Like many people who grow up in Brooklyn, Adama Delphine Fawundu remembers spending much of her childhood and adolescence in Prospect Park. Yet she never recalled learning about the stories behind the 526-acre green space’s structures and sites, such as the 18th-century farmhouse that once belonged to the family of Continental Army Lieutenant Pieter Lefferts, situated near the park’s eastern entrance at the corner of Flatbush and Ocean Avenues. As with many of the historical structures scattered across her neighborhood, Fawundu never really thought much about the Lefferts Historic House and its past until she grew older and gained a greater understanding of New York’s legacy of slavery.
“I kind of thought, ‘Okay, this is it,’” Fawundu told Hyperallergic. “‘Something had to happen in this house, right?’”
Now, over 150 years since the end of slavery in the United States, this history is front and center in Fawundu’s new site-specific installation “Ancestral Whispers,” which she created as the Prospect Park Alliance’s inaugural ReImagine Lefferts artist-in-residence.
