Early Use of Silhouettes
Silhouettes - small, paper cutout portraits also known as profiles, shades or shadows - represented a sea change in portraiture. “They were strikingly affordable, and this was at a time when painted portraits were so expensive, they were only available to elites - to white men, sometimes to their wives, sometimes in particularly wealthy families, their children,” says Brandon Fortune, National Portrait Gallery chief curator. “Black Out” focuses on that accessibility.Moses Williams: A Pioneer in Silhouette Art
One notable figure in the early history of silhouette art is Moses Williams (1777-c. 1826-1854). Born into slavery, Williams grew up in the household of Charles Willson Peale. All of Peale’s children learned an art; in fact he named his sons after famed artists Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Titian, and Rubens. At Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, Williams operated the physiognotrace, a portable device used to create a reduced size profile of a sitter.Williams was also taught an art, but while Peale’s sons studied painting, Williams had only the physiognotrace, a silhouette-making machine used to trace a reduced outline of the sitter. After finishing the tracing, Williams cut the profile from the white sheet of paper and discarded it. The profile was then placed over a darker color of paper. Yet that did not stop him from success. As the historian Paul R. Cutright notes, in his first year working at the museum, Williams produced more than 8,000 silhouettes for eight cents each.The precision in Williams’s portraits was impressive, especially since he created them on such a mass scale. Each was just stamped “Museum,” so his attribution as an artist was obscured. Shaw highlights an 1803 silhouette portrait labeled “Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles.”
Williams was freed in 1802 at the age of 27, and set up shop within Peale’s Museum. He married Maria, a white woman who had worked as the Peales’ cook, and bought a two-story house.
While it was in the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia since the 1850s, only in 1996 was it given critical attention and attributed to Raphaelle Peale, but Shaw theorizes it may be a self-portrait, revealing both Williams’s empowerment as an artist and lack of agency as a formerly enslaved man of mixed heritage, particularly through the hand-cut alterations to the machine-traced lines that extended the hair and smoothed its curl.
“By deviating from the original form line, I believe that Moses Williams purposely created an image in which his own features would connote tropes of whiteness rather than blackness,” Shaw writes.
The Enigmatic Form
The form is considered enigmatic as it simultaneously reveals some of aspects of a subject’s appearance, while obscuring others. They were mostly commissioned as a portrait of self or family, but in some cases, such as those of enslaved people, they documented property.| Artist | Key Contributions |
|---|---|
| Moses Williams | Pioneering silhouette artist, mass production of silhouettes using physiognotrace. |
| Kara Walker | Contemporary artist known for provocative silhouettes addressing race, gender, and power. |
| Auguste Edouart | 19th-century artist who created silhouettes of diverse subjects, including marginalized individuals. |
The Harlem Renaissance and the Silhouette
During the Harlem Renaissance, African American artists explored various mediums to express their identities and experiences. In the visual realm of his sinuous graphic art Richard Bruce Nugent adopted the motif of the silhouette to express both vibrant scenes from Harlem’s night life and queer circles, as well as chilling illustrations of lynching murders.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.
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For silhouettes seem to completely suspend identity due to their aesthetic of ambiguity. By specifically highlighting this aesthetic of ambiguity and taking transatlantic modernism as overarching research framework, this dissertation project investigates how the adoption and reception of the ambiguous visual motif of the silhouette negotiated with the socio-political aspirations of the time and contributed to the imaginations and creations of new African American individual and collective identities.
Kara Walker: A Contemporary Master of Silhouettes
How Does Kara Walker Make Her Silhouettes? - Artists Behind the Art
Walker's Signature Style
Walker’s signature style is epitomised in her black-and-white silhouette works, which draw heavily on the visual language of 19th-century cut-paper silhouettes. These pieces, such as “Gone: An Historical Romance,” use stark contrasts to depict scenes of violence, exploitation, and racial subjugation, forcing viewers to confront the grotesque and often hidden aspects of American history.“Gone: An Historical Romance” portrays an array of disturbing scenes, including sexual violence and racial humiliation, with figures engaged in acts that blend horror with a twisted form of romance. The work’s title itself is a play on the sentimentality of the antebellum South, drawing from both Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” and Harlequin romance novels.
In addition to her silhouette works, Walker has created powerful sculptures and large-scale installations that further her exploration of race and history. Notably, “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” a massive sugar-coated sphinx-like figure installed in the former Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn in 2014, addressed themes of industrial exploitation, racism, and the commodification of black bodies.
Themes and Contexts in Walker's Art
Walker’s art consistently interrogates the intertwined themes of race, gender, violence, and power. Her works often depict disturbing and violent interactions, exploring how these dynamics have shaped and continue to shape societal structures.Kara Walker’s art is deeply rooted in historical and cultural contexts, drawing on the legacies of slavery, the Civil War, and the Jim Crow era to critique contemporary racial dynamics. Her works engage with and subvert traditional historical narratives, presenting a counter-narrative that foregrounds the experiences and voices of the oppressed.
The historical contexts that Walker engages with are fraught with violence and oppression. The antebellum South, a period romanticised in American culture, was in reality a time of severe brutality and exploitation of African Americans.
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Reception and Impact of Walker's Work
Kara Walker’s work has had a profound impact on the art world and beyond, eliciting strong reactions from both critics and the public. Her pieces have been lauded for their boldness and critical engagement with difficult subjects, yet they have also sparked controversy for their explicit depictions of violence and sexual exploitation."Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now" Exhibition
The exhibition “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now” explores this relatively unstudied art form by examining its rich historical roots and considering its forceful contemporary presence. Highlights of the historical objects include a double-silhouette portrait of a same-sex couple and a rarely seen life-size silhouette of a nineteen-year-old enslaved girl, along with the bill of her sale from 1796.The featured contemporary artists are Kara Walker, who makes panoramic silhouettes of plantation life and African American history; Canadian artist Kristi Malakoff, who cuts paper to make life-size sculptures depicting a children’s Maypole dance; MacArthur-prize-winner Camille Utterback, who will present an interactive digital work that reacts to visitors’ shadows and movements; and Kumi Yamashita, who “sculpts” light and shadow with objects to create mixed-media profiles of people who are not there.“What you have here is a way to create a very direct, one-to-one representation of your body through this digital artwork, just like a silhouette,” said Fortune. Only here, it’s temporary, as more visitors interact with the piece or the lines dissolve.
Kumi Yamashita’s minimalist works sculpt light and shadow. Careful manipulations of paper form shadow human profiles in “Origami,” created the weekend before the exhibition opened.
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