Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden

Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden, Inc., will be hosting an exhibition for the preview of the two-of-five life-sized bronze sculptures for a yet-to-be-built urban-heritage sculpture garden at an exhibition at the Yonkers Riverfront Library. The exhibition will be on view through 2019, when all of the sculptures are completed.

Artist Vinnie Bagwell is leading the development and creation of the public artwork for the Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden, a destination project scheduled to be constructed on the shore of the Hudson River in Yonkers in 2019. The public artwork interprets the legacy of enslaved Africans who lived and worked at the Philipse Manor Hall–six of whom were among the first to be manumitted by law in the United States in 1799 (64 years before the Emancipation Proclamation). The law was written in New York State by U.S. Founding Father John Jay, then future, first Chief
Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Hon. Patricia McDow, former Yonkers City-Council Majority Leader, brought the story of the enslaved Africans at Philipse Manor Hall to Vinnie Bagwell’s attention in 2009, which sparked the idea of creating a public-art initiative to honor enslaved Africans.

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