Join Senior Curator Corinne Erni with Plain Sight Project Co-Directors Donnamarie Barnes (Curator/Archivist at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm and Plain Sight Project Founder and Chair) and David Rattray (Editor, East Hampton Star) in a live-stream conversation about Barnes’s and Rattray’s ongoing research for The Plain Sight Project. This project identifies enslaved persons and free Blacks on the East End of Long Island from the 1600s to the mid-19th century and their efforts to project, locate, and preserve burial grounds, habitations, and work sites in the Hamptons. The Plain Sight Project will serve as a significant resource for Platform artist Tomashi Jackson’s research as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition, The Land Claim, on view this summer at the Parrish.

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

About the Speakers
Donnamarie Barnes began working at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm in 2014 as a volunteer and history docent and in 2016 joined the staff full time as Curator and Archivist. She has curated the exhibitions, Women of the Manor, A Place in Pictures, and All That Has Been: Our Roots Revealed. Her ongoing work of conserving the various collections at the Manor, researching and uncovering the lives and identities of the enslaved and indigenous people of Sylvester Manor is an integral part of the organization’s mission to Preserve, Cultivate and Share the stories of all the people of Sylvester Manor. She is also Co-Director of the Plain Sight Project, which is dedicated to uncovering, naming and counting the enslaved people of the East End of Long Island. For over thirty years Barnes worked in the editorial photography field as a photographer and photo editor for publications such as People and Essence Magazines and as a Photo Editor at the Gamma Liaison photo agency. A life-long summer and full-time resident of Ninevah Beach in the historic SANS Community in Sag Harbor, Barnes grew up photographing the community and the beach landscape. In 2015 she curated a highly acclaimed historic tintype photography exhibition at the Eastville Community Historical Society in Sag Harbor entitled, Collective Identity. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in photography from the Cooper Union School of Art.

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 graduated from East Hampton High School and then Dartmouth College. Rattray’s first job was as a busboy at the Sea Wolf restaurant in East Hampton and have included a summer as an East Hampton Town lifeguard, an assistant caretaker on Gardiner’s Island, selling fish, setting up party tents, making table and glassware deliveries for Bermuda Party Rentals, staffing the liquor checkout counter at a Cambridge, Mass., grocery store, 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.

Friday Nights are made possible, in part, by Presenting Sponsor:
Additional support provided by Sandy and Stephen Perlbinder.