Kara Walker uses the silhouette, that old parlor craft practiced by bonneted ladies, to create installations, prints, and paintings that stir intense controversy. The body of her work focuses on the antebellum South and the iconography and stereotypes surrounding African Americans,...
[more]Kara Walker uses the silhouette, that old parlor craft practiced by bonneted ladies, to create installations, prints, and paintings that stir intense controversy. The body of her work focuses on the antebellum South and the iconography and stereotypes surrounding African Americans, especially the images used to rationalize slavery. Through the negative shapes of the silhouettes, whether in paint, paper cutout, or etching, Walker constructs elaborate tableaux that tap into nineteenth-century history. Her work is no mere representation of the past, however. Even as she evokes the world of the plantation and the Civil War -- complete with slaves, soldiers, and southern belles -- the simplicity of the cutouts and the distortion of their shapes force viewers to exercise their imaginations in truly frightening ways. Droplets run from gashes, ropes snake upwards from necks, skirts are lifted to reveal strange shapes emerging from between legs. Walker's work is most profound when it plays on implication, hinting at the realities behind the myth of the old South; it is most uncomfortable when she parodies racist narratives with shocking depictions of blacks engaged in cannibalism or in seemingly perverse sex with either each other or with white masters.
Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, Walker moved to the South with her family when still a girl. There she encountered a world in which racial prejudice was actively linked in the collective imagination to the history of slavery. A place in which racial stereotypes like Uncle Tom were kept alive by a constant remythologizing of that past. Walker's artwork gained rapid recognition: since earning a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, she has exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide. In 1997 she became the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award. That she should receive such an honor is indicative of the impact of her work. To make sense of her narratives is to tap into our own racist knowledge and preconceptions. There are no labels in Walker's work, but her long and sometimes meandering titles -- "The Battle of Atlanta, Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire" or "Look Away! Look Away! Look Away!" -- set the stage, causing us to recognize instantly identities like the pickaninny, the cracker, the mammy, and the evil master. Ultimately the sexual and gothic elements of her tableaux are not entirely of her own devising. She simply gives us the outlines; we fill in the details for ourselves.
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