$20 Suggested Donation

Join us for a preview of Signs from the Mainland, a documentary short that explores the extraordinary history of the Martha’s Vineyard deaf community, followed by a conversation with 2021 Twenty Summers Fellow Jeffrey Mansfield and director Michael Cestaro.

Starting as far back as the early 1700s, genetic deafness took a foothold on Martha's Vineyard where as many as one in four residents were deaf and a majority of hearing residents also were able to communicate in what is considered one of the precursors to modern American Sign Language. The film explores the deeper meaning and lessons to be learned from this unique enclave where deaf and hearing individuals coexisted seamlessly. 

Through interviews with historians and community members, the documentary asks, “why did this happen?”, “what was it like?”, and also “where did it go?” The story of the MV deaf community’s eventual conclusion shows us the first steps of the ASL movement, the establishment of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford CT, and bigger lessons about connection over time. 

Signs from the Mainland reflects on the legacy of the MV Deaf community, the implications for the broader society, and its relevance to contemporary conversations about inclusivity and diversity. 

Jeffrey in Menemsha, a small fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard.

Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a design director at MASS Design Group and a Ford-Mellon Disability Futures fellow, whose work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Jeffrey is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his work on Architecture of Deafness, which explores how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance. Jeffrey holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University. Deaf since birth, Jeffrey is a Yonsei, or fourth-generation, Japanese American, and attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between aesthetics, geography, and power emerged.

Support for this project provided by Expanding Massachusetts Stories, an initiative of Mass Humanities.