This print originates from William Quigley’s 1995 Los Angeles Civil War series, inspired by the relentless imagery of the “11 O’Clock News.” The work examined how daily conflict — in America and globally — is fueled by racism, crime, political division, and the deeper human impulses that ignite violence and war.
Quigley’s studio stood near the epicenter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which erupted on April 29 — his birthday — marking a profound personal and civic inflection point.
Conceived just one month before its opening on October 13, 1995, the exhibition comprised 16 paintings, a carved sculpture of a 15-year-old Black Union soldier, and a 40-page hand-painted book interpreting a Civil War diary. As the series developed, its focus sharpened on the individual lives of soldiers, generals, and Abraham Lincoln — and, more pointedly, on the enduring struggle for freedom and dignity for enslaved people.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring enslaved people in Confederate-held territory free. Slavery was permanently abolished with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6, 1865.
The edition is limited to 40 prints — a deliberate reference to the promise of “40 acres,” stemming from William Tecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Orders No. 15 (1865), which proposed land redistribution to formerly enslaved families, later remembered as “40 acres and a mule.”
Hand-signed. Artist-supervised. Archival museum-quality print.
Limited edition of 40.
