Offset lithography and silkscreen on Somerset textured paper, 42 7/16 x 28 1/4in.
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Purchase with the Susan and Bernard Schilling (Susan Eisenhart, Class of 1932) Fund and the Belle and Hy Baier Art Acquisition Fund MH 2012.14.4
This image is composed of a reused, mid-nineteenth century print from a Harper’s Weekly series titled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, and a silhouetted figure an African American woman being ripped apart by an explosion that the artist has superimposed over it. Her headscarf and stereotyped features intentionally echo recognizable racist conventions for depicting the black female body, as is almost universally the case in Walker’s work. This print is part of a series called Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, Annotated that Walker, a California-born artist based in New York, created in 2005. In the Harper’s series, Walker superimposes her signature silhouettes over prints from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, in an attempt to highlight the ugly, often unseen history of suffering. This series was shown after Walker had already become well known for her large-scale, narrative silhouette works that draw on historical material in order to explore issues of race, sexuality, and power.