Harvard Art Museums’ Kara Walker work on view
Two years ago, the Harvard Art Museums purchased “U.S.A. Idioms,” a massive collage and drawing by the contemporary artist Kara Walker, who first rocked the art world in 1994 with her cut-paper silhouettes that evoked slavery’s horrors and lasting impact in contemporary America. Walker’s work made its long-anticipated Harvard debut last week. “U.S.A. Idioms,” created in the summer of 2017 in the wake of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., involving white nationalists and supremacists and counterprotesters, takes aim at the same subjects through a series of vignettes depicting African-American figures and oppressors. In the work, bodies are woven through the branches of a dead tree; others perch atop a stump. A torn Confederate flag waves from one branch. What appears to be a white flag hangs from another. Walker’s work speaks to the present moment “in a way that is so vital, so critical, so engaging,” said Mary Schneider Enriquez, Houghton Associate...