Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)
In this exhibition, Walker’s works are presented alongside a selection of the original Harper’s prints on which they are based, also drawn from SAAM’s collection. For over two decades, African American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been making work that weaves together imagery from the antebellum South, the brutality of slavery, and racist stereotypes. Best known for her use of the cut-paper silhouette, she transforms the genteel eighteenth-century portrait medium into stark, haunting tableaux. Walker plays with the idea of misrepresenting misrepresentations, stating, “The whole gamut of images of black people, whether by black people or not, are free rein in my mind.” Her work has stirred controversy for its use of exaggerated caricatures that reflect existing racial and gender stereotypes and for its lurid depictions of history, challenging viewers to consider America’s origins of racial inequality. In Walker’s art, the present is defined by the past and the past exerts a savage power.
Description
Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is a series of fifteen prints based on the two-volume anthology published in 1866. To create her prints, Walker enlarged select illustrations and then overlaid them with large stenciled figures. The shadowy images visually disrupt the original scenes and suffuse them with traumatic scenarios left out of the official record. Mangled and grotesque figures escape the boundaries of the anthology’s pictures, expanding into the margins and the space of real life.
Walker’s prints are presented alongside a selection of the original Harper’s images on which they are based. Seen together, the two bodies of work shed light on Walker’s artistic process and her approach to history as an always-fraught, always-contested narrative. Her ghostly scenes assert the influence of racial history on contemporary life and create a provocative dialogue between the past and the present.
Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is organized by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art.
Visiting Information
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Credit
Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Generous support for the presentation in Washington, DC has been provided by Crown Equipment Exhibitions Endowment.
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