Pinkster King

From the artist: “Pinkster King” is a memorial to the main character of the peculiarly Afro-Dutch, 18th-Century Hudson Valley cultural phenomenon once known as the “Pinkster Carnival.” The “Pinkster King”, as described by historian A.J. Williams-Myers, was a well-dressed master drummer who led festive processions around the Pentecost, much like Mardi Gras before Lent. Many of New York’s enslaved took advantage of the celebrations to escape slavery until the Pinkster Carnival was outlawed by Albany in 1810. The fine-looking dress and tri-cornered hat of this figure is borrowed from a portrait of William Lee, George Washington’s “Manservant” whose dress resembles historical descriptions of the “Pinkster King” and is reminiscent of the way in which many free Blacks (or those who wanted to pass for free) would have chosen to appear. “Ju Mont sa koop Kabaj for su Rie” is an old proverb in “Low Dutch”, spoken by many African-Americans in Dutch households in New York (such as the Van Cortlandts of Westchester County) that translates as: “Your mouth will buy you a horse to ride” – an allusion to the ways in which, for many of those fleeing slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries in New York, language was a harbinger for freedom. As a person of mixed race, I am always sensitive to the evidence of cultural hybridization of colonization and slavery as exemplified by the “Pinkster King,” born in the cultural crucible of Dutch, African and English influences of 19th- century antebellum New York.