Silhouette art, with its inherent features of reduction, generalization, and anonymity, presents a unique lens through which to examine African American identity and history. This art form, seemingly suspending identity due to its aesthetic of ambiguity, has been employed by various artists to negotiate socio-political aspirations and contribute to the creation of new individual and collective identities.
Moses Williams: Pioneer of Silhouette Art
Moses Williams (1777-c. 1826) stands out as an early figure in African American silhouette art. At Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, Williams operated the physiognotrace, a portable device used to create a reduced-size profile of a sitter. After finishing the tracing, Williams cut the profile from the white sheet of paper and discarded it. The form is considered enigmatic as it simultaneously reveals some aspects of a subject’s appearance while obscuring others.
Silhouettes were traditionally made as physiognomic amusements (as in the Peale Museum) or as domestic crafts in the form of paper figure cut-outs mounted onto white paper or into pre-printed interior scenes.
Kara Walker: Challenging Narratives and Stereotypes
Kara Walker's work skillfully and intelligently addresses identity issues through multiple aspects of African American history. During her graduate studies, Walker encountered black paper silhouettes from the antebellum period and Victorian era. These highly detailed and evocative shadow figures provided the inspiration for Walker’s best-known work.
Walker began to subvert the traditional function of this sentimental craft form by using it to explore painful aspects of America’s past. Drawing upon slave narratives, popular persistent stereotypes, Civil War-related literature and film, and her personal experience as an African American woman, Walker designs elaborate and provocative 'imagined narratives.'
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Her work has been praised for its forthright and visually astute consideration of history, race, gender, and power relations. It has as often been condemned because of Walker’s willingness to confront the past using grotesque, violent, and self-deprecating “race” imagery and language. Walker’s visual language contributes to these opposite receptions.
She has adopted a traditionally white, genteel, outmoded art form in order to interrogate racist caricatures and imagine the most violent, sexually abusive, and demeaning master-slave narrative.
"African/American": A Dual Identity
"African/American" is one of Walker’s best-known works as it provokes questions central to her practice. The dual identity presented in the title also describes the figure as a symbolic figure that can be read as either African or American and a hybrid of both. Placing these words into opposition, separated by a slash immediately makes viewers confront the social, historical, and visual predicament of Americans with African blood. Walker willfully plays on all of these allusions.
The space of the silhouette can similarly be read as absence, place of projection, blank slate, the hole left by the cutting-out of an earlier denigrating representation.
Confronting Western Art History
The first piece that caught my attention on this subject was, The Means to an End…A Shadow Drama in Five Acts, and this piece is a significant example as to how Kara Walker combats the narratives of Western Art History. In this piece, we can see a series of five panels, all in black and white, decorated with the silhouettes of six characters. This piece includes subtle yet graphic representations of citizens of America, and how they have never been depicted.
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Kara does this as an attempt to reduce the image of people, taking away skin color, characteristics, and facial features so the viewer is not completely certain of who Kara Walker is depicting. She does this in order for the audience to “deal with their own prejudices or fear or desires when they look at these images,”. This is seen to be impactful on the audiences she displays them to.
Exploring Kara Walker’s Radical Use of Silhouettes | Art21
Consume: Gender, Ambiguity, and Race
Another piece Kara Walker created that breaks down the typical norms of Western Art culture was, Consume, created in 1998. This work still sticks to the same artistic style Walker creates, using a white canvas and a black silhouette of two people. In this painting, one person is significantly taller than the other; the tallest one being a women suckling her own breast, and the smaller one being a little boy suckling on the fallic shaped dress material of the women.
With this piece, Walker embellishes in the consumption of people as products of slave trade in the past, along with the consumption of breast milk in Walker’s versions of the Madonna lactans. This piece is combating the flaws of Western Art culture due to the fact that Kara Walker is attempting to denote gender, ambiguity, and race. By creating this piece, she is showing the boy performing a sexual act to “consume” the exotic female figure in front of him.
This goes along with previous notations of the white male having degrading stances on African American women and the “foreignness” of their appearance. The message being interpreted in this piece exemplifies the subconscious mind of the viewer once again. Kara Walker not only uses her work to get her audience thinking however, she impacts her audience to go deep into their minds to discover what their true intentions and how wrong they may or may not be. With these two pieces, Kara Walker recreates the social construction of Western Art culture.
The Aesthetic of Ambiguity
Yet it is striking to notice how, through its inherent features of reduction, generalization, and anonymity, the silhouette seems to visually and conceptually counteract the goals pursued at the time of opposing negative stereotypes about the African American community, of affirming its multifaceted contributions to the wider American society, and of establishing a compositeness of Black identities. For silhouettes seem to completely suspend identity due to their aesthetic of ambiguity.
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Key Figures in African American Silhouette Art
| Artist | Notable Work | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Moses Williams | Portraits at Peale's Museum | Early use of physiognotrace to create silhouette portraits. |
| Kara Walker | "African/American", "The Means to an End…A Shadow Drama in Five Acts", "Consume" | Subverting traditional forms to explore painful aspects of American history, race, gender, and power relations. |
