In conjunction with her Origins Exhibition at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, artist Karen Hampton will join her esteemed colleagues Dr. Kathleen Deagan and Dr. Jane Landers in a panel discussion to contextualize where the Clarke-Garvin family fit into the histories of Spanish Florida and United States.

The panel discussion will take place Saturday, March 5, 2022 at 6:00pm in the Flagler Room at Flagler College.  It will also be livestreamed.

Free and open to the public; masks are required.

Hampton’s work utilizes hand-woven textiles, digital prints and embroidery on cloth, and hand dyed fabrics to consider her own lineage and how these individuals are connected to Black American history within Spanish Florida, the United States, and the African Diaspora. Often merging ancestral methods of textile production with more experimental contemporary processes, the work represents a window into the world her ancestors had to traverse, from the late 1700s to the Civil War, and the return to their homeland in Florida.

Through extensive genealogical research Karen Hampton has traced her family to descendants in St. Augustine, Florida.   That includes the British-born George J.F. Clarke (1774-1836), who served as the Surveyor General and Lieutenant Governor during the Second Spanish Period and his unmarried wife Flora Leslie (1771-1832), a formerly enslaved woman whom he manumitted.  The fascinating story of their large, multiracial, land-owning family in the late 18th to mid-19th centuries has been the catalyst for an ongoing body of work since her first visit to St. Augustine in 2006.

This program is supported by a grant from the Dr. JoAnn Crisp-Ellert Fund at The Community Foundation for Northeast Florida.

Click event website link for additional informaiton.