Scholar to Discuss Kara Walker Exhibit

The New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) will host a lecture by scholar-curator Dr. Stephanie Sparling Williams on Kara Walker’s exhibit Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated).

Williams’s website says that she,

is a black feminist theorist and an Associate Curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum. She holds a Doctorate in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California (USC) and a Certificate in Visual Studies, also from USC. Her scholarly work is invested in modern and contemporary art histories, with a particular focus on the direct address, performance, conceptual, and feminist art making practices of women identified artists of color. Other research interests include auto-ethnographic approaches to visual studies, critical theory, institutional critique, and phenomenology.

In her lecture, Williams will discuss the exhibit, Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), which the Museum has said,

considers experiences of racism toward African Americans that were absent or only alluded to in historical representations of the Civil War. Created in collaboration with the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, New York, each print in the portfolio is an enlargement of a woodcut plate from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Chicago, 1866), overlaid with Walker’s silkscreen cutout figures rendered in solid black silhouette.

The Museum says that,

In each print, Walker appropriates illustrations from a two-volume anthology published in 1866 by Harper’s Weekly chronicling the Civil War, superimposing them with stenciled silhouetted figures. In her own fictive account, which centers the black body in a mélange of unsettling configurations, Walker challenges cultural authority over truth claims, as well as notions of power in the telling of history.

The exhibit is the first in the Museum’s 2020/20+ Women initiative, being held to coincide with the one hundredth anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteeing women the right to vote.

The lecture is to be on Sunday, February 2, 2020. It is to be from 3:00pm to 4:00pm at the Museum.

The Museum says that the lecture is, “Free for Circle level Members and above,” $7 for adult members, $5 for members who are seniors and students, $15 for adult non members and $12 for non members who are seniors. Tickets are available on an online tickets site.

The Museum says that members of the Museum,

enjoy benefits including unlimited free general admission for one year, discounts on programs and trips, invitations to openings and special events, discounts in the Museum Shop and Café on the Park, and more! Join at the Circle level for member access to over 1,000 museums across the country with the North American Reciprocal Museum Association.

Information on how to join NBMAA membership is on the Museum’s website.

The New Britain Museum of American Art is located at 56 Lexington Street, adjoining New Britain’s historic Walnut Hill Park.