Child's Grave with Silver Trim, Hale County, Alabama
1975, printed 1988
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
chromogenic print
Dimensions
image: 7.94 × 12.38 cm (3 1/8 × 4 7/8 in.) sheet: 20.32 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Gift of Lee and Maria Friedlander)
Accession Number
2015.19.5070
Art Historical Context
William Christenberry's *Child's Grave with Silver Trim, Hale County, Alabama* (1975, printed 1988) captures a poignant slice of rural Southern life in the American Black Belt region. This chromogenic print, a vibrant color photograph measuring just 7 15/16 × 4 7/8 inches on an 8 × 10-inch sheet, depicts a humble grave marker adorned with silver trim—likely handmade and weathered by time. Christenberry, a pioneering artist from Tennessee, obsessively documented the architecture, signs, and landscapes of Hale County over decades, blending photography with sculpture and drawing to evoke memory a...
About the Artist
William Christenberry
William Christenberry (1936–2016) was an American artist whose career-long obsession with a small region of rural Alabama transformed the documentation of a place into one of the most sustained and poetic bodies of work in contemporary American art. Born in Hale County, Alabama — the same landscape made famous by James Agee and Walker Evans in their 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — Christe...