Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta from the portfolio: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)
Artist: Kara Elizabeth Walker (American, born 1969)
Publisher: LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies
Date: 2005
Dimensions:
53 x 39 inches
Medium: Offset lithographs with silkscreen
Classification: Prints
Credit Line: Purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey
Object number: 2016.75C
Label Text:These two monumental works belong to Kara Walker’s portfolio of 15 prints of her signature black silhouettes layered over Civil War illustrations taken from the 1866 publication Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War. By superimposing large-scale figures on military scenes, Walker re-imagines events of the war from an African American perspective.
The physical presence of her interventions, which mask, expand, or interact with the historical scenes, highlights the title’s ironic inclusion of “annotated”—a term referring to explanatory comments typically found in the margins of a text. In her revisionist take on Exodus of Confederates, Walker creates a double silhouette of a man within a woman’s profile to spotlight an African American boy assisting an evacuation of white civilians after a Confederate Army defeat. Similarly, in Buzzard’s Roost Pass, Walker re-directs the focus of Harper’s illustration of battle to the suffering and violence experienced by the Black civilian population.
By making central what had been marginalized, Walker creates a powerful visual statement that both challenges and complicates the conventional account of the Civil War and abolition of slavery.
The physical presence of her interventions, which mask, expand, or interact with the historical scenes, highlights the title’s ironic inclusion of “annotated”—a term referring to explanatory comments typically found in the margins of a text. In her revisionist take on Exodus of Confederates, Walker creates a double silhouette of a man within a woman’s profile to spotlight an African American boy assisting an evacuation of white civilians after a Confederate Army defeat. Similarly, in Buzzard’s Roost Pass, Walker re-directs the focus of Harper’s illustration of battle to the suffering and violence experienced by the Black civilian population.
By making central what had been marginalized, Walker creates a powerful visual statement that both challenges and complicates the conventional account of the Civil War and abolition of slavery.
Not on view