innocence, for everybody is implicated. It is not a matter of morality, and morality might actually muddy the water. There is not good and evil; it is not black and white.” Her works primary purpose is to disrupt a popular notion of American slavery as a past event in which the victims and oppressors are clearly defined roles, with the victims serving purely as passive recipients and the oppressors serving as ubiquitously powerful actors. This complicated picture is best expressed in a piece some consider to be one of her greatest, being the 1995 installation titled The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (see Figure 8). This panoramic piece paints a picture of the cyclical and unending nature of grief and oppression within enslavement. This piece seeks to inject chaos into every understanding of the power structures of slavery its legacies in modern race relations. It creates gray areas in the perception of violence being passed down from white enslavers onto black slaves, between the commonly understood goodness of children and corruption of adults, between the sanctity of child birth and the foulness of defecation, and by doing so with a panoramic piece and with silhouetted imagery, tells many narratives within one image that all lack a defined begin, end, and central message. In this sense the primary role of Walker’s art in the collective understanding of slavery and the modern black experience is that of a disrupter. Specifically in terms of the violence of slaves against enslavers, Walker’s work in many ways updates the 19th representation of violence as a noble liberator to portray it as a more sinister, yet still understandable, type of vengeance. The violence that Walker depicts in The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven seems to be on one hand senseless, but in many of the instances, especially those of
innocence, for everybody is implicated. It is not a matter of morality, and morality might actually muddy the water. There is not good and evil; it is not black and white.” Her works primary purpose is to disrupt a popular notion of American slavery as a past event in which the victims and oppressors are clearly defined roles, with the victims serving purely as passive recipients and the oppressors serving as ubiquitously powerful actors. This complicated picture is best expressed in a piece some consider to be one of her greatest, being the 1995 installation titled The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (see Figure 8). This panoramic piece paints a picture of the cyclical and unending nature of grief and oppression within enslavement. This piece seeks to inject chaos into every understanding of the power structures of slavery its legacies in modern race relations. It creates gray areas in the perception of violence being passed down from white enslavers onto black slaves, between the commonly understood goodness of children and corruption of adults, between the sanctity of child birth and the foulness of defecation, and by doing so with a panoramic piece and with silhouetted imagery, tells many narratives within one image that all lack a defined begin, end, and central message. In this sense the primary role of Walker’s art in the collective understanding of slavery and the modern black experience is that of a disrupter. Specifically in terms of the violence of slaves against enslavers, Walker’s work in many ways updates the 19th representation of violence as a noble liberator to portray it as a more sinister, yet still understandable, type of vengeance. The violence that Walker depicts in The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven seems to be on one hand senseless, but in many of the instances, especially those of