Kara Walker's civil war
By GREG COOK | January 30, 2007
THE RICH SOIL DOWN THERE: The fantasia of race and sex and shit manifests themes of power and slavery. |
In February 1862, with the Civil War not yet a year old, Union forces took Fort Henry, a Confederate outpost on the Tennessee River, as they began to open up Southern waterways for supply lines. They then continued down along the river through Confederate Tennessee and into Alabama. “We have met the most gratifying proofs of loyalty,” a Union lieutenant reported. “Men, women, and children, several times gathered in crowds of hundreds, shouted their welcome, and hailed their national flag with an enthusiasm there was no mistaking.”An illustration published in the two-volume Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War of 1866 and 1868 documents just such a scene. In 2005, New York artist Kara Walker revised the original by adding the black silhouette of an African-American woman who has tripped at the back of the white throng rushing down to the river. She wears a ragged skirt and a kerchief is tied around her hair mammy-style, but she’s topless. Her presence calls attention to a fully clothed black woman (a wet-nurse slave?) who’s at the back of the crowd in the original, dashing along cradling a white baby in her arms. A little black boy stumbles to the ground behind her, in danger of being left behind and maybe trampled.
It’s one of the prints from Walker’s 2005 series “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated),” which is on view at the Philips Academy’s Addison Gallery through April 15. Walker enlarges lithographs of the Harper’s originals and screenprints her signature black silhouetted characters on top, as if they were graffiti moustaches elegantly scrawled on billboards. The silhouettes become ghosts (a reference to the slur “spook”?) haunting the Civil War, interrogating the portrayal of African-Americans in history and their role in the war.
ALABAMA LOYALISTS GREETING THE FEDERAL GUN-BOATS: Walker makes you realize how easily classifications of race and gender can slide into bigoted caricature. |
Walker, who’s now 37, lived in California until her family moved to Atlanta when she was 12. “When I was coming along in Georgia, I became black in more senses than just the kind of multicultural acceptance that I grew up with in California,” she said in a 1999 interview with New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “Blackness became a very loaded subject, a very loaded thing to be — all about forbidden passions and desires, and all about a history that’s still living, very present . . . the shame of the South and the shame of the South’s past; its legacy and its contemporary troubles.”While studying at Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a master’s degree in 1994, she made her great formal move: reviving the 19th-century art of the cut-paper silhouette. It had been seen as decorative and a women’s medium and had long been out of favor except in second-grade classrooms — three strikes against it in the art world. Walker seized on it for these very reasons: it was beautiful, it spoke of womanhood, it spoke to history. And the stark black paper stuck to white walls was an elemental metaphor for race.
Related:
The right profile, Folk my brains out, Deep cuts, More 
- The right profile
Contemporary African-American artists have taken on issues of race and American identity in a wealth of ways, from Kara Walker’s provocative silhouette narratives to Fred Wilson’s discomforting black "collectibles" to William Pope L’s agonizing acts of crawling.
- Folk my brains out
Toby Kamp's 'The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes In Contemporary Art' at The Decordova Museum
- Deep cuts
The beauty of Kara Walker's silhouettes lies in their concurrent brutality and daintiness, and in her unabashed exploration cutting to the meat of the black-and-white binary in American contemporary culture.
- Art in America
The legend of the Old West's cowboys and Indians, flinty pioneers and buffalo killers, sheriffs and gunslingers started with the tall tales that cowboys themselves told of their glorious exploits.
- Review: Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief
That must've been one rockin' party the gods of Ancient Greece had with the hotties of America back in the early '90s, since they left a string of demigods with absentee-daddy issues behind.
- Power rangers
Adam Ryder was fascinated, he said, by long-distance, high-tension power lines and their scruffy right-of-ways.
- Crimson tied
Barack Obama's presidential campaign was successful in part because he was able to cleverly negotiate and navigate the battles that have plagued the United States the last few years.
- Accept no imitations
The nature of art requires that you see the real works. Reproductions will not do.
- Rethinking 9/11
The Phoenix decided to ask ten people prominent in a range of fields a question.
- War stories
In his new book, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism , author John Byrne Cooke tracks press influence on public opinion.
- Arthur M. Schlesinger, 1917–2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. managed to stay so sharp and funny up to the end that it was still a shock to hear of his death last week.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Culture and Lifestyle, Racial Issues, Social Issues, More
, Culture and Lifestyle, Racial Issues, Social Issues, History, World History, Racism and Bigotry, Visual Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Less
