KARA Walker
Kara Walker is a contemporary artist who creates works steeped in race, gender, and sexuality overtones.
Whichever medium she
uses
be it drawing, painting, sculpture, text, or film -- Walker is able to hold a mirror to society’s relationship with power
and violence.
Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California in 1969. She studied at the Atlanta College of Art (B.F.A.) and the Rhode Island School of Design (M.F.A.). She currently works in New York City.
On the left: An Army Train, from the portfolio Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005,
“Walker enlarged select illustrations and then overlaid them with large stenciled figures. The shadowy images visually
disrupt the original scenes and suffuse
them with traumatic scenarios left out of the official record. Mangled and grotesque figures escape the boundaries of the anthology’s pictures, expanding into the margins and the space of real life.”
On the left: Fons Americanus (2019)
At Smithsonian American Art Museum here in DC, Walker held an exhibition in 2019 titled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated). It was a series of fifteen prints based on the two-volume anthology published in 1866.
Walker’s works depict the violent histories of the past and is a reminder that these violations of power persist in the present.
On the left: Virginia’s Lynch Mob (1998)
“I don’t know how much I believe in redemptive stories, triumph never sits still. Life goes on. People forget and make mistakes. Heroes are not completely pure, and villains aren’t purely evil. I’m interested in the continuity of conflict.”
— Kara Walker
On the right: Four Idioms on Negro Art #4 Primitivism(2015)