White Guise

Alison Saar’s woodcut and relief print, White Guise, is a visual allegory of strength, resolve, and self-determination. Its subject, a young Black woman with hair bound into an elaborate cotton-boll crown, holds a blood-stained flatiron in her hand, a tool of servitude that has been transformed into a symbol of her defiance. The print’s title alludes to the growing of cotton, the cash crop that flourished in the American South and helped drive the enslavement of Africans and African Americans between 1619 and 1865, when Confederate leaders surrendered to the Union Army to end the Civil War and the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, outlawing slavery. In the war’s aftermath, many formerly enslaved people became tenant farmers, sharecroppers, or domestics, landless workers who were often exploited and abused by white landowners.