SYDNEY A. SLATER

Reframing the Picture, Reclaiming the Past

Cornell Fine Arts Museum

January 14 – April 2, 2017
 

Reframing the Picture, Reclaiming the Past responds to the exhibition The Black Figure in the European Imaginary by presenting selected works by contemporary artists whose work transforms previous stereotypical representations of the black or colonized figure. The Black Figure in the European Imaginary assembles eighteenth and nineteenth-century European works that depict black people according to European preconceptions inflected by colonialism, slavery, and notions of the exotic. Taking hold of their heritage, the artists in Reframing the Picture confront the perpetuation of racialized stereotypes established in the past, seeking to forge a new and often challenging visual language. Kara Walker uses the

silhouette form as a means of exposing the brutality of slavery. Here, she creates printed silhouettes in order to restore the presence of black slaves to the Harper’s Weekly illustrations of the Civil War that omit slavery. Addressing slavery as a contemporary, though unrecognized practice, Hank Willis Thomas exposes the connections between historical slavery and the modern-day exploitation of black male athletes, in this case college students. Work by Lorna Simpson, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Lalla Essaydi contest and reclaim stereotypes of gender and race, although in radically different ways. As if emerging from the past, Whitfield Lovell’s charcoal drawing on wood of an unnamed African American woman evokes a haunting reminder of presence and loss. In these varied ways, Reframing the Picture, Reclaiming the Past is in active dialogue with representations that continue to inform the present, all too visible in images of race, gender, and “other” cultures that saturate our media today.

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This exhibition is curated by Rollins College Professor Susan H. Libby, Ph.D. and her students.

 

 

Exhibition List:

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Lalla Essaydi, Harem #I (detail), 2009, C-41 print on aluminum, 60 x 48 in., The Alfond

Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College, Gift of Barbara '68 and Theodore '68

Alfond 2013.34.055. Image courtesy of the artist and Howard Yezerski Gallery.

 

Lyle Ashton Harris, (American, b. 1965), Toussaint L'Ouverture, 1994, Dye diffusion transfer

print (Polaroid), 24 x 20 in., Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

 

Whitfield Lovell, (American, b. 1959), Patience, 2004, Charcoal on wood, radio, 11 x 8 1/2

inches framed, Purchased with the Michel Roux Acquisitions Fund Cornell Fine Arts Museum,

2015.10 © Whitfield Lovell. Image courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

 

Lorna Simpson, (American, b. 1960), Counting, 1991, Photogravure and screen-print

73 3/4 x 38 in. Museum purchase from the Anniversary Acquisition Fund. 1998.10.

 

Hank Willis Thomas, (American, b. 1976), The Cotton Bowl, 2011, Digital C-print, 50 x 73 in.

Image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, 2014.1.25.

 

Kara Walker, (American, b. 1969), Cotton Hoards in Southern Swamp, from the portfolio

Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, Offset lithography and silkscreen

39 x 53 in. © 2015 Kara Walker. Image courtesy of the artist, 2013.34.158