Kara Walker
The High and Soft Laughter of the Nigger Wenches at Night, in the Colorless Light of Day
Kara Walker has consistently interrogated the legacy of American myth making as it manifests through systems of race, sexuality, and violence. Her work leverages satire and archetypes to needle at the dominant narratives and prevailing dissonances of the United States’ own self-conception. In Walker’s work, the impulse to allegorize is thrown into stark, panoramic relief: history is the oft-repeated fable, power is the oft-wielded script, and her subjects are the preeminent players.
Since the start of her career, Walker’s monochromatic silhouettes have featured in scenes characterized by unfettered mayhem and darkly humorous referentiality. For her newest body of collage works presented here, Walker began by ignoring her own usual conventions, instead embracing the pleasure of color and creating formal compositional rules. Strokes of sumi-e ink and Gansai watercolor cast a mélange of shades over the cut-paper figures, effectively elevating the silhouette’s fundamental reduction of form with new dimensions of hue and texture. Arranged in a tangle of overlapping limbs and brushed contortions, Walker’s subjects appear closer to an abstracted landscape rather than coherent representation of bodily forms.
Through this, her large-scale collages intend to consider the role of the sublime in landscape art, and the romantic longing for some pure, organic natural order—paving over any individual or group that stands in its way or questions its logic. In contemporary political contests, such fantasies appeal to a return to nature while simultaneously looking towards an increasingly technologized, “post-work” future. The locational words in Walker’s titles further allude to this mythic sense of place and expansion. In a chromatic swirl of earthen pigments, her collage figures have become the topography, both compositional subject and setting upon which such towering ideals of freedom and individual determination are put forth.
- Kara Walker was born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, and raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award in 1997, and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work can be found in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), Rome; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.
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Website: karawalkerstudio.com
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