“The Arabella Freeman Series” by Artist Hilary Harkness

A choice of latest get the job done by Brooklyn-primarily based artist Hilary Harkness. By way of her portray follow, Harkness reimagines histories that comment on sociocultural forces with a present-day revisionist sensibility. Her before paintings concentrated on the Environment War II era, and her most recent entire body of perform, “The Arabella Freeman Sequence,” is an ongoing episodic venture. Now represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery, the sequence was conceived as section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Copyist Plan, in which Harkness started reworking Winslow Homer’s iconic Civil War era portray, Prisoners from the Front, 1866, by switching the race of one of the figures to a Black Union soldier.

“With that as a genesis, I began to recognize that switching the race of one particular character wasn’t such a very simple tweak,” Harkness clarifies. “How would this be attainable, given the history and regulations put into place to protect against Black wealth, independence, and citizenship? My issues created extra questions. I examine, I wrote, I painted, seeking to make feeling of the globe as it was in get to paint it as I desired it to be. This series offers an option narrative centered about an enduring relationship among Homer’s protagonist, Union Common Barlow, and a fictitious, absolutely free Virginia landowning African-American household, the Freemans.”

See far more from Hilary Harkness down below!