Tracing Slavery
![walker exhibition graphic](/images/walker_coa_trout_2021_700w.jpg")
Kara Walker, Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, from the portfolio Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, offset lithograph and screenprint on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, © 2005 Kara Walker.
Exhibition: Oct. 2, 2021, to Jan. 22, 2022
Opening Reception: Oct. 2
Join us for Tracing Slavery, a two-part exhibition featuring works by Moses Williams and Kara Walker. This event is free and open to the public!
KARA WALKER: HARPER'S PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR (ANNOTATED)
Walker’s work deals extensively with the experience and identity of African American women past and present, which she explores in part through contemporary imagery portrayed as narratives cast in the manner of 19th-century cut silhouettes. At first nostalgic, perhaps charming in appearance, Walker’s silhouette imagery depicts the brutal reality of white-on-black violence in American society. Walker’s work and the 19th-century artistic sources she references could hardly be paired with a more poignant body of material than the cut silhouettes made by Moses Williams, featured in and described below.
MOSES WILLIAMS: SILHOUETTES
Moses Williams (1777-c.1825) was a prolific silhouette artist and former slave who worked for Charles Willson Peale, an early-American portraitist, naturalist and museum founder. Williams cut silhouette portraits of guests to Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, and the portraits were given to the guests as mementos. The black-and-white portraits made by Williams are striking in that they represent the white, powerful elite of the early 19th century, many of whom were slaveholders. Among the sitters in this selection is Peale's friend Dr. James Hunter Fayssoux, who was likely studying medicine in Philadelphia with Dr. Benjamin Rush.
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