In Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), now on view at The Frick Art Museum, the artist confronts the historical narratives that have long shaped American memory. Walker overlays enlargements of the woodcut illustrations with her signature black silhouette figures, a disruption that forces viewers to confront the absences embedded in the historical archive.
Composed of 15 large-scale prints, the exhibition revisits the two-volume Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, first published in 1866. The original publication, which sought to present an impartial account of the war, largely excluded or minimized the presence of Black people, enslaved, freed, or free-born, within its visual record. The touring presentation of this exhibition is organized by The Museum Box and curated by Lisa Hayes Williams, Associate Curator at the New Britain Museum of American Art, where the show debuted in 2020.
Dawn Brean, The Frick’s chief curator and director of collections, tells Pittsburgh City Paper that the museum began planning the exhibition several years ago, yet its resonance has only deepened in light of current political efforts to suppress Black histories.
“In many ways, Kara Walker’s work feels even more urgent today than when we first booked the show,” Brean says. “It’s particularly special to show this series during its 20th anniversary, reemphasizing how Walker’s work continues to speak to where we are in the present moment as much as where we were in the past.”
The original Harper’s anthology condensed four years of weekly issues into what it claimed was a comprehensive, objective history. Yet the visual record predominantly depicted white soldiers, generals, and political figures, recasting the war as a struggle over states’ rights and economic dominance between white men. By obscuring, redirecting, and re-inscribing these scenes, Walker’s silhouettes challenge the notion of historical objectivity.
Brean says, “It’s an act scholar Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has termed ‘remembering the disremembered.’”
The exhibition layout at The Frick furthers this dialogue between the original woodcuts and Walker’s annotations. Instead of presenting the works sequentially, curators intersperse Walker’s prints with original engravings by Winslow Homer, one of several “artist-reporters” who illustrated for Harper’s during the Civil War. This arrangement highlights how even the period’s most lauded visual chroniclers shaped public memory through omission and invention.
“Homer’s illustrations were not wholly factual depictions of what was actually happening,” Brean explains. “His works are as much a concoction as the ‘annotations’ Walker inserts into the historic prints. Seen together, Homer’s and Walker’s prints offer opportunities to see the parallels between the two bodies of work as a witness to American history.”
What makes The Frick’s presentation particularly distinctive is the inclusion of bound Civil War-era copies of Harper’s Weekly owned by the Frick family.
“These original editions, typically housed in the library at Clayton, are presented alongside Walker’s work, inviting further dialogue between historical and contemporary perspectives,” Brean says.
Walker’s imagery is often challenging and provocative, confronting the intersections of race, gender, violence, and memory with unflinching clarity. Some prints feature scenes of sexual violence or grotesque caricatures, reflecting the brutal realities of slavery that were sanitized or excluded from historical accounts. The Frick has included a content warning to prepare visitors for the emotional weight of the works. The decision to do so acknowledges the discomfort Walker’s art can provoke, and is an invitation to reckon with the various forms of trauma and violence that continue to shape American society.
The museum has partnered with over a dozen local artists, scholars, and cultural leaders to contribute guest labels, offering personal reflections on Walker’s work and its relationship to the region’s history. (Full disclosure: the author contributed a guest label to the exhibition.) This collaborative approach broadens the interpretive lens, moving beyond the institution’s voice to foster a more polyphonic dialogue.
Brean says the guest labelists’ reflections are often “thought-provoking, personal, compelling, and a call to action.”
Among the voices included are Black women artists and writers whose work addresses the ongoing erasure of Black histories in Pittsburgh. The city’s East End, where the Frick family amassed its wealth during the Gilded Age, remains a site of contested memory, as gentrification and displacement continue to impact Black communities.
“Having local perspectives woven into the exhibition deepens the connection between Walker’s work and the lived experiences of Black Pittsburghers,” Brean says. “These contributions reveal how the exhibition resonates not just on a national scale but within the fabric of the city itself.”
The exhibition ends with a reflection space where visitors are invited to respond to Walker’s work and consider what questions she raises. The Frick has also curated a selection of books that explore the exhibition’s themes, encouraging deeper engagement with the historical and contemporary implications of Walker’s practice. Visitors can also submit their own reflections, some of which will become part of the exhibition’s evolving dialogue.
The Frick’s presentation of Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is part of a broader institutional effort to interrogate historical narratives through a contemporary lens. This initiative is most visible in the museum’s reinterpreted tour of Clayton, the Frick family’s Gilded Age home, which explores the inequalities and power structures that shaped the era.
By bringing Walker’s work into conversation with these histories, the exhibition confronts the gaps and silences of the past, and invites audiences to consider how those omissions continue to shape the present. In a political climate where Black histories are under renewed threat, Walker’s work offers a counterpoint to erasure. Her silhouettes are an insistence, and a reminder that the stories of those rendered invisible by the official record demand to be seen. As visitors move through the galleries, they are compelled to reckon with the ways history is constructed, contested, and ultimately reimagined, making visible the lives and acts of violence the original illustrations sought to erase.
Brean highlights one of Walker’s quotes featured in the space: “The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events, a point in history and nothing else.”
“If visitors read nothing else, I hope they read that,” Brean says.
Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). Continues through May 25. The Frick Art Museum at The Frick Pittsburgh. 7227 Reynolds St., Point Breeze. $1-15, free for members. thefrickpittsburgh.org
This article appears in Feb 26 – Mar 4, 2025.
