Weisman Art Museum exhibition revisits the Civil War

As polarizing rhetoric ramps up to a fever pitch in this last month before the presidential election, an exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum featuring one of America’s most preeminent artists, Kara Walker, takes us back to another moment in American history when viewpoints were perilously bifurcated: the Civil War. 

At the heart of the exhibition is a two-volume book published just after the war, in 1866 and 1868, by Harper & Brothers, which owned Harper’s New Monthly Magazine — now simply Harper’s Magazine — and Harper’s Weekly. Called “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War,” the book anthologized reporting by Harper’s Weekly over the course of the war. The book features illustrations created by a team of artists dispatched by the publisher to cover the battlefields and follow the Union Army. In total, it makes up 836 pages. 

You’ve likely encountered Kara Walker’s work at the Walker Art Center or the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which both have her art in their collections, as does WAM. I also recently experienced Walker’s incredible “8 Possible Beginnings or The Creation of African-America,” (2005) and a 1997 pop-up book “Freedom: A Fable” (1997) at the Marine Art Museum in its recent “A Nation Takes Place” exhibition. 

Art curators in Minnesota took note of Walker’s voice early on, with WAC beginning its collection of her work in 1996 and commissioning her a year later. WAC bought an early edition of “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” in 2005 and held the artist’s first museum solo survey exhibition, “Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love,” in 2007.  

Walker had burst onto the national scene in the mid-1990s after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, earning notice for provocative work that satirized notions of the “genteel” antebellum by peeling away its surface for the horrors that lie beneath. In 1997, she won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship when she was only 28. 

She also proved a controversial figure. The Detroit Institute of Art removed one of her artworks from a group exhibition in 1999 because of protests, and the Newark Public Library covered a piece of hers in 2012, later uncovering it. WAM, for its part, places a wall covering over the large open doorway, so visitors can’t see the exhibition until they walk past warning language at the entrance.

Kara Walker: Signal Station, Summit of Maryland Heights, from
Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005 Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan

“We wanted people to have a moment,” said WAM senior curator Diane Mullin. “Many of these images and works are unsettling to people.” 

In 2005, Kara Walker decided to take images from the Pictorial History and use them as source material for a new portfolio called Harper’s “Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated).” The portfolio uses 15 woodcuts and lithographs from the Harper’s collection, which are enlarged and overlaid with screen prints that channel racist tropes. Walker’s prints interrogate the original illustrations, juxtaposing them with her signature silhouette figures of stereotypical Black characters. They jar the viewer with grotesque and violent imagery and question the missing stories of Black enslaved people left out of the historical images. 

The work aims to provoke questions about who is missing from the historic images, while also deconstructing the tropes contained in the stereotypical images, according to Diane Mullin, senior curator at WAM. “One of the things Kara Walker is really interested in is the stereotype and how related that is to silhouettes, which was a sort of charming way of doing portraiture in the South in the 18th and 19th century and earlier,” Mullin said. She noted that Walker intentionally confronts pseudoscience discourses of the period as well, like the belief that the shape of one’s head has relation to intelligence. 

These discourses may be debunked now, but elements of them linger. The phrases “high-brow” and “low-brow,” for instance, which are still used today, come from the fact-less science of phrenology. “A lot of the things that we say that are common parlance that comes out of 19th century American English, which comes from a very racialized point of view,” Mullin said. 

Mullin said WAM became interested in the series four or five years ago. “We were interested in the way this spoke to issues around war, issues around internal strife,” she said. The museum was also interested in the way the work resonated with the polarized moment in our history, she said. 

The exhibition was organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art and The Museum Box, and it pairs Walker’s suite of 15 large-scale prints with an artist named Winslow Homer. Homer contributed to Harper’s Weekly as one of the artists the magazine sent to the front lines to be embedded with Union troops. Walker doesn’t include his illustrations in her “Annotated” series, but his style is similar to the works she does deconstruct. Seeing the two bodies of work together offers additional context to Walker’s project, which in turn points to missing narratives from the earlier collection.

Winslow Homer: The War for the Union, 1862 — A Bayonet Charge
(For Harper’s Weekly), 1862 Credit: MinnPost photo by Sheila Regan

If you go, be sure to also visit “Seeking for the Lost,” a solo show by Christopher E. Harrison, organized by the African American Interpretive Center of Minnesota and curated by JoJo Bell. For the exhibition, Harrison dove through the archives of The Appeal, a St. Paul-based Black press. His work uses ads from a column where family members sought loved ones who had been sold or “lost” during slavery and post-Reconstruction.

In his paintings, Harrison imagines what some of them might have looked like, with the text from each ad appearing in the portrait. These tender portraits fill out the narrative of each ad, imagining the missing people with dignity and grace.

Kara Walker: “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)” runs through Dec. 29, and “Seeking for the Lost” runs through Feb. 16, 2025, on Wednesdays 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Thursdays and Fridays 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 11 a.m.-5 p.m., and admission is free. More information here.

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