2019

During his Hearst Foundations Fellowship in 2019, David researched slavery in antebellum New England—focusing on Massachusetts and on New York City, where the country’s oldest and largest slave cemetery is located. In the video above, he discusses his writing career and how the American Antiquarian Society introduced a more focused archival aspect to his writing.

My project, CONTRABAND, visually explores how the industry of slavery laid the blueprint for drug crimes, gang culture, and mass incarceration in Black communities. This project draws from research at the American Antiquarian Society where I used ephemera and manuscripts to visualize the economics of the transatlantic slave trade. I am working to unpack historical connections visually; sometimes words fail me. CONTRABAND will be the culmination of this research and analysis in the form of large scale silkscreen prints, woodblock prints, and animation.

For the American Antiquarian Society Fellowship, I proposed to examine historical texts for their plant and land based content, seeking primary sources directly related to plant uses —in healing, dyeing, and food. I also wanted to look for uses of ‘weeds’ [plants often deemed useless] and the presence of ‘removed words’ [nature related words were removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in 2016].

My research residency confirmed again how the direct, unfiltered experience of examining an artifact creates a moment of connection, empathy, wonderment and expansion similar to the moments of shared experience in a live performance. A chance for a fuller narrative opens up, independent of interpretive trends, making way for me as a dramatist to offer general audiences new emotional, creative identifications and understandings, experienced through the electricity of shared discovery.

My performance-in-progress is based on the story of Frances Slocum, a 5-year-old Quaker girl, kidnapped in 1778 by the Lenape, married into the Miami in 1795, and in 1837, reunited with her Slocum siblings, who found her in Indiana, the revered widow of a chief. They entreated her to return to Pennsylvania and “civilization.” She refused, living out the rest of her life with her people. Her story was popularized through epic poems, ballads, family memoirs, historical studies, children’s books, melodramas, and public pageants.