Kara Walker, You Do, 1993-94 (detail). Cut Paper on canvas. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. The use of the traditionally proper Victorian medium, gives evidence of the her critical and artistic processes, creating a theatrical – yet controversial – space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate, seduce and inflict violence on one another.
Kara Walker, “Art in the Twenty-First Century”, production still, 2003 © Art21, Inc.
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
The exhibition at Witney Museum presents a comprehensive grouping of the artist’s work to date, featuring more than 200 paintings, drawings, collages, shadow-puppetry, light projections, and video animations that offer an extended contemplation on the nature of figurative representation and narrative in contemporary art.
Drawing her inspiration from sources as varied as the antebellum South, testimonial slave narratives, historical novels, and minstrel shows, Walker has invented a repertoire of powerful narratives in which she conflates fact and fiction to uncover the living roots of racial and gender bias. The intricacy of her imagination and her diligent command of art history have caused her silhouettes to cast shadows on conventional thinking about race representation in the context of discrimination, exclusion, sexual desire, and love. “It’s interesting that as soon as you start telling the story of racism, you start reliving the story,” Walker says. “You keep creating a monster that swallows you. But as long as there’s a Darfur, as long as there are people saying ‘Hey, you don’t belong here’ to others, it only seems realistic to continue investigating the terrain of racism.”
Witney Museum of American Art
Until February 3, 2008
Kara Walker, Darkytown Rebellion, 2001. Cut paper and projection on wall
Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
