GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW: Dressing for the Carnival is a fascinating image of postwar, post-reconstruction Black life as Homer imagined it.

NARRATOR: When Winslow Homer returned to Virginia in the 1870s, he found that the long shadow of the Civil War still loomed over Black communities struggling to assert their freedom and identity.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania:

GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW: One of the things that I love about Dressing for Carnival is this older woman at the center who has a pipe in her mouth, and she's holding a needle between her finger with an invisible thread that connects her to the man at the center. The younger woman on the left also is sewing this man into his costume. And we forget the ways that people in the 19th century inhabited their clothing. Clothing didn't have zippers, Velcro, and spandex, elastic. Rather buttons would have been extremely precious, and lots of clothes you needed to be stitched into.

NARRATOR: After the Civil War, women and children became the primary focus of Homer’s depictions of both Black and White communities—following the deaths of more than 750,000 men during the conflict. The loss of Black men, in particular, made women central to the reconstitution of African American life.

GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW: And in this case, as they pull their needles through the costume of the man at the center, they're building that life. They are creating it, they are sewing it, they're making it happen – in spite of the fact that so many of their family members have been lost to the war effort or to the struggle to make a living. And we see them being the center of those communities.