“The Arabella Freeman Series” by Artist Hilary Harkness

A assortment of latest operate by Brooklyn-based mostly artist Hilary Harkness. By her portray apply, Harkness reimagines histories that comment on sociocultural forces with a present-day revisionist sensibility. Her earlier paintings concentrated on the Earth War II era, and her most recent physique of function, “The Arabella Freeman Series,” 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 Plan, in which Harkness began reworking Winslow Homer’s legendary Civil War period portray, Prisoners from the Front, 1866, by shifting the race of a single of the figures to a Black Union soldier.

“With that as a genesis, I commenced to understand that changing the race of 1 character was not these kinds of a easy tweak,” Harkness describes. “How would this be doable, supplied the history and rules set into location to protect against Black prosperity, freedom, and citizenship? My questions generated much more issues. I read, I wrote, I painted, attempting to make feeling of the planet as it was in order to paint it as I wanted it to be. This sequence provides an alternate narrative centered all over an enduring partnership between Homer’s protagonist, Union Typical Barlow, and a fictitious, cost-free Virginia landowning African-American family members, the Freemans.”

See a lot more from Hilary Harkness underneath!