Activity: Create your own Victorian silhouette portrait
2. Kara Walker (b. 1969)
14
The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven , 1995 Linocut paper on wall
In pairs, take a photograph of your classmate in profile against a blank background. Print out the photo and tape it to a black piece of paper. Using very sharp scissors or an X-Acto knife (under the supervision of an adult), cut out the background. You will be left with the cutout of the person’s profile and an exact copy on black paper. Tape the black paper to a white background or put it in a white frame. Explore: Group discussion How might the Victorian silhouette portraits of you and your classmate tell a story of a lived experience? In pairs, write down a story, fictional or non, steeped in emotion. What other silhouettes might you add to your portraits that convey this story? Take photographs of your installation and share the image and your writing with our education team at museumeducation@oscars.org. Further reading Jordan Giles. “The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven,” in Afterlives of Slavery: An encyclopedia documenting contemporary representations of transatlantic slavery , at https://afterlivesofslavery.wordpress. com/visual-art/the-end-of-uncle-tom-and-the- grand-allegorical-tableau-of-eva-in-heaven/. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw. “The ‘Rememory’ of Slavery: Kara Walker’s The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven .” In Trauma and Visuality in Modernity , edited by Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg. Dartmouth College Press, 2006, pp. 158–88.
Warning: This piece contains explicit imagery that may be disturbing for some audiences
Reflect
• Describe what you see in this image? • In what ways does this artwork relate to filmmaking?
Information
This large-scale installation by Kara Walker is made with linocut black paper and adhesive on a curved white wall created in the style of a popular form of portraiture from the Victorian era called silhouetting. The work is an imagined visual history that probes the violent characterizations in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN (1852). “Reading” from left to right, the first depiction is of a woman with her child, described by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw as “involved in a moment of mutual nursing.” Next are images of enslaved children holding various objects circling a young woman wielding an ax above her head; a silhouette of an aging man engaged in sexual activity with a young girl; and finally, a very old man holding his hands in prayer while a fetus dangles from a cord hanging from his backside. Walker’s artwork rejects the mainstream narratives of a glorified ANTEBELLUM SOUTH, including depictions by white filmmakers well into the twentieth century, and presents a frank and graphic visual history from an African American woman’s perspective.
Kara Walker, The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eve in Heaven , 1995
*Words set in ALL CAPS are defined in the Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts (section F of this guide).
*Words set in ALL CAPS are defined in the Glossary of Key Terms and Concepts (section F of this guide).
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