Vinnie Bagwell is currently leading the conception and development of “The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden”–an urban-heritage, public-art project for the City of Yonkers, New York, to commemorate the legacy of the first enslaved Africans to be manumitted by law in the United States, 76 years before the Emancipation Proclamation. Vinnie is an untutored artist. She began sculpting in 1993, and was commissioned to create her first public artwork in 1995. Her portraits display immense spirit and verisimilitude, and have souls which grandly speak for themselves.