Randi Bjornstad of the Eugene Register-Guard covers the opening of the show Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker’s Tales of Slavery and Power at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene.
The article explains the origins of and influences on Ms. Walker’s work. Further, it describes its components:
“It’s a provocative exhibit, pulling no punches when it comes to its depictions of domination, whether physical, emotional or sexual. But it uses silhouettes instead of more representational figures to give viewers a chance not only to take a breath but to infer their own interpretations of what the artist is saying.
Besides “Emancipation Approximation,” the exhibit includes another section that uses pictures from a book called “Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War,” published in 1866. Walker’s cutout silhouettes are superimposed on them to introduce a sense of the effect these horrific events had on blacks of the time — or their probable reactions to them.
“A continuous-loop video…uses a shadow-puppet format to document the nightmarish and often brutal straits experienced by former slaves during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, as based on records amassed and preserved in the National Archives.”
The show runs from January 25 through April 6.