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Carrie Rebora Barratt: This is Carrie Rebora Barratt, curator—with my colleague Barbara Weinberg—of the exhibition “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765–1915” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The exhibition includes more than one hundred iconic works by many of America’s most acclaimed artists, who tell stories about their times by depicting ordinary people engaged in life’s tasks and pleasures. Their paintings range in date from the Revolutionary era to the eve of World War I. In William Sidney Mount’s 1847 painting The Power of Music, an African-American man listens in as a group of white men enjoys a fiddler’s tune. The artist was a fiddler himself, and a strong believer in the therapeutic value of music. Mount painted the picture in Stony Brook, New York, and the African-American man is known to be Robin Mills—a local landowner and elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church. This was one of the first American paintings that circulated widely as a lithographic print and was seen by thousands of Americans. It can be read as a picture about exclusion and racism, or, on the other hand, it can be viewed as a representation of the power of music to transcend division. We asked the artist Kara Walker to share her own interpretation of the painting. Kara Walker: I’m looking at what seems to be a portrait of a black man at the forefront. He’s in the |
