Crisp-Ellert Art Museum | 03/04/22 - 04/23/22 | Origins | Karen Hampton | St. Augustine

Art Exhibition | 03/04/22 – 04/23/22
Origins | Karen Hampton
St. Augustine

Crisp-Ellert Art Museum
48 Sevilla St St. Augustine FL 32084
904-826-8530

February 16 2022 — We are pleased to announce the exhibition Karen Hampton: Origins
opening at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College on Friday March 4. Hampton’s textilebased work explores stories of the African American diaspora as well as her ancestral ties to
Northeast Florida. The artist will give a walkthrough of the exhibition on Friday March 4 at
5pm followed by an opening reception until 8pm.
On Saturday March 5 at 6pm 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. This panel discussion will take place in
the Flagler Room at Flagler College and will also be livestreamed. These events are free and
open to the public and masks are required. The Origins exhibition will continue through
Saturday April 23.
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 mid19th centuries has been the catalyst for an ongoing body of work since her first visit to St.
Augustine in 2006.
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.
A site visit in June 2021 served as further inspiration for new works Hampton has created for
this exhibition. In the installation America Now and Then narrowly woven indigo and bast
fibers unfurl and curl around vintage spools from weaving mills in Lowell Massachusetts where
the artist lives and works. Running close to twenty yards long the work suggests an aerial view
of the landscape or a map. As Hampton has explained this piece represents the distance along
the coast from Fernandina to St. Augustine as well as considers the means of production of the
transatlantic slave trade and speaks to the role of northern financiers who enabled the system.
Fort Mose and the Oysters is derived from a photograph the artist took of the grove of trees
that stand where Fort Mose the first legally sanctioned free African settlement once stood.
Fort Mose Historic State Park extends into a tidal creek where plentiful oyster beds are exposed
at low tide. This material is abundant along the waterways of Northeast Florida where her
ancestors once traveled and has been used more broadly as the building blocks of society in
Florida. The landscape of Northeast Florida has become a poetical point of departure for
Hampton to consider connections between the past and present and through a combination of
stories and historical documentation from the lives of George J.F. Clarke Flora Leslie and their
descendants the artist has crafted a generational story of love dedication and survival.