Recently, US art teacher Meg Getsinger visited US history teacher John Hughes's classes and taught a short lesson introducing contemporary artist Kara Walker.
Kara Walker is an African American woman who explores race, gender, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker’s silhouette images work to bridge unfinished histories of the antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular.
The students viewed a short video clip of Walker speaking about her work and were then asked to create their own visual narratives about a particular historical event or narrative in American history that they have studied thus far.
We had a lively discussion prompted by these probing questions:
- Does history represent all of the people who have participated in it? Why or why not?
- Walker speaks about the silhouette as a medium of avoidance because it prevents the viewer from looking at the subject directly. What does this mean in relation to Walker’s subject matter?
- How have different stories about the Civil War framed our understanding of the events and consequences of that time?
- How do history textbooks, movies, slave memoirs, and novels like "Gone With the Wind" represent those stories in different ways?
- How do viewers relate to the anonymity of the silhouette?
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| Alex Antonelli '13 | George Duan '13 |
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| Elias Bello '13 | Hannah Thoms '13 |