Special Exhibition

New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper

Sunday, November 19, 2023–Sunday, April 14, 2024

Location: 101A–B Prints and Drawings
James and Hanna Bartlett Prints and Drawings Galleries

Featured Art

About The Exhibition

New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper explores the myriad ways in which contemporary artists use storytelling to engage the imagination, scrutinize the past, and envision the future. Comprised entirely of prints and drawings, the exhibition features many recent acquisitions to the CMA’s collection. Pervading the works on view is an interest in narrative, whether fiction or nonfiction, personal, cultural, or mythic. Artists in the exhibition utilize history, people, or events; biographies of known or often unknown people; and various media juxtapositions to layer the past and the present day.

The two galleries that make up the exhibition are anchored by large-scale, multipart works. Jacob Lawrence’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1986), a series of 15 screenprints, recounts aspects of the Haitian revolution, the successful insurrection by enslaved and free people of color against French colonial rule in 1791–1804. Lawrence’s expressive style and tightly composed scenes narrate the revolution through the biography of one of its leaders, General Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803). Also featured is Kara Walker’s The Means to an End: A Shadow Drama in Five Acts (1995). This monumental five-part etching employs the style of historic silhouettes popular in the antebellum South to suggest a provocative narrative about race, gender, and power. Also featured are new drawings by Kerry James Marshall and Shahzia Sikander and prints by Camille Billops, Enrique Chagoya, David Wojnarowicz, Michael Menchaca, Renee Stout, and others.

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The Ecstasy of Saint Kara: Kara Walker, New York

By Reto Thüring, Beau Rutland, Kara Walker, John Lansdowne, Tracy K. Smith Photos by Ari Marcopoulos Over the past two decades, Kara Walker has relentlessly examined racial injustice in the United States both past and present. The Ecstasy of St. Kara debuts Walker’s most recent artworks, a series of large-scale drawings on paper. Stemming from her time at an artist’s residency in Rome, the new works echo that city’s long and tumultuous history––its complicated layering of cultures, traditions, and religions, especially Christianity. The new drawings question the notion of history itself, and examine how Walker envisions the rise and fall of society. Richly illustrated, this publication includes plates of each drawing as well as intimate photographs of the artist at work taken by her partner, acclaimed artist and filmmaker Ari Marcopoulos. An introduction by Reto Thüring and Beau Rutland contextualizes the importance of this latest evolution within Walker’s oeuvre; John Lansdowne addresses the topic of Christian iconography and its relationship to Walker’s new drawings; and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith contributes a new poem. In addition, a text by Walker considers her work within the recent political climate." 80 pages Published 2016

American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence

by Peabody Essex Museum "A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence's art: through the perspective of teens of color... An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives." ―Kirkus Reviews In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of “separate but equal,” the great African American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle. . . from the History of the American People. Lawrence, the best known black American artist of the 20th century, developed the series of thirty panels, each measuring 12 × 16 inches, over the course of two years. Lawrence created the panels as history you could hold in your hands and intended to reproduce the images in a book that he never realized. The paintings depict signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and feature the words and actions of founding fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. In January 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is mounting the landmark exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. The show, which unites the panels in one place for the first time in nearly half a century, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., on a two-year national tour. In the spirit of Lawrence’s project, this collection includes brief interpretive texts written by teens in response to the Struggle series. This illustrated book features a chorus of thirty singular young adult voices expressing how Lawrence and his Struggle series speaks to them on a personal, emotional level. The young writers come from a broad variety of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities, and underrepresented voices. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events, he saw happening around him in segregation-era America, these young adults use these panels to comment on their experiences in today’s America. 200 pages Published January 21, 2020

Kerry James Marshall Untitled (Studio) Mug

This mug showcases a detail from Kerry James Marshall's (American, b. 1955) Untitled (Studio) (2014) in The Met collection. The painting references Marshall's pivotal visit to the studio of his childhood idol, Charles White (American, 1918–1979)—the first time he saw an artist's workspace for himself—and serves as a tribute to the creative process. © Kerry James Marshall Porcelain 3 3/4''H; 3 3/8'' diam.; 12.5 oz Dishwasher and microwave safe

Collusions of Fact and Fiction

by Ilka Saal Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies. Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past, and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future. Published 2021

New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper

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About The Exhibition

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