Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats, from the portfolio Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

Object Details

Date
2005
Artist
Kara Walker, born Stockton, CA 1969
Printer
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University
Publisher
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University
Exhibition Label
For her series Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), Kara Walker appropriated and enlarged select illustration from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, a two-volume publication of 1866. She chose fifteen wood engravings, enlarged them through offset lithography, and overlaid them with large, black stencils. Walker’s signature silhouettes interrupt and transform the nineteenth-century narratives of battle, death, and retreat in these large-scale prints. According to the artist, the Civil War prints from Harper’s “are the landscapes that I imagine exist in the back of my somewhat more austere wall pieces,” namely the large black silhouette compositions for which she is best known.
Walker’s scenes are set in the American South before and during the Civil War. They play off stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters and mistresses and slave men, women, and children enact a subverted version of the past. Walker suggests a critical understanding of the past and proposes an examination of contemporary racial and gender stereotypes.
Multiplicity, 2011
Topic
African American
History\United States\Civil War
See more items in
Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
Department
Graphic Arts
Credit Line
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Copyright
© 2005 Kara Walker
Data Source
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Object number
2008.19.1.1
Type
Graphic Arts-Print
Restrictions & Rights
Usage conditions apply
Medium
offset lithograph and screenprint on paper
Dimensions
39 x 53 in. (99.1 x 134.6 cm)
GUID
http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk7906181a5-6e26-4472-a34b-90b0a8d35b10
Record ID
saam_2008.19.1.1