Faust Interprets Civil War Images at Fogg

In honor of her inauguration and playing to her academic expertise, University President Drew G. Faust introduced a collection of prints exploring the ramifications of the Civil War at an exhibit in the Fogg Art Museum.

The exhibit featured Kara Walker’s reinterpretations of traditional Civil War images in fifteen large-scale prints. She combines lithographic reproductions from Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War with haunting silhouettes of black slaves screenprinted over them.

Faust’s appearance at the museum came the day after she announced the creation of a university-wide task force aimed at reinvigorating the arts at Harvard. The effort to better integrate the arts on campus has become an early centerpiece of Faust’s presidency.

At the event on Friday, Faust praised Walker’s work for reasserting the importance of race in society’s cycle of violence.

She said that it has become fashionable in many circles to marginalize the role of slavery and race in the violent culture of the Civil War.

“Kara Walker brings race literally and figuratively into the foreground,” Faust said, praising Walker’s work for reinforcing the prominence of the issue in American national heritage.

“We still, I believe, live in a world the war has made,” Faust said.

Pointing to a painting of dismembered body parts including a laughing head—called “Buzzard’s Roost Pass,” Faust said that the manic expression and carnival imagery in the painting echoed her own findings.

She said that she had come across many references to Civil War society as a carnival of death, in which violence was met with violence.

Using the paintings surrounding her, historical documents, speeches, and letters, Faust argued that the Civil War was dictated by the slave society and dominated by violence.

The presentation was part of a series in which Harvard faculty speak about exhibits related to their fields at different Harvard museums.

“President Faust demonstrated everything that they say about her being a terrific scholar and teacher here in the galleries today,” said Susan Dackerman, the museum’s curator of prints, who introduced the lecture.