Congratulations to Natalie Keating ‘25, winner of the Norman Holmes Pearson Prize for her essay, “Kara Walker and Sally Mann’s Transgressive Memorials to the Civil War: An Artistic Reexamination of the Past.” Each year, the American Studies department awards the Holmes Pearson for the best senior project in American Studies.
In her essay, Natalie explores how Walker’s 2005 lithograph series Harper’s Pictorial History fo the Civil War (Annotated) and Mann’s 2000 photographic series Battlefields challenge the notion of a singular, unified national memory of the Civil War. Focusing on the artstis’ material techniques - Walker’s act of “annotating” historical images and Mann’s use of the wet collodion process - Natalie argues that these works create alternative memorial spaces that confront the country’s violent past and its ongoing echoes in the present. These artworks insist that history should not be neatly contained or forgotten.