On Thursday night, a group of fiber artists organized by Erica Huberty, Louise Eastman, and Laurie Lambrecht hung 35 handmade, nonpartisan signs across Sag Harbor Village, all containing a single-word message: "Vote."
On Friday morning, they were removed.
Dan Rizzie, an artist, told The Star he was walking with his wife, Susan Lazarus-Reimen, also an artist, on Friday morning when they saw a village employee in a Sag Harbor Village "custodial department" truck removing the signs from trees and utility poles. "We had just gotten back from overseas and were driving through the town to pick up our dog. Susan said, 'I love our village. Look at these sweet little signs.' Ten minutes later and there's a guy ripping them all down," he said.
When Ms. Lazarus-Reimen asked him why, Mr. Rizzie said, the custodian simply called it "a violation of the village signage laws."
In a village where signs advertising teak furniture sales, dog meet-up groups, dog poop clean-up services, lost dogs and cats, grill cleaning, and personal trainers proliferate — as seen on utility poles in many places — it struck Mr. Rizzie and Ms. Lazarus-Reimen, among others, as an odd instance of a law being enforced.
"I would agree. I would say that's an issue," Mayor Thomas Gardella said Friday afternoon, referring to the uneven enforcement of village code. He had been out of the village when the artistic signs were removed. "It's unfortunate they were removed because I would have liked to have the opportunity to say, 'No, let's keep them.' I thought they were colorful and simply promoting to go out and vote, which is what we should do. They didn't have a political side."
Seventeen of them were later recovered from trash bins — some by Ms. Huberty herself, one of the signs' creators.
"The signs were all made by hand by a group of local artists for a project called Mending Democracy," she said in a phone call Friday. She and Ms. Eastman and Ms. Lambrecht are fiber artists whose work has been shown around the world. "We spent the last six weeks knitting and sewing specifically nonpolitical banners just to get out the vote."
They had been careful, she said, "not to place them near other political signs. We put them near other signs that had already been placed, like for lost animals or Bay Street Theater. We put them on telephone poles and trees, with only staples and yarn. We sized them according to where they were placed. If we put one on a telephone pole, we had a long, thin, scarf-sized banner. Nothing was hanging off, flapping around. Nothing was defaced. As we hung them, many people commented on how beautiful they were. We had people trying to buy them from us."
In addition to those put up locally, about 100 more were mailed out to be hung in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.
"Every single one of the signs was handsewn, handcut, and handmade," Ms. Huberty said.
Mayor Gardella characterized the situation as village employees "just doing their jobs."
"On Main Street, they just defer to the code, they don't ask questions," he said. "I think we should get them on a banner, so we can reuse them and put them up for every future election cycle. Whoever put them up just didn't understand the process."
