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Kara Walker, Winslow Homer, Blackness, & AI with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw | Lecture

As part of the opening day celebration of the exhibition, Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), the Weisman Art Museum presents a keynote lecture on "Kara Walker, Winslow Homer, Blackness, & AI" with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw.

The keynote lecture considers the ongoing engagement with Harper’s Weekly illustrations made by Winslow Homer and other artists during the Civil War by contemporary artists, like Kara Walker, who have sought to transform them, and by everyday art lovers who search for historical images of African Americans to add to their home decor. It will explore what insight these contested historical images might give us into the desires of contemporary art audiences in a world in which artificial intelligence is radically altering the terrain of art creation and consumption.

Kara Walker: Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) is organized by New Britain Museum of American Art and The Museum Box.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

A light-skinned, Black femme with salt and pepper, shoulder length hair smiles with teeth into the camera. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw wears red lipstick and a dark, navy blue dress.
About the Speaker
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the American context. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, The Art of Remembering, Essays on African American Art and History, (Duke: 2024), Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006), Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015), and I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women, at the National Portrait Gallery.
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