Artist Kara Walker's work examining race in the antebellum South comes to Weisman Art Museum

The MacArthur "genius" grant winner has annotated etchings from Civil-War era magazine Harper's Weekly.

By Alicia Eler Star Tribune

September 30, 2024 — 6:30am

It's 1864, and the Battle of Atlanta just ended. Union Army Gen. James Birdseye McPherson was unexpectedly shot and killed. The scene of his death looks like an abandoned campground in the forest, with wooden wheels, a horse skeleton and twigs scattered about. But on top of the etching is a silhouette of a larger-than-life Black child with a severed leg. The remainder of that leg is held up by a tiny Black man wearing shoes.

The etching is from a Civil War-era Harper's Weekly, but the cut-paper silhouette was made in 2005 by New York-based artist Kara Walker.

"Kara Walker often looks at other images from different times, mostly 19th century, particularly about the genteel history that we tell, particularly about the era of the Civil War and the antebellum South, that she likes to take apart, rethink and repurpose," Weisman Art Museum Senior Curator Diane Mullin said.

The print, titled "Scene of McPherson's Death" from Walker's series "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)," is one of 15 on view at the Weisman Art Museum. The traveling show organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art and the Museum Box pairs Walker's work with reproductions of Harper's Weekly prints by American realist artist Winslow Homer.

"Looking at Harper's Weekly, you have material that was made for white audiences, even though it included and portrayed Black people," said artist and Macalester College assistant professor Tia-Simone Gardner. "Black folks had their own media, circulation and print history."

Walker, who is best known for her cut-paper silhouettes — sometimes life-sized, portraying historical narratives of the antebellum South rife with violence, sexuality and power abuses, and sometimes employing a tongue-in-cheek humor — made a name for herself in 1997 when, at age 28, she became one of the youngest artists to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2007, the Walker Art Center hosted her first major survey exhibition.

Mullin thought the exhibition would resonate with Twin Cities audiences in this so-called "post-George Floyd" era.

"We were interested in the ways that this [series] spoke to the issues around internal civil strife," Mullin said. "We are in a very bifurcating, polarizing moment in our history."

Look again

In this series of prints, sometimes the narratives that Walker overlays weave into the stories that Homer created.

In "Alabama Loyalists Greeting the Federal Gun-Boats," a crowd of Union-supporting Alabamans run up to U.S. ships, while a silhouette of an enslaved Black woman seems to float in the foreground, attempting her own escape. In the original drawing, there's a small Black child crawling on the ground, as if reaching for the fleeing silhouette figure.

While Walker's work has been celebrated for speaking to difficult histories, it also has received criticism for portraying sexual violence.

Artist Lamar Peterson, a 2024 Guggenheim fellow, professor at the University of Minnesota and a native Floridian, always has admired Walker's work for how it discusses these histories.

"She was definitely someone as an artist who I looked at early on, and I love her stylization of the human form and the humor in the work," he said. "It's often depicted or discussed as being really serious, but I think they are often tongue-in-cheek and funny, too."

Peterson noted that the Walker show is one of several major exhibitions of work by Black artists in the Twin Cities. Artist Walter Price's work is on view at the Walker Art Center, and the first retrospective of abstract artist Stanley Whitney opens in mid-November at the Walker.

Gardner, who grew up in Alabama, noted that Walker was born in California, but was raised in Atlanta from age 13 on, something that also affected her work.

"There's this sort of popular imagination about the South in a certain way that, coming from there, being raised there in a Black community, I didn't know about that until I was older," she said.

Gardner is most curious about how the exhibition will be received in the Twin Cities.

"When Kara Walker's work was first reaching larger audiences, a lot of elder Black women artists were very critical of what she was doing, and a lot of those folks are gone now, they are not with us now, so you have a different critical landscape that the work is being shown in, even though it is the same work," she said. "It's different audiences, and we've aged almost 20 years since the work was done."