The Frick Museums in New York and Pittsburgh are typically known for their collections of Classical and Baroque painting and sculpture, which made me all the more intrigued when I heard that they would be exhibiting contemporary artist Kara Walker’s prints this year.
As her artist statement says, Walker is “best known for her candid investigation of race, gender, sexuality, and violence through silhouetted figures.” This often takes the form of paintings, printworks, and installations of Black figures throughout history, making us reexamine our own notions of America’s culture and past.
The Frick is currently displaying Walker’s 2005 series of 15 silkscreens of silhouetted profiles and figures over selected woodcut illustrations published by Harper’s Magazine during the Civil War. During the war, the magazine sent journalists and artists to document the ongoing conflict for their audience of largely middle-class Northerners in cities like New York and Boston. Many of these scenes were drawn by American realist Winslow Homer, and many unaltered Homer drawings are shown alongside Walker’s pictures for added context.
By altering and overlaying her works over these images, Walker takes these stories in new directions. After all, many of the originals are far from telling the whole story. Where Confederate plantation owners once appeared stoic and steadfast, silhouettes of enslaved figures merging with the trees around them warp and disrupt that appearance.
Superimposing a silhouette brings an interesting perspective to a work, as something is bound to be covered up and something is bound to be highlighted. Walker occasionally puts an empty, window-like silhouette of negative space inside a larger opaque one to emphasize certain figures and objects by vignetting them.
That falls into a larger set of tactics Walker utilizes to add new tones and reveal different stories in the original Harper’s Magazine images. Her silhouettes are rarely unaltered and feature embellishments and distortions to heighten their presence. Figures often act within the picture plane of the original image but at a giant size, or sometimes walk in front of it as if it were a backdrop.
Recognizability and stereotype are two of Walker’s strongest weapons. Throughout, silhouettes are often distorted in ways reminiscent of cultural archetypes of Black roles. As a result, we are all the more attentive to our own preconceived biases and expectations in works like these. They force us to introspect on our own idea of American history.
“Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” is on display at the Frick Pittsburgh until May 25.
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