Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial of the Civil War (Annotated)
For nearly three decades, Kara Walker (b. 1969) has created pioneering work that explores race, gender, identity, and American history. Her striking compositions utilize the form of the cut-paper silhouette—a medium traditionally associated with 19th-century portrait profiles of the upper-middle-class—to construct provocative narratives that expose or confront inequalities, prejudices, and stereotypes that pervade society. Typically set against the backdrop of historical events, including the Civil War, Walker’s art challenges viewers to recognize unsettling parallels between our nation’s past and present.
This exhibition marks the premier debut of the NBMAA’s 2019 acquisition of Walker’s important series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, a suite of 15 large-scale prints that considers experiences of racism and violence against African Americans that were absent or only alluded to in historical representations of the Civil War. Each print in the portfolio includes an enlargement of a woodcut plate from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, a two-volume compendium published in 1866 with the intention of narrating events of the war “just as they occurred.” By overlaying silhouette figures upon the scenes, Walker visually disrupts the original images and suffuses them with traumatic scenarios left out of the “official” record. In this way, Walker activates the past in order to address the reality of racial conflict that persists in the United States today.
Juxtaposed with Walker’s series is a group of original Harper’s engravings of the Civil War by Winslow Homer (1836-1910) drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection. During the war years, Homer, a preeminent American artist, served as an artist-correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, and was dispatched to the front lines to record battle scenes and camp life—ten examples of which are on view. These two bodies of work, executed more than a century apart, reveal diverse perspectives of the Civil War and suggest that history remains an always-fraught and always-contested narrative.
This exhibition marks the launch of 2020/20+ Women @ NBMAA, an initiative in which all special exhibitions will be dedicated to female-identifying artists in honor of the centennial of women’s suffrage in America.
