Emancipating The Past: Kara Walker's Tales of Slavery and Power

Exhibition Catalog 11" by 8 1/2". Stapled wraps. Sixteen pages featuring a selection from an exhibition of 59 of Walker's prints and multiples and an essay by Jessi DiTillio. The traveling exhibition visited eight locations in the United States between January 2014 and February 2017.

Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular. Walker uses images from historical textbooks to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during Antebellum South.The silhouette was typically a genteel tradition in American art history; it was often used for family portraits and book illustrations. Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality.