“The Arabella Freeman Series” by Artist Hilary Harkness

A variety of modern do the job by Brooklyn-based mostly artist Hilary Harkness. As a result of her painting follow, Harkness reimagines histories that remark on sociocultural forces with a present-day revisionist sensibility. Her previously paintings concentrated on the World War II era, and her latest overall body of get the job done, “The Arabella Freeman Collection,” is an ongoing episodic venture. Now represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, the collection was conceived as component of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Copyist Application, in which Harkness began reworking Winslow Homer’s legendary Civil War period painting, Prisoners from the Entrance, 1866, by shifting the race of one particular of the figures to a Black Union soldier.

“With that as a genesis, I commenced to realize that changing the race of just one character was not these types of a easy tweak,” Harkness clarifies. “How would this be feasible, supplied the record and legislation set into location to avert Black wealth, liberty, and citizenship? My issues generated extra issues. I browse, I wrote, I painted, attempting to make perception of the planet as it was in order to paint it as I needed it to be. This sequence presents an substitute narrative centered close to an enduring connection in between Homer’s protagonist, Union Typical Barlow, and a fictitious, totally free Virginia landowning African-American family members, the Freemans.”

See far more from Hilary Harkness under!