JAC Talk with Jean-Marc Superville Sovak and Peter Fay

Thursday, March 30, 2023

6 pm

$10 General Admission, $8 for JAC Members

JAC Talk is a regular program hosted by the JAC to bring together artists and creative minds to share their stories with the Jamestown community and beyond.

Jean-Marc Superville Sovak will share the inspiration and untold stories behind his poignant research-driven sculpture from the JAC’s 2022 Biennial Outdoor Arts Exhibition. Jamestown resident and historian Peter Fay, whose research helped inspire the artwork, will participate in the discussion. Six of the First is a monument to some of the earliest recorded Africans to have been brought to the shores of Newport County in 1743: six women named Yallah, Morandah, Mowoorie, Simboh, Burrah and Yearie who were among the human cargo aboard the slave ship “Jolly Bachelor” before it sank as recorded by the Royal Admiralty Court.

The overall composition of the Six of the First’s steel panel is borrowed from an18th century engraving depicting the flight of Mary of Modena, the illegitimate wife of King James II, eponym of Jamestown. The faces of the figures from the original engraving are replaced with stylized versions of masks traditionally worn by the matriarchs of what is known as the Sande Society, an intertribal fellowship of women from Temne, Mende and Vai cultures of Sierra Leone where the six women are thought to have originated.

The masks are a reference to a culture they themselves would surely have recognized. The names of the six women are displayed along with their appraised value, an amount equivalent to 25-40 acres of land, a property few Rhode Islanders would have been able to afford at the time. Six of the First is a combination of sculpture and storytelling that seeks to visualize unwritten histories rooted in a region that was acutely shaped by the contours of colonialism’s triangular trade in bodies whose voices and names have often remained unheard.

Photo by Maddie Van