Feature image: After Appomattox (Fig. 2)
Written by Donato Loia
On Sunday, October 11, 2025, at 11 a.m., I spoke with American artist William Blake about his exhibition Brothers’ Bones Beside at Gallery Victor in Chicago. Through the gallery’s glass façade, we could see participants in the nationwide No Kings Protests against the Trump administration moving toward the Brown Line subway.
The event had been rescheduled from evening to morning, inadvertently coinciding with the protest. We decided to proceed, adjusting the start time so attendees could join the demonstration afterward. The overlap felt fitting: Blake’s exhibition, with its charged reflections on the American Civil War, resonates powerfully with the political unrest of the present.
Blake’s paintings—figurative, grounded in nineteenth-century American traditions, and executed with academic precision—initially appear accessible, even familiar. Yet beneath their surface lies a complex meditation on history and its representation.
For more than two decades, Blake has participated in Civil War reenactments, often embodying the painter Winslow Homer. This long-term engagement infuses his work with a conceptual depth: his paintings do not simply revisit the past—they probe how the past continues to live within the American imagination.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Donato Loia (DL): Let’s begin with the title, Brothers’ Bones Beside. It’s evocative and haunting, maybe even a little ominous. Who are these “brothers”?
William Blake (WB): The title comes from an 1862 recruitment song, We’re Coming, Father Abra’am—sometimes just Father Abraham—linking Lincoln directly to the biblical figure. It’s essentially a propaganda song.
Within the song there’s a line that goes, “We lay our bodies down for freedom’s sake, our brothers’ bones beside.” It’s a haunting image—a kind of unflinching call to martyrdom. The language itself suggests that martyrdom has already taken place and will continue that so many men have already died, and now more are needed to join them. In that sense, the “brothers” are already martyrs.
That lyric echoes through the show—monuments, commemoration, and painting’s role when confronted with war.
DL: I want to start by imagining the viewer entering the gallery. Immediately to the left, they encounter a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 life mask (Fig. 1). The mask doesn’t feel celebratory; it carries something ominous, a fading aura of grandeur—as if even the legacy of the man who saved the Union and proclaimed emancipation now stands on uncertain ground. The copy connects directly to the Union recruitment song that inspired the show’s title, as you mentioned.
Directly facing the viewer, and positioned beside Lincoln’s mask, is After Appomattox—a work that feels like a point of departure, or even a statement piece for the exhibition (Fig. 2).
Like the Lincoln piece, After Appomattox begins from an existing image, yet, as in much of your work, a citation is filtered through a personal interpretation. I know artists sometimes hesitate to speak too directly about intention, but could you walk us through how After Appomattox developed and the kind of effect you hope it produces?
WB: I’ve been a painter for quite a while now, and part of that has meant interrogating what it is I actually do. When I look at painters of the past—the lineage I feel connected to—I find a kind of foil in the artist John “Jack” Adams Elder, a Virginian who studied in Düsseldorf with Emanuel Leutze, the German-American painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware.
Elder went on to fight for the Confederacy after his studio was bombed during the Battle of Fredericksburg. He fought at Gettysburg and at the Battle of the Crater—a battle where surrendering Black troops were massacred. He later painted that battle in the style of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, with the Confederate battle flag in place of the French tricolor.
So, he’s deeply embedded in the Confederate cause and this Romantic lineage.
In After Appomattox, I copied one of Elder’s paintings that, to me, is the image of the Lost Cause: a Confederate soldier painted just after Lee’s surrender to Grant, which Elder witnessed. That image later became a bronze monument to the Confederate dead in Alexandria—eventually removed after George Floyd’s murder. So, this painting carries a lineage: from painting, to monument, to toppling, and now, back into painting.
DL: By turning the Elder’s soldier’s image to the side, you seem to anticipate the later history of the work—the moment when it becomes a monument, and then is ultimately toppled. Was that connection intentional for you?
WB: I found it impossible to really copy the painting as it was. When I look at it, I don’t just see a tenderly painted grief-stricken man with a well-placed temperature shift in the forehead, I see a painter who’s romanticizing his sacrifices to uphold a society of enslavement. I also see the brutality of the post-war nadir and the painting being used for a monument to that brutality. A monument that then finally topples among the grief of Floyd’s murder.
So, my copy started as a bit of an amalgamation of the Elder painting and the bronze statue, the sculptor changed a few things like giving him more hair and muscles, a subtle act of revisionist history. I kept the forehead of the painting, but his uniform became the green oxidized bronze of the monument. And yes, it’s also not standing anymore.
DL: Your discussion of After Appomattox reveals how many layers of history are condensed in a single image. But let me play, just for a moment, the role of the “annoying” radical professor. Isn’t it risky to revive an image that memorializes a Confederate soldier? Especially one that later became a monument in Virginia — a symbol of the Confederacy until its removal after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. And then there’s the addition of the flowers: couldn’t that be read as an act of mourning, or even of honoring, a deeply problematic legacy?
Do you ever worry that these symbols — or citations like this one — might be misunderstood, or seen as reclaiming something controversial?
WB: It’s always a concern to bring a painting to an audience. Painting, for me, has been a very personal engagement—a way of having a sense of history.
When I started reenacting here in Illinois, there were more Union reenactors than Confederate ones. The unit I was part of — the 7th Illinois Cavalry — would “cross-dress,” as we used to say, by portraying Confederate cavalry during battle. So, we’d switch roles. I did that as a kid. So, from early on, I was already within the performance of embodying the Confederacy—not fully consciously, but out of a practical necessity.
Later, as I got more into painting, I thought of Philip Guston under the hood, or Kiefer performing the Nazi salute — not to glorify it, but to confront it. That’s how I think about After Appomattox: working within the tension rather than looking away.
The flowers entered as a kind of failure of me continuing the portrait. I began layering flowers over the soldier, because flower painting is, to me, the most quintessential painter’s subject. Many artists, as they age — think of Manet — turn to flowers. They’re intimate, quiet, beautiful. I’ve always imagined myself one day retiring to just paint flowers.
So, when I couldn’t finish this copy, when it felt too heavy, I started adding flowers — real flowers from my garden, and symbolic ones from painters I admire. There’s a Matisse daisy, a Jacob Lawrence flower, and several by Abbott Henderson Thayer, who I think is the best flower painter—and also the artist who helped develop camouflage for the U.S. military.
The violence is still present. There’s a bit of anxiety about how far to take it. I could have covered the entire painting and erased the soldier completely, but I stopped short. There is a push and pull between what’s visible and what’s hidden. Erasure felt too easy. He needed to remain visible — not to honor him, but to keep the Lost Cause exposed.
DL: Well, I’d say that even in moments of political turmoil, it’s still worth loving flowers. Turning now to the other painting-manifesto in the exhibition: To See a New Nation (Fig. 3), as with After Appomattox, this painting is built through multiple sources. I’m sure you’ll tell us more about that process. But before, I want to share an initial impression—something I felt almost immediately when I saw the painting.From a distance, I thought the severed head on the floor belonged to the statue itself. The figure of George Washington appears headless. I read it as a metaphor for the loss of reason. It made me think about how many leaders today often speak to the gut, to the underbelly — and they seem to react impulsively, without clear thinking or direction, to political circumstances. Of course, once one learns more about the painting’s sources, that interpretation becomes morecomplex. But my first reaction was that this image speaks not only to the past, but to something deeply contemporary: a growing irrationality of the political sphere.
Compared to your earlier shows, this one feels charged with a clearer sense of anxiety—as if something ominous is either about to happen or already underway. In many ways, your work seems to mirror the anxiety many people in the U.S. feel today — a fear that something fundamental is fracturing from within.
WB: I don’t know anyone who isn’t anxious these days. Houdon’s Washington is considered the most faithful likeness we have—he cast the face from life—yet the body is a neoclassical costume: Cincinnatus with a plough and fasces. So even the “truest” Washington is already an ideal, a national story wearing realism as its surface.
That’s why the head of the Apollo Belvedere sits at his feet. In the nineteenth century, Apollo wasn’t only admired; it was used as the diagram of the “ideal head” in racial science—sitting at the top of a hierarchy. Beauty, classicism, and virtue were braided into a visual logic of supremacy.
By dethroning the Apollo head, I’m trying to visualize the scaffolding that made Enlightenment virtue, classicism, and whiteness read as one noble image. We know he was an enslaver; that history isn’t hidden. What’s often hidden is how intertwined aesthetics and ideologies are.
These images get revived whenever national identity is in crisis. During the Civil War, the Union and Confederacy literally fought over Houdon’s Washington to claim inheritance of the United States. We’ve watched that recur with the Houdon copy in the Rose Garden. The recent toppling and reframing of monuments have also brought the question of what a nation chooses to see (or not) back to the surface.
Homer uses a similar mixing of realism and myth. When he drew Lincoln as the president-elect for Harper’s Weekly, he fused Brady’s Cooper Union photograph with a Titian-like backdrop: realism over an inherited ideal. Crafting how a president is seen.
To See a New Nation works in that same friction—not erasing the symbol, but shifting the vantage point, like Homer or Eastman Johnson painting Mount Vernon from an enslaved entrance rather than the front. The painting sort of slows the image until its construction is legible—and maybe felt. The uneasiness comes from that layering: the past still moving through the present, and the present still reading itself through the past. The painting doesn’t resolve the tension; it sits in it, because we do.
DL: During the Civil War, artists like Winslow Homer, as you mentioned, worked directly from the battlefield. Even as photography was emerging as a tool for documentation, painters were still responsible for recording history. That’s one lineage within history painting — the artist as eyewitness, capturing an event with a sense of immediacy and accuracy. But there’s another lineage: the artist as interpreter — the one who idealizes or mythologizes an event or figure. Houdon’s sculpture of Washington belongs to that tradition. It blends fact and imagination, objectivity and idealization — and, as with much history painting, it also edges into the territory of propaganda.
Today, those functions have shifted. Documentary film, investigative journalism, photography, even social media posts and tweets now record, shape, and mythologize events — often in real time. What is the role of a painter interested in history today? If painting is no longer expected to document or idealize, what kind of space remains for historical painting?
WB: There’re fewer rules. For me, the available space is far less about my ability to “record” or to “edify,” but to make the image-logic visible: how pictures inherit, project, and reorganize values in the present.
That’s why reenactment has stayed central in my practice. From the beginning I wasn’t painting historical figures; I was painting people performing them—contemporary bodies carrying the past for their own reasons. It’s already a present-tense image, and the painting becomes a way to feel that transmission.
And yes, I look to painters who have reactivated history with painting—Kerry James Marshall among them—artists who absorb the tradition and redeploy it to build their own canon.
DL: A quick step back to monuments: what does a monument actually do today? How do you see your paintings positioned in relation to that function? I’m asking because this question feels especially charged right now. Beyond removals, there are also new monument campaigns—such as the NEH-funded proposals for the “National Garden of American Heroes”—and exhibitions like MONUMENTS, co-curated by Hamza Walker at The Brick, which directly addresses the legacy of Confederate monuments and treats their removal as part of their own history. With renewed federal and cultural pushes for “inherently American” classicism in art and architecture, monuments sit at the center of a broader struggle over how the past is narrated—and who gets remembered.
How does After Appomattox and To See a New Nation fit within this larger discourse on monuments and memory?
WB: I was in Philadelphia when Monument Lab began, and “what does a monument do?” was very much alive. For me, monuments declare who or what a society believes is worth valuing, and by extension, worth protecting. And when that belief breaks, many monuments record their own undoing. The graffiti, the dents, the melting down — that becomes part of its meaning. You see that clearly in the MONUMENTS exhibition: the toppling is now part of the history, not an interruption of it.
I don’t think my paintings are doing that same civic work. A monument requires a public — a “we.” My paintings come from a much more solitary vantage point. They’re not proclamations so much as examinations. Reenactment gets closer to monumenthood than my paintings do — it’s a living monument, constantly renegotiated through repetition rather than fixed in stone.
That instability isn’t abstract. In 2017, I was at Gettysburg for an encampment, and there were militia groups patrolling because they thought Antifa was coming to pull monuments down. The Hells Angels were there. One man even shot himself in the foot. The fight over a monuments authority continues.
After Appomattox was first painted by a witness to what Robert Penn Warren called the moment when the Confederacy was truly born — the immortalized Lost Cause. The image moves from memory to painting, to a bronze, and then to toppling. To See a New Nation looks at a similar process in real time: Washington as a usable symbol, claimed again and again. Trump moving Houdon’s Washington copy into the Rose Garden is the same inheritance struggle the Union and the Confederacy staged during the Civil War. The painting lets me see that transfer of legitimacy — not as something settled, but as something still in motion.
DL: Reenactment adds something especially compelling to your paintings. In this exhibition, that aspect comes through most directly in Stag Dance and To Illinois (Fig. 4-5).
What’s the impulse behind participating in something like that? I’m curious how you understand both the conscious and unconscious motivations at play.
And second, more specifically about your own practice: when you reenact, say as Winslow Homer, are you fully stepping into character, or are you always William Blake — aware that you’re performing someone else?
WB: Painting and reenactment feel like parallel practices. My entry into reenactment came through childhood curiosity, really — as a kind of fascination. I think, for many people, there’s a desire to be part of something larger than yourself. That’s what it did for me, but there are many reasons people reenact.
I’ve taken part in tactical battles where there’s no audience at all — just reenactors doing it for themselves. Once, while portraying Winslow Homer, I woke up in camp to the sound of gunfire. Since I was “the reporter,” I went to see what was happening. As I came over a rise, the sun was coming up, there was smoke everywhere, the crack of musket fire — the Rebel Yell echoing across the field. Some of the men around me were crying. It was a deeply emotional space.
In some ways, those are the same sights and sounds those soldiers would have experienced — but, of course, it’s also a false connection. It’s spectacle, fantasy. No one’s actually getting shot. There’s no real fear. It’s a play — but a very serious kind of play. It can be an incredibly moving experience, one that goes beyond education or commemoration.
To answer your question about the level of embodiment, I move in an out of it, but there is also the privilege of playing Homer that other figures just don’t really allow. There are aspects of the past which should be examined, but not fully embodied. You can image reenacting a massacre of the War or just simply walking through a camp and listing to the language used. One of the extreme examples of this would be the reenactments of a slave auction performed at Colonial Williamsburg. If you’re going to show the history, you should show the history and not anesthetize the horrors to appease an audience who might just want to be entertained. It gets complicated very fast.
At large events — I’ve seen some with 15,000 Confederate reenactors under the battle flag, singing songs, shouting the Rebel Yell — there’s a certain reality to that spectacle. You start to sense the scale of the war, the intensity, the uncertainty of it. You can speculate what’s it’s like to not know how it will end. How you may not survive it, or your family may not survive it. The reenactment creates this kind of bubble of intensity — an echo of history that feels immediate, physical.
In that sense, it’s not unlike painting. When painting a master copy or just the act of looking at a painting: you sort of inhabit the painter’s choices because your body is in the same spot they were when looking and creating. Reenactment and painting both let me feel the past through an action in the present, which is why they have been central in this show.
DL: Reenactment is a kind of play, but perhaps that fiction is necessary to make sense of what has already happened. When you’re in the middle of an event, you can’t truly understand it; you’re too close. So there’s a distance that only fiction — or something like reenactment — can provide. Maybe I’m idealizing its value, since for some participants it might simply be a way to spend a weekend with friends. But I do think reenactment carries psychological, cultural, and historical weight for a society.
And perhaps there’s something even larger at stake — not just understanding, but healing. I can’t help but think of your work in dialogue with a broader group of artists and filmmakers who use reenactment as a way to process the past. I’m thinking of Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave — his restaging of a violent episode in British labor history — or Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, where former death-squad members reperform their own crimes for the camera. In both cases, as in your work, reenactment becomes a way of revisiting traumatic histories through repetition — almost in a psychoanalytic sense. It’s as if the act of replaying history might open a space for repair.
Do you see your work as part of that broader conversation around reenactment in contemporary culture? And in your view, is reenactment about healing — or is it more about understanding? I’m also thinking of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir — another powerful example of how re-staging memory can become a way to confront it.
WB: You mentioned reenactment as a means of healing — but it can just as easily reopen wounds or make people angry all over again. You brought up Jeremy Deller and The Act of Killing, I’d also like to mention Pocket Guide to Hell’s reenactment of the Haymarket Riot here in Chicago, part of the city’s long history of labor movements. Reenacting those events can reignite the emotions tied to them; it’s a way of feeling the anger again, of making the past present.The Civil War carries that same charge. There’s so much death and violence bound up in it that people want to give it meaning — to find something redemptive in the loss. Out of that war came extraordinary things: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. So, in some ways, reenacting the war is an attempt to honor that transformation, to make sure the deaths weren’t meaningless. That’s the poetry of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — dedicating a cemetery so that those men “shall not have died in vain.” So, when you see attempts to undermine those rights they died for, you’re more than angered by it. Reenactment works like that: it can give shape and purpose to memory, even when it’s painful.
DL: How do your paintings engage with those emotional layers — the mix of empathy, grief, and tension that reenactment can stir up — especially in works like To Illinois and Stag Dance?
WB: In both To Illinois and Stag Dance, reenactment and painting are ways of holding onto something— but they hold in different registers. Reenactment holds time using recursive bodies, and painting holds those bodies in oil.
To Illinois imagines the daylight before the Sultana exploded, largest maritime disaster in US history. Where going home was still possible. These POWs had already endured battles and prison camps before the tragic sinking. I didn’t want to paint the disaster, or the spectacle of it — I wanted to hold the moment of return that never arrived. That’s why the figure repeats: memory comes back in loops, not in sequence. It revisits the place of longing.
The standing figure in the background comes from designing a quarter reverse of Washington Crossing the Delaware for the U.S. Mint. I chose not to depict Washington in the design, he’s already on the front; I focused on the men in the boat, as Washington probably would’ve liked. But some folks insisted the silhouette of the oarsman must be Washington — as if there has to be a heroic father-figure steering us through the waters. That reflex stuck with me. So here he becomes a kind of echo of that impulse — not Washington himself, but the expectation of a leading father. Of course, there’s a bit of the Homeric epic in their journey home. The exhibition has Father Time, Father Abraham, a founding father, a father and son. So, this figure fits in that.
Stag Dance holds a different kind of longing. These war time stag dances happened in a suspended world that wasn’t quite war and wasn’t quite civilian life either. There’s a sort of seductive nostalgia. I was very much looking at Homer’s great painting of two women dancing together on a summer night and the moonlight dance of Paula Rego’s late husband. [1] The Naval reenactors in the waltz are father and son. It became more about inheritance — about a dance with our past.
I was thinking about how grief and desire sit beside each other in these reenactment spaces, the same way they sit beside each other in painting. You reach for beauty because something has been lost. You recreate a world because you know it can’t return.
Both paintings are trying to hold that unsteady terrain — the part history doesn’t keep: not the climax, but the suspended moment before and after, when understanding is still unsettled.
DL: Before we conclude our conversation, I have one final broader question on your work. I want to ask you a question that touches on something rarely talked about in contemporary art circles: the idea of academic art. Today, that word — academic — almost sounds like a critique. What interests me in your work is how it reconnects — consciously or not — to certain academic lineages: the tradition of nineteenth-century American painting,
What interests me in your work is how it reconnects — consciously or not — to certain academic lineages: the tradition of nineteenth-century American painting, ertainly, but also perhaps something of the French academic painters. Your use of live drawing, your attention to proportion and structure, your engagement with historical subjects — these are all features of a tradition that was once central to art education.
So here’s my question: Do you see your work — or your approach — as having anything in common with the academic traditions of the past? How do you think those academic tools or values — like life drawing, technical skill, and idealized form — operate differently today, in a context where the artist is often expected to embody “total freedom”?
WB: I teach figure drawing and painting, so I’m biased, but I don’t hear “academic” as a slur. There are probably more Gérôme admirers now than in the 19th century. [1] I think of it less as an ideology than a craft.
For me, academic training today means a way of learning how to see — sizing, value scales, edges… Those are tools of perception, not rigid ideologies. Total freedom means having access to all of the tools. The old cast halls smashed in the 60s have been rebuilt in ateliers, and I don’t see that as nostalgic — it’s just another lineage. Black Mountain College and Howard Pyle’s school feel, to me, like different branches of the same tree.
Historically the academy was tied to theology — “made in the image” as a way of dignifying the gaze. I don’t share the theology, but I do care about the regard: the idea that looking can be a worthwhile act. Life drawing is one of those places in art school where that happens — where you slow down enough to register complexity before you interpret it.
So yes, there’s overlap with the academic tradition — but not as obedience or restoration. It’s a craft inheritance I can work inside critically. These tools let me hold contradictions in an image without flattening them and let me use the language of history painting without pretending it’s neutral or abandoning it altogether.