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| Open on Saturdays & Sundays 12 - 6PM and by appointment |
| Tours available upon request |
| 1701 Main Street PO Box 209 Peekskill, NY 10566 |
| tel: 914.788.0100 fax: 914.788.4531 |
| email: info@hvcca.org |
HVCCA exhibitions and programs are generously
supported by:
Paul Clay - When We Came, 2004
A one hour, two channel video work Conceived by Paul Clay
Video Mix: Paul Clay
Audio Mix: Arrow Chrome
"When We Came"
tells the story of Peekskill from the dawn of human beings. It begins with
the text of an African creation myth from Ghana. Africa - the origin point
for human kind. A great number of African Americans originally came from
Ghana and most passed through Almina Castle in Cape Coast, a Dutch fort
in the slave trade. Peekskill has been a key center in African American
development and resistance in the New World since before the Revolutionary
War. The African myth explains the origin of Water Sun and Moon, and why Water still lives with us on the earth. Peekskill is about water about the Hudson River. It formed from a retreating glacier at the end of the last ice age. It is a New World that has been continuously rediscovered for the last 12,500 years. The early Native American Paleo People, the Shield Archaic people, the Mahicans, the Iroquois, the Wappinger, and the Kitchawak an Algonquian people lived in the town of Peekskill, or Sackhoes as they liked to call it, before the European peoples ever arrived.
The story of Peekskill is about visitors coming up the Hudson from New York. This includes Jan Peek, for whom the town is named, ("Peek's Creek" in Dutch) who lived in the settlement of New Amsterdam which was later renamed New York. Jan came up the Hudson to trade with the Kitchawak at Sackhoes. Other New Yorkers also traded goods by boat and later by car and train. They brought ideas too: Young Russian Jewish women fleeing the nightmare of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory fire came trying to start a better life, free of labor exploitation; African Americans came up from the AME Zion Church and from Harlem, working towards equality; Soho artists driven out by soaring real estate prices looking for a place to create and express their art.
They came from other places besides New York too. The Italians, the Irish, the Chinese as they built the railroads. The British first to burn the place, and later to establish families. African Americans fleeing slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad. Equadorans, Guatemalans, and others from even further South, looking for a better life.
There is a long and tumultuous history of arrivals in this place, filled with great strife and great beauty. We are only the current caretakers and ours is a momentary passing in the long history of the river valley. The "Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk" - as the Mahicans would call it when they first came 6000 years ago. "The place where the waters are never still". In this work we too arrive. The strangers, the outsiders, the new comers. We try to document, to make a record, so others who come after can know what we experienced, how we felt. So they might see what we saw - when we came.
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