Kara Walker
Issue #33
A traveling exhibit shows the artist’s career of provocative work
By Kelly Shindler
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Few artists can touch a nerve quite like Kara Walker. Armed with an X-acto knife and even sharper wit, the 37-year-old is best known for her large-scale cut-paper silhouettes depicting charged images of the antebellum South. Walker’s frenetic tableaux of masters and servants, men and women, and adults and children play out according to her singular interpretation of American history. These hypersexual, violent, and fantastical scenes tell a rather different story of slavery and race relations in the United States, provocatively suggesting that perhaps things haven’t progressed as much as we think.
Ever since Walker, straight out of graduate school at Rhode Island School of Design, stunned audiences with her 50-foot mural (Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart) that he created for a group show at the Drawing Center in New York in 1994, her art has plumbed our personal and historical psyches to mesmerizing and repulsive ends.
And critics and viewers alike have taken note. Her talent has inspired such accolades as the MacArthur “genius grant,” which she was awarded at age 27. But she’s also been the subject of negative crusades, including one by fellow black artist Betye Saar, who objected to the grant, calling Walker’s work “revolting.”
One can witness Walker’s vision, in all its expert and furious glory, in the first American museum survey of her career, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the show is traveling to ARC/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA through May 2008. This major exhibition provides an overview of Walker’s work since 1993 and includes not just her silhouettes but also paintings, drawings, installations, writings, and her recent explorations into film. Featured in the show are more than 100 works on paper, a new installation of Gone as well as Walker’s first animated film in color, ...the angry surface of some grey and threatening sea (2007).
Clocking in at number 21 in Time magazine’s recent list of the 100 most influential people and profiled in PBS’s acclaimed Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century documentary series, Walker already sees her impact far outweighing her years. Her work may not be easy on the eyes and if anything, it stings. But more importantly, it’s a clear call that nothing — not the silhouettes, films, or the walls she puts them on — is as black or white as history, fiction, or memory make it seem.
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