2014.1.4.2
Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, 1997; Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times
Artist
Kara Walker
(Stockton, California, 11/26/1969 - )
Title
Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, 1997; Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times
Creation Date
1997
Century
late 20th century
Dimensions
9 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 5/8 in. (23.5 x 20.96 x 1.59 cm)
Object Type
book
Creation Place
North America, United States
Medium and Support
bound volume of offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes on wove paper
Credit Line
Gift of The Peter Norton Family Christmas Project
Copyright
This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s
Copyright Terms and Conditions.
Accession Number
2014.1.4.2
Modeled after a children’s pop-up book, Freedom: A Fable transforms Kara Walker’s well-known cut-paper tableaux of black silhouettes from the scale of architectural to the hand-held object. The work’s title, a female slave’s post-emancipation life, is a double entendre. The fable is not only the book’s form but also its politics—namely, the dark ironies of freedom’s promises amid the failures of Reconstruction. The book’s laser-cut silhouettes maintain the delicacy of the artist’s more well-known hand-cut scenes, but its intimate scale and interactive quality are unique in Walker’s oeuvre. Rather than remain immersed within and surrounded by theatrical life-size dramas of the lives of slaves and masters in the antebellum American south, the viewer holds the narrative in their hands, literally controlling the movement of bodies and scenes that animate the dark history of the American Civil War and its aftermath, and the transformation of one woman’s hope.
