Description:
Silhouette of a bare-breasted woman, kneeling or falling to her knees and facing left, over an image of a large group of people (including white and African American men, women, and children) running towards the shore to greet a ship that can be seen in the distance.

Label Text:
Contemporary artist Kara Walker’s work reminds us of the inherent subjectivity of historical perspective. This work is one of 15 prints belonging to Walker’s powerful series in which she enlarges selected images from two volumes of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (1866–68). Walker then “annotates” the images by superimposing her signature silhouettes, thereby disrupting the original narrative. Walker inserts issues of racial stereotyping, slavery, gender, and the violence of oppression often omitted in these mid-19th-century representations.

-Ellen Alvord, Weatherbie Curator of Education and Academic Programs, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum (Jan. 2017)

Tags:
diaspora; slavery; boats; African American

Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+2012.14.1

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