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

Catalog Data

Artist:
Kara Walker, born Stockton, CA 1969  Search this
Printer:
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University  Search this
Publisher:
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University  Search this
Medium:
offset lithograph and screenprint on paper
Dimensions:
39 x 53 in. (99.1 x 134.6 cm)
Type:
Graphic Arts-Print
Date:
2005
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  Search this
History\United States\Civil War  Search this
Credit Line:
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment
Copyright:
© 2005 Kara Walker
Object number:
2008.19.1.1
Restrictions & Rights:
Usage conditions apply
See more items in:
Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection
Department:
Graphic Arts
Data Source:
Smithsonian American Art Museum
GUID:
http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/vk7906181a5-6e26-4472-a34b-90b0a8d35b10
EDAN-URL:
edanmdm:saam_2008.19.1.1