Historical art references events from the past, and can take the form of contemporary art reflecting back on past events, or art that documents present episodes and becomes “historical” in retrospect. Contemporary art that refers to the past can have dark resonances with the present. This is particularly true in the work of Kara Walker, an artist whose work appropriates the form of popular Victorian era silhouettes. With this familiar aesthetic, Walker deals with difficult historical subjects like racism, rape, and slavery; all of which echo in contemporary American civil rights issues. Another artist working today, Kehinde Wiley, borrows the conventions of Baroque portraiture and sculpture, replacing the royal subjects with anonymous African Americans, thus bestowing a sense of grandeur on a subjugated class.

Art made at important moments in history can later serve as an important relic or document of that moment. Photographer Walker Evans gained employment by the Works Progress Administration, a division of Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the mid-1930s. Though the role of the WPA was mostly propagandistic, to promote the progress made under other New Deal programs, Evans steadfastly refused to think of his photographs that way. He insisted that they were documentary, and that their value would later be proved when they served as important and indelible records of a time and place. His prediction proved prescient, as his images of Depression-era America remain to this day some of the most iconic and recognizable pictures of that time. Photographers of the Civil Rights Movement made images that influenced both the course of history and our collective memory of that time. Photographers like Bob Adelmann, James Karales, Gordon Parks, Leonard Freed, and Bob Henriques caught moments both intimate and grand to make a visual record of an event that changed the nation.