Kara Walker

This pair of works demonstrates how artists have used historical representations to address the issues of their own times. In her 2006 print Cotton Hoards in the Southern Swamp, Kara Walker stencils figures onto images from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866. Walker’s overlayed black figures reassert the stories of African Americans that have gone untold in the historical record.

In the 1857 painting, Alonzo Chappel inventively portrays the 1636 arrival of Roger Williams in what is now Rhode Island, imagining an enthusiastic welcome by the Narragansett people already living here. This heroicized image was created when U.S. policies were forcing many thousands of Native Americans onto reservations, freeing their homelands for European settlement.

While Walker’s work intentionally engages fiction to tell suppressed historical truths, Chappel’s composition embellishes a historical event to support the dominant power hierarchies in the era in which he lived.

To hear Lorén Spears (Narragansett/Niantic) discuss Chappel’s painting, go to https://risdmuseum.org/manual/422_the_landing_of_roger_williams.

[see also: 43.003]