Collection Record
Images
Metadata
Artist |
Walker, Kara (American, b. 1969) |
Title |
Signal Station, Summit of Maryland Heights, from Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) |
Date |
2005 |
Medium |
Ink |
Material |
Paper |
Technique |
Offset lithography and silkscreen |
Height (in) |
53.000 |
Width (in) |
39.000 |
Credit line |
Partial Gift of Dr. Harold F. Daum with additional funds from the acquisitions endowment |
Notes |
Kara Walker creates challenging artwork that confronts the legacy of slavery in American culture. Since the late 1990s, she has been creating satirically subversive renditions of the pre-Civil-War South that challenge viewers to wrestle with lingering racial and gender stereotypes, caricatures, and myths. Walker is especially renowned for her large-scale, cut-paper silhouettes and narrative tableaus. This print is from Walker's series "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)," a suite of 15 prints. It marked the first time the artist united her trademark silhouettes with the type of historical documentation that influenced the development of her aesthetic. Each of the large-scale prints in Walker's portfolio began with an enlargement, using offset lithography, of a woodcut plate from the 1866 book "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War: Contemporary Accounts and Illustrations from the Greatest Magazine of the Time, with 1000 scenes, maps, plans and portraits." Walker overlays each of the original images with silhouetted figures rendered with solid black silkscreen. She uses a variety of strategies to break in, cover over, or otherwise intervene within the narrative of the woodcuts, usurping the images' original dramatic and documentary purposes in favor of ones of her own invention. Kara Walker is internationally celebrated for her work, and is known as the youngest person ever to receive a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, which she did in 1997, when she was just 28. Since then, she has had her work exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, London's Tate Modern, the Venice Biennale, and other venues around the world. |
Object ID |
2013.17.10 |
Object Type |