In 2023, Manship Artists Residency began a partnership with the Cape Ann Museum on their Vessels of Slavery project. This two-year research initiative will result in an exhibition that will help us understand and process this dark history of our region and the recovered stories of enslaved members of our community.
Gloucester’s port benefitted from shipping and trade from the colonies, and was therefore heavily vested in slave commerce. Although this region is not often strongly associated with slavery, people were in fact enslaved in Gloucester and throughout New England, and played a significant role in the region’s current prosperity. Guided by their collaborative studio practice, the project artists help people access and experience Gloucester’s slavery history in meaningful ways by facilitating public artmaking workshops, dialogues, and events. In the artists’ words they, “Imagine working with the ideas of vessels and sanctuaries, sweeping and cleaning, ancestors and identities, and winds blowing and talking. We envision making offerings with water, sea glass and sails, sweeping with brooms, and building a large vessel made of cloth.” As the artists collaborate and engage with residents and local artists over the four visits, these ideas will become final artworks.
In 2023, project artists unearthed the local stories and legacies of Gloucester’s enslaved people by researching Cape Ann Museum’s (CAM) archives. They creatively responded to this research in their studio practice, using cloth and stitching and embedding symbolic imagery in their work, culminating in a pop-up exhibition of exploratory artwork and preliminary vessel designs and accompanied by community workshops and dialogues facilitated by the artists.
In spring and summer 2024, artists will use their MARs residencies to bring together the many creative elements of the project to create a large-scale, symbolic vessel that speaks to the history of slavery in Gloucester. This collaboration will culminate in a major summer event co-hosted by MARs and CAM on the CAM grounds. The event will include the installation of the collaborative, large-scale, outdoor vessel; a ceremony to honor, cleanse, and celebrate the lives of enslaved people on Cape Ann; an artists’ talk with community dialogue; and an exhibition of photos, artifacts, and first person accounts from their historical research as well as their own photographs and journal writings, reflecting their creative process.
Project artists include:
IlaSahai Prouty: Interdisciplinary artist working with communities on socially engaged projects using quilting and craft practices that focus on co-making as a restorative process and exploring race as a social construction made through language.
Sisters In Stitches Joined By The Cloth: A quilting guild founded in 1997 with the mission to uphold the tradition of African American quilt-making and to educate the public about the rich history of people of color and cloth. Artists include Susi Ryan, fiber and performance artist whose symbolic story quilts acknowledge and document the culturally diverse history of her enslaved ancestors; Christle Rawlins-Jackson, fiber artist, poet, and graphic designer; and Lesyslie Rackard, a self-taught, life-long quilter and crafter who has committed herself to the African American quilting tradition.
Sika Foyer: American multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Lomé, Togo, West Africa who explores wrapping cultures, the materiality of wrapping, and its cross-cultural rituals to tell ancestral stories and to examine forms of social injustice.
