The Shiftless Countryside of Emancipation, 2024

Kara Walker

Art

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.

The Day I Learned I Was a Woman of Color by Jorgelina Corbatta

Essays

One afternoon, several years into my tenure at Wayne State University, I got a phone call during my office hours from a journalism student who wanted to meet with me. When I asked her what it was about, she explained that one of my colleagues from the English department had given her my name because she thought it could be interesting to interview me, as “a woman of color,” about my experience at Wayne. When I heard that, I thought, A woman of color? Is she talking about me, or has she confused me with someone else?