Kara Walker

Kara Walker (born November 26, 1969, Stockton, California, U.S.) is an American installation artist who uses intricate cut-paper silhouettes, together with collage, drawing, painting, performance, film, video, shadow puppetry, light projection, and animation, to comment on power, race, and gender relations.

Her father, Larry Walker, was an artist and chair of the art department at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. She showed promise as an artist from a young age, but it was not until the family moved to Georgia when she was 13 that she began to focus on issues of race. Walker received a bachelor’s degree (1991) from the Atlanta College of Art and a master’s degree (1994) from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she began working in the silhouette form while exploring themes of slavery, violence, and sex found in sources such as books, films, and cartoons.

In 1994 Walker’s work appeared in a new-talent show at the Drawing Center in New York. Her contribution was a 50-foot (15-metre) mural of life-size silhouettes depicting a set of disturbing scenes set in the antebellum American South. The piece was titled Gone, an Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Negress and Her Heart. That work and subsequent others, such as a series of watercolours titled Negress Notes (Brown Follies) (1996–97), caused a stir. Some African American artists, particularly those who participated in the civil rights movement, deplored her use of racist caricatures. Walker made it clear that her intent as an artist was not to create pleasing images or to raise questions with easy answers. She also explained her use of the silhouette by stating that “the silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does.”

In 1997, at age 27, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” Her work was exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, and she served as the U.S. representative to the 2002 São Paulo Biennial. She was on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York City.

In 2006 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City featured her exhibition titled After the Deluge, which was inspired in part by the devastation wreaked the previous year by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The exhibition juxtaposed pieces from the museum’s own collection—many of which depicted black figures or images demonstrating the terrific power of water—with some of her own works. The intermingled disparate images created an amalgam of new meaning fraught with a discomfiting ambiguity characteristic of much of Walker’s output. Two subsequent major exhibitions were My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, a comprehensive traveling show organized in 2007 by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Rise Up Ye Mighty Race! (2013), for the Art Institute of Chicago.

Walker’s first sculptures were commissioned for a temporary installation in the former Domino Sugar processing facility in Brooklyn, New York, just before the building’s scheduled demolition in 2014. The work, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, featured a colossal 35-foot- (10.7-metre-) tall sugar-coated polystyrene female sphinx and a cortege of molasses-coloured candy figurine boys hauling baskets and bananas. With a kerchief knotted on her head and exaggerated nose and lips, the sphinx recalled the stereotypical “mammy” figure, while her bare breasts and provocative pose that exposed her genitalia suggested an obliging object of sexual desire. The engaging yet disquieting installation attracted more than 130,000 visitors during its eight-weekend run. Drawing from the work’s full title, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, many critics lauded the piece for raising challenging questions on, among other complexities, slavery, racial stereotypes, and the female sexual object.

In 2019 Walker exhibited Fons Americanus (“Fountain of America”), a commission for Tate Modern in London. Recalling Buckingham Palace’s Victoria Memorial, which celebrates England’s once-expansive empire using traditional allegorical forms, Fons Americanus instead commemorated, albeit sardonically, the victims of the empire. The nearly 43-foot (13-metre) marblelike fountain featured rough-hewn sculptures that pitifully, sometimes unsettlingly, spurt water from their eyes, breasts, and jugular, while referencing art history, including J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), Dana Schutz’s controversial painting of Emmett Till (2017), and the ubiquitous figures of Venus.