back into our shared history.
Donnamarie Barnes Plain Sight Project, Chair; Curator/Archivist Sylvester Manor Educational Farm
Donnamarie Barnes has spent over thirty years working in the editorial photography field as a photographer and photo editor for publications such as People and Essence Magazines and as an
Editor at the Gamma Liaison photo agency. A life-long summer and full-time resident of the SANS Community in Sag Harbor, she curated a highly-acclaimed historic tintype photography exhibition in
2015 at the Eastville Community Historical Society entitled, " Collective Identity". Donnamarie began at Sylvester Manor in 2014 as a volunteer and history docent and in 2016 joined the staff as Curator & Archivist. Over the past three years she has curated the exhibitions, "Women of the Manor '', "A Place in Pictures" and "All That Has Been: Our Roots Revealed". Her work uncovering the lives and identities of the enslaved and indigenous people of Sylvester Manor is ongoing and is an integral part of the Manor's mission to preserve, cultivate and share the stories of all the people of Sylvester Manor.
David Rattray
Plain Sight Project, Founder; Editor East Hampton Star
David Rattray is the owner and editor of The East Hampton Star. He is the fifth member of the Rattray family over three generations to have held the post. He attended the Hampton Day School in Bridgehampton, N.Y. and graduated from East Hampton High School and Dartmouth College. His early jobs included summers as a busboy an East Hampton Town lifeguard, an assistant caretaker on Gardiner's Island, selling fish, setting up party tents, making party rental deliveries, staffing the liquor checkout counter at a Cambridge, Mass., grocery store, and as a field archaeologist for the American Museum of Natural History. He was associate producer on the public television documentaries "The Hurricane of '38" and "Chicago 1968" for the American Experience and "Tabloid Truth" for Frontline. He worked for Design Division, a museum design firm in Manhattan, before returning to East Hampton in 1998 to work at The Star. He became its editor in 2003, succeeding his mother, Helen S. Rattray.
PLEASE NOTE: These lectures will be held OUTDOORS for FREE. Seats are limited and there will be no rain dates so please RSVP. In compliance with NY State Covid restrictions, all guests on the property must practice NY State defined social distancing at all times.
For further information or RSVP, please contact Jess Frost at duckcreekarts@gmail.com