Remember her saying, "no one's gonna let you know when you're an artist."
You have to claim that title and figure out what it means to you.
Kara Walker gained national and international recognition for her cut paper silhouettes.
She uses these silhouettes to depict historical narratives.
These narratives often allude to sexuality, violence, and subjugation.
Her forms are abstracted but representational.
They are fantastical but based on figures from historical documents and narratives.
Specifically, they deal with the legacy of slavery and the connections of Black people and their bodies in popular culture.
Dramatizes gender and race.
Weaves together present realities and historical narratives.
Works with the image as an icon.
Something that stands in for something bigger, something more.
Like the symbol of a heart or a tree.
Uses simplified images as a kind of iconography in a critical way.
Uses the cultural knowledge of the audience.
The audience recognizes the imagery she's using.
The audience weaves into the imagery.
The audience participates in creating the work.
The meaning of the work incorporates cultural and historical tropes.
Challenges the audience and viewers to recognize their own looking, their own seeing, and their own part in understanding these figures.
Often works with caricature figures with exaggerated features.
Her debut exhibition launched her career in New York.
She presented this technique that she developed publicly.
The piece represents caricatured antebellum figures engaged in violent and sexual interactions.
Silhouettes are cut from black paper and installed directly on the wall of the museum.
The silhouette technique has its roots in sentimental Victorian ladies' art of shadow portraits.
Ladies of society would create portraits of their friends by cutting out paper silhouettes and pasting them on white paper.
The scale of Walker's work is not of this sentimental Victorian portraiture.
It alludes more to the 360 degree historical cycloramas that were popular during the post-Civil War era for the depiction of battle scenes.
Room-scale installations display painting in this immersive way where you can walk into the image.
Walker has continued to use both the silhouette and the cyclorama form (immersive installation form).
She explores the nature of race representation.
She explores the history of figuration and narrative in contemporary art.
She builds a story using individual representations by putting them together in this linear way, where we can read it as a narrative.
She's commenting on the history of figuration in the narrative.
"Endless Conundrum, an African American Anonymous Adventuress"
In the piece, "Endless Conundrum, an African American Anonymous Adventuress" from 2002/2001, she interrogates the representation of the Black body by modernist artists from Matisse to Brancusi.
Kara Walker critically examines that fascination and specifically that fascination with depictions of Black bodies.
She's using satire and exaggeration.
To extrapolate what she is perceiving these modernists to be doing.
Turning it up even more.
Using a form, but exaggerating it so that it seems almost preposterous or kind of over the top.
Critiques these representations.
Pokes at this desire to depict certain bodies in certain ways.
She's working with things that she comes across in culture.
Addressing the visual culture that she lives in, that we live in.
She's working with concerns of her time, whatever that time is.
Images that circulate in our popular culture are also historical images.
There are no clean breaks with history.
History is always a part of our current dealing.
It shows up in traces, through the imagery that we use and create and circulate.
Video on Kara Walker's Early Practice
The video provides insight into Kara Walker's early practice.
It examines her process of working with paper cutouts.
It explores her motivations behind it.
It delves into her background as an artist.
Those things come into the work, and they matter for understanding the work as well.
Cyclorama was a major phenomenon of the nineteenth century.
It's just before cinema.
You enter into this rotunda slit.
It's like the peak of the painter's creative enterprise.
To make the painting surround the viewer and to create the illusion of depth and of space.
To lure the viewer into the feeling of being a part of the scene.
Most of my work, the illusion is that it's about past events.
The illusion is that it's simply about a particular point in history and nothing else.
That's really part of the ruse that I tend to like to approach the complexities of my own life by distancing myself and finding parallel in something prettier and more genteel, like that picture of the old self, that's a stereotype.
Started to read the book, "Gone With the Wind", and I was thrilled how, you know, engrossing that story was and how grotesque it was at the same time.
The romance of it, the storytelling, it was so rich and epic, and that was what I hadn't expected. I hadn't expected to be titillated in a way, but, you know, stories like that. I meant titillate.
It was so much fire for the work that I wanted to do.
Distressing part was always being caught up in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.
Scarlet in her desperation is, you know, digging up dried up roots and tubers down by the slaves' quarters, and she's overcome by an angry scent and vomits.
It scenes like that that, you know, might go washed over by the sort of vast epic structure of the story.
That was an epic moment.
A lot of my work has been about the unexpected, kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.
That kind of dilemma, that push and pull is the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make.
The silhouette lends itself to, you know, avoidance of the subject, you know, not being able to look at it indirectly.
My earliest memory of wanting to be an artist, I was three.
I was sitting on my dad's lap, and he was drawing in his studio to the garage or house in Stockton, California.
I remember thinking to myself that I I wanted to do what he did.
He used to give me chalk to draw on his sidewalk, you know, with, you know, document my creations.
When we moved from California to Georgia, I know that I was having nightmares about moving to the South. You know? The South was already it's a place loaded with, like I said, mythology, but also a reality of, you know, viciousness.
It was just such a a frightening prospect to to be sort of borderline between child and teenager and going into an environment where black kids are being targeted.
Still not in Georgia.
This is where I did most of my growing up.
Stone Mountain
It's like a Mount Rushmore type thing for the Confederate heroes.
That is pretty significant.
Stone Mountain was a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.
That place had a little bit more resonance.
It was just so in your face.
There was no real hiding the fact.
You know, what what black stands for in white America, what white stands for in black America.
We're all loaded with our deepest psychological perversions and fears and longings.
Most of these studies have to do with exchanges of power, attempts to steal away from others.
I was tracing outlines of of profiles, and I was thinking about physiognomy and racist sciences and minstrelsy and shadow, the dark side of soul.
I thought, oh, you know, I've got black paper here.
I was making silhouette paintings, but they weren't the same thing.
It seemed like the most obvious answer it took me forever to come to, which was just to make a cut in the surface of this black thing.
You know, this black paper, and if I just made a cut in it, it was creating this hole.
You know, it was like the whole world wasn't there for me.
I also get interested in the melodramatic and sort of outrageous gestures.
I love mystery painting, artistic, you know, painterly conceit, which is to, you know, make a painting stage and to think of your characters, you know, your portraits or whoever has characters on that stage.
And to please frame a moment that is full of pain and blood and depths of drama and glory.
Just work this two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria.
Insurrection. Our tools were rudimentary.
He got his press on an image of a slave revolt around the South where the house slaves got after their master with their utensils of everyday life.
Really, it started with a sketch of of a series of slaves disemboweling the master with a soup ladle.
My reference in my mind was the surgical theater paintings of Thomas Eakins.
Overhead projectors created a space where the viewer's shadow would also be projected into into the scene so that maybe they would, you know, become implicated.
Overhead projectors are a didactic tool.
They're a schoolroom tool, so they're about I mean, in my thinking, they're about conveying facts.
The work that I do is about projecting fictions into those facts.
I began to love the kind of self promotion surrounding the work of the silhouette artist.
You know, they would have to show up in different towns and advertise their skills and sometimes very overblown language, starting their incredible skills, you know, able to cut, you know, in in less than a minute, you know, ten seconds for your you're sitting for your likeness accurate likenesses.
That was something I had to question, whole idea of accurate likenesses.
The work takes on this narrative structure, creates all the elements of the story, and I just need the viewer.
Like an author needs or a reader, to fill in the rest of the tension of the story.
This is a book I made in 1997 called "Freedom, a Fable, a Curious Interpretation of the Wit of My Negress in Troubled Times".
The negress as a term that I apply to myself is, you know, a real and artificial construct.
Everything I'm doing is trying to strip the line between fiction and reality.
It's not just examination of race relations in America today. I mean, that's a part of it.
It's part of being an African American woman artist.
It's about how do you make representations of your world given what you've been given.
Artists are always metabolizing, processing their impressions, their lives, the things that they see around them.
Things like observation, research, that all comes into Kara Walker's practice as well.
She's clearly very steep in her historical research and doing, like, very detailed historical analysis, looking for these, I think, like, historical anecdotes, materials, you know, just thinking about the portraitists and how they would, you know, promote their their practices in their advertising.
Even, you know, to find that kind of information, you have to go pretty you have to be very research oriented, and, you know, you have to look through all of this historical material.
Audience plays an active role even beyond representation.
They are forced to contend with it.
It has these two sides to it, with making these both legible and illegible.
It allows the audience to project.
Psychological projection.
You put yourself into narrative or into a situation.
When there is kind of a lack of detail, it might be easier to see that, conjure the details for ourselves.
We fill in the the spaces in between.
The characters as characters on a stage.
They're animated in the mind of the viewer.
Completing the.
Questioning what accurate likeness means.
We read images in different ways that we're presented with.
We don't just absorb them in the same way.
We are interpreting everything that we're seeing, whether we're conscious of that or not.
It makes a lot of sense that she then turns to animation and actually making these figures move and come alive in a certain sense.
Animation
In the early 2000s, she started to put these figures in motion using film and video.
In the video installation, "Calling to Me from the Angry Surface of Some Grey and Threaten to See, I Was Transported", Walker set her Black shadow puppet against intensely colored backgrounds.
She added a soundtrack of music by a southern country band.
Talks about mixing the genteel or the pleasant with the grotesque or the horrific.
For her, that contrast, that juxtaposition is really productive because it opens up this psychological space.
This work references both the history of slavery in America and also contemporary events of that of the era that was made.
In 2002/2003, the genocide in Darfur in Sudan.
Reminding viewers that images of Black bodies and pains continue to be a European or American's tactical.
The idea of of Black pain as a spectacle for for others.
She is commenting on historical historical facts and also the the events of or you could even say that she's speaking to the contemporary through the historical.
Using these historical historical aspects to talk about current events.
Seeing it still is not the same thing as seeing it move.
Later Work
In 2014, Walker produced her first site specific sculpture, which is titled "A Subtlety for the Marvelous Sugar Baby", which was installed in a warehouse in a former Domino Sugar Compound in Brooklyn.
The centerpiece for this sculptural exhibition was a monumental sphinx-like woman with caricature features and an aunt Jemima kerchief with walker fashion from blocks of Styrofoam or polystyrene.
Coated with white sugar.
The central figure is attended by thirteen molasses colored boys made of either cast sugar or resin.
With the materials that she's using, she wants to specifically remind us that refined sugar, which was once a luxury used to make table decorations that were known as subtleties.
Was harvested by slaves on Caribbean sugarcane plantations.
She's drawing this historical parallel.
She's connecting that with with the materiality of the piece.
The sweetness of sugar juxtaposed with that sordid history.
With the exaggerated features of the figure, she's trying to provoke thought and reaction.
In working with racist representations and stereotypes and appropriating that imagery, Kara Walker is telling stories of violence and oppression that also revolt.
She says that she's projecting tensions into facts.
She's drawing on historical facts that are embellished and made fantastical to speak about our world today and the existence of this history.
She has been criticized by other black artists who accuse her of feeding into the viewing audience's preconceived ideas about black people, sort arguing that this is doing more harm than good.
Others have defended her saying that black artists should be allowed to create any kind of art they want.
Why should black artists be limited by this responsibility?
Previous generations have fought for that very right.
Questioning the idea that art by black artists should be in a certain way.
Freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression.
The responsibility of interpretation lies with the audience.
She should be able to use this injury in a critical way and confront her audiences with it.
Kara Walker says that it makes people queasy, and I like that queasy feeling, that uneasiness of mixed with nightmarish.
Her response to this kind of critique about having to present a positive image, she has said, what is a positive black image? Is a positive image one that is honest? And if so, to whom and or what?
I think that images, these hand drawn characters I make, have the ambiguous duty of being both part of the real world, which is cruel and nasty, and the world of other images, which sometimes pretend to be noble but are often concealing disgusting intentions.
She wants us to consciously consider representation and to look critically at the imagery that we are presented with.
She wants us to take that active role.
"Fortuna and the Immortality Garden Machine"
A recent work for Tuna and that immortality garden machine is a continuation of her expressions of fantasy and humor, that confront troubling histories and dominant narratives, reallocating control in the process.
This body of work is inspired by a wide range of sources from antique dolls to Octavia Butler's novel, "Parable of the Sower".
It considers objectives of technology, and the possibilities of transforming the negative energies that play contemporary society.
A speculative sci fi installation, thinking about the role of the human and the history of slavery and servitude.
In relation to also to current debates over AI and its impact and what the future might hold.
She's questioning her own critical impulse, and she's trying to be more speculative and open to the future and not knowing what that will be.
Deals with historical narratives, this work has that as part of it as well, but it is much more about the future and trying to understand where we're headed or kind of what what this new age might bring and, I guess, really not knowing, and and and trying to
"Fortuna and the Immortality Garden Machine"
How a lot of my work arises is that I kinda get an interest, I do a little bit of research, and I start trying to figure out how it connects with my thoughts about, you know, having a black body and its abstractions as they've been concocted through colonial exploits and through chattel slavery and the attempts over decades and centuries of trying to reclaim our humanity from the power narratives that have destroyed it or mechanized that body.
Without really realizing it at the time, I was just thinking about the cyborg nature of having a black body in the first place.
The project really came about when I got COVID. I had already been thinking about illness and death and those cases that we all encountered during these long months of lockdown and quarantine.
It really became a creative exercise for me.
What does it mean to have a body if I can extend it with media?
Everything that I am mediating my life with is contained on a single screen.
Where does the soul questions.
We encounter a kind of mechanical wonderland, a kind of circus-like atmosphere, a circus-like atmosphere of automaton.
I was thinking of those prototypes for a whole new group of humanoid cyborgs.
They're all portraits of archetypal figures that populate the centerpiece for the garden as if mama.
I began working with unfired air dry clay.
I just started trying and trying and trying to figure out who these characters might be.
They took on different sorts of forms, some familiar, some unfamiliar.
From there, we made a three d scan of each one.
Those three d scans could be used to make bronzes or CNC cutouts, whatever we want.
Over the course of the last months, we've gotten a few test prints.
It's as simple as a version of paper mache, which just changes the surface enough and brings my hand back into the final stage of the process because I it is a piece where it goes from the hand to the machine back to the hand a couple of times.
With my treating bodies, my hips, whatever parts might be exposed with tissue paper or gummy paper, a little bit of gold leaf in places.
In the Roberts family gallery, the viewer will encounter a series of three display areas that populated by robo like black figures that seem to have emerged from the past or perhaps from the future, those two concepts collide in this work.
There's a central display area that I'm calling the settee.
In the settee is a field of obsidian, and on that field of obsidian are six of the eight automata performing a ritual of a resurrection.
The obsidian sort of fulfills the role of the natural element in the space, doing the sort of energetic work that a plant might do in another setting.
Fortuna of the title is overseeing the proceedings and offering.
This is fortunes, non sequiturs in the form of little paper slips or absolutions for the visitor.
My history with San Francisco is is kind of informed by, you know, a kind of love, you know, for the beauty of the place, and I failed to kind of understand its transformations over the last couple of decades.
One of those changes is the housing crisis and the sort of depopulation of the city, that there are fewer and fewer black people in a population that seems from the Second World War on to be, you know, somewhat thriving or at least present.
It's interesting to sort of engage with this version of technology and location that has so much invested in new technology.
It's a bit of a struggle to sort of feel like the city is is thriving in a way that it could.
For me, I felt I needed to learn the language of the place that I've been engaging with instead of what I had been doing was thinking about what was lost.
Making a large public installation that lives in the space for a long period of time means that it's going to encounter, you know, many different types of people, different groups.
Everybody's going to bring their reaction to the piece, into the space, and I think that's beautiful.
The one thing that I know that I can provide even if the work doesn't make sense is that if you provide a place to sit, which is one of my primary goals.
Working with representations of Black bodies, but there are some new questions that are emerging in this work.