“What Artist Martha McDonald Might Teach Us About a Nation Divided”
“What Artist Martha McDonald Might Teach Us About a Nation Divided”
by David Ward
Smithsonian Magazine
September 16, 2015
Connecting the present to the past is the central mission of historians, and especially historians who work in museums. A new exhibition, “Dark Fields of the Republic,” which I curated for the National Portrait Gallery, looks at the photography of Alexander Gardner, a student of Mathew Brady, who was among the first to document the horrors of the Civil War battlefields. During the heroic and tragic middle period of the American 19th century, it was Gardner's shocking images of the dead that helped usher in the modern world.
Martha McDonald, a Philadelphia-based performance artist had been drawn to the question of Victorian mourning rituals in her earlier works The Lost Garden (2014) and The Weeping Dress (2012) and when we asked her to create a piece to accompany and amplify the themes of the Gardner show, she readily agreed.