Kara Walker (B. 1969)

Executed in 2005, Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is a series of fifteen prints created by the artist at Columbia University’s LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies. Walker is known for her canny examination of African American history through the lens of representational tropes that inevitably conjure the uncomfortable legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and racist stereotypes. In these prints she has for the first time joined her own imagery with the 19th Century source material that she often works from.
Each print in the portfolio references, and uses as the starting point for Walker’s composition, Ed. Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden’s Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, first published in 1866 in Chicago. Silkscreened on to the top of these historical illustrations Walker has added her signature solid black silhouette figures. As a very significant portfolio in the artist’s oeuvre it can be found in numerous prominent collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Walker art Center, Yale University Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.