Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta from the portfolio: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

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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

Date2005

Dimensions53 x 39 inches

MediumOffset lithographs with silkscreen

ClassificationPrints

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

2016.75C

Not on View

Exhibition HistoryToledo Museum of Art, Kara Walker, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), June 17-October 22, 2017.

Toledo Museum of Art, PICTURE ID: Contemporary African American Works on Paper, March 14-June 14, 2020.

Label TextThese 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.