The Cotton Pickers

Two young Black women move through a sunlit field heavy with cotton, baskets and a full sack weighing on them, one gazing pensively into the distance, the other lost in thought. Winslow Homer painted them just over a decade after emancipation, granting field laborers a grave, monumental dignity rarely seen in American art. Now at LACMA, the Cotton Pickers is quietly powerful and unresolved - the women's strength and inwardness set against the unending toil and uncertain freedom of the post-slavery South, their faces holding a whole history of endurance and unanswered hope.