Kara Elizabeth Walker (born November 26, 1969) is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, and university professor, who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Walker is most well known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes that interrogate romantic narratives of the antebellum South of the United States. She is regarded as among the most prominent and acclaimed Black American artists working today.
Walker was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Early life and education Walker was born in 1969 in Stockton, California. Her father, Larry Walker, was a painter and professor. Her mother Gwendolyn was an administrative assistant. A 2007 review in New York Times described her early life as calm, noting that "nothing about [Walker's] very early life would seem to have predestined her for this task. Born in 1969, she grew up in an integrated California suburb, part of a generation for whom the uplift and fervor of the civil rights movement and the want-it-now anger of Black Power were yesterday's news."
When Walker was 13, her father accepted a position at Georgia State University. They settled in the city of Stone Mountain. The move was a culture shock for the young artist. In sharp contrast with the multicultural environment of Central California, Stone Mountain still held Ku Klux Klan rallies. At her new high school, Walker recalls, "I was called a 'nigger,' told I looked like a monkey, accused (I didn't know it was an accusation) of being a 'Yankee.'"
Walker received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1994. Walker recalls reflecting on her father's influence: "One of my earliest memories involves sitting on my dad's lap in his studio in the garage of our house and watching him draw. I remember thinking: 'I want to do that, too,' and I pretty much decided then and there at age 2½ or 3 that I was an artist just like Dad."Wilson, Flo, "On Walls and the Walkers," "The International Review of African American Art" 20.3: 17–19. She found herself uncomfortable and afraid, however, to address the issues of race within her art during her early college years, worrying it would be received as "typical" or "obvious"; however, she began introducing them into her art while attending RISD for her master's.
Career Walker first became known for her oversize tableaux of cut-paper silhouettes, usually black figures against a white wall, which address the history of American slavery and racism through violent and unsettling imagery.Kara Walker Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has also produced works in gouache, watercolor, video animation, shadow puppets, magic lantern projections, as well as large-scale sculptural installations like her ambitious 2014 public exhibition with Creative Time called 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. The black-and-white silhouettes confront the realities of Western history while also using the stereotypes from the era of American slavery to relate to persistent modern-day concerns. Drawings also constitute a significant portion of Walker's body of work. The artist reserves a special meaning to this medium in her artistic practice as a space to confront the Western canon and find freedom from its historical criteria dominating painting: “I gravitated towards [drawing] pretty early on in graduate school […] partly as a way to escape the chains of western painting. […] Drawing transforms a blank page into a site of reflection.” A major retrospective dedicated to Walker’s drawings and archival materials was held at Kunstmuseum Basel in 2021.
She first came to the art world's attention in 1994 with her mural Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. This cut-paper silhouette mural, presenting an Antebellum South filled with sex and slavery, was an instant hit.Cotter, Holland. "Kara Walker." "The New York Times," n.d. The artwork's title references Margaret Mitchell's popular novel Gone with the Wind, and the individual figures in the tableau index the fairy-tale universe of Walt Disney in the 1930s. At the age of 28, Walker became the second youngest recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, second only to Mayanist David Stuart. In 2007, the Walker Art Center exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Oppressor, My Enemy, My Love was the artist's first full-scale U.S. museum survey.
According to an exhibition review on Art Tattler, "Walker's silhouette images work to bridge unfinished folklore in the Antebellum South, raising identity and gender issues for African-American women in particular.... Walker uses images from historical textbooks" to show how enslaved African Americans were depicted during that time. The silhouette was typically a genteel tradition in American art history; it was often used for family portraits and book illustrations. Walker carried on this portrait tradition but used them to create characters in a nightmarish world, a world that reveals the brutality of American racism and inequality. Walker incorporates ominous, sharp fragments of the South's landscape, such as Spanish moss trees and a giant moon obscured by dramatic clouds. These images surround the viewer and create a circular, claustrophobic space. The circular format paid homage to another art form, the 360-degree historical painting known as the cyclorama.
Some of her images are grotesque; for example, in The Battle of Atlanta, a white man, presumably a Southern soldier, is raping a black girl while her brother watches in shock; and a enslaved black male rains tears all over a white adolescent boy. The use of physical stereotypes such as flatter profiles, bigger lips, straighter nose, and longer hair helps the viewer immediately distinguish the black subjects from the white ones. Walker depicts the inequalities and mistreatment of African Americans by their white counterparts. Viewers at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003 looked sickly, shocked, and appalled upon seeing her exhibition. Thelma Golden, the museum's chief curator, said that "throughout her career, Walker has challenged and changed the way we look at and understand American history. Her work is provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet overwhelmingly beautiful and intellectually compelling." Walker has said that her work addresses the way Americans look at racism with a "soft focus", avoiding "the confluence of disgust and desire and voluptuousness that are all wrapped up in... racism".
Her influences include Andy Warhol, whose art Walker says she admired as a child, Adrian Piper, and African American satirist Robert Colescott. In an interview with New York's Museum of Modern Art, Walker stated: "I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things–genre paintings, historical paintings– the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society."
Process: Silhouette installations Walker may be widely known for her immersive site-specific installations. Walker plays and almost blurs the lines between types of art forms. Elements of her installations like the theatrical staging or the life-size cut figurines contribute to and somewhat evoke performative art behavior. As Walker has mentioned before, she talks more on the ideas and concepts behind the artwork rather than focusing on the initial aesthetic and visual aspect of it, creating more of a conceptual outlook.
Shelly Jarenski discusses Walker's art in the context of panoramas. Panoramas were a popular form of entertainment in the nineteenth century that usually depicted historical scenes or vast landscapes. Walker's work demonstrates that the aesthetic experiences embedded in the panorama (though those experiences are rooted in the particular contexts of the nineteenth century) persist as a concern in African American art, just as the social consequences of slavery and the racial narratives that structured it persist in shaping our contemporary cultural narratives of race and space. Walker's work demonstrates how immersive, panoramic installations can affect viewers, helping scholars better understand the visual experience that is often missing from historical records. When viewing Walker's panoramas, they are illustrative of past events or depictions of the enslavement of African Americans. Her ability to combine devices that were used in the past and recontextualize with the sinful scenes she creates in her large-scale installations deconstructs the aesthetic of these installations. As Jarenski mentioned in her article, Walker's panoramas provide a visual example of how her panoramas affect the viewers which is different from 19th-century panoramas which were limited to written sources. Walker's installations are able to create a contemporary visual interpretation and reinforce one of the themes of panoramas, to depict historical events.
Walker once explained her artistic process as "two parts research and one part paranoid hysteria", a description that captures the entanglement of history and fantasy that pervades her work. Even despite the rational aspect, there's a sense of uneasiness and complexity that ties and illustrates itself through her work.
Notable works In her piece created in 2000, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), the silhouetted characters are against a background of colored light projections. This gives the piece a transparent quality, evocative of the production cels from the animated films of the 1930s. It also references the plantation story Gone With the Wind and the Technicolor film based on it. Also, the light projectors were set up so that the shadows of the viewers were cast on the wall, including them as characters and encouraging them to assess the work's tough themes. In 2005, Walker created the exhibit "8 Possible Beginnings" or: "The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture," which introduced moving images and sound. This helped further immerse the viewers into her dark worlds. In this exhibit, the silhouettes are used as shadow puppets. Additionally, she uses the voice of herself and her daughter to suggest how the heritage of early American slavery has affected her image as an artist and woman of color.
In response to Hurricane Katrina, Walker created After the Deluge since the hurricane had devastated many poor and Black areas of New Orleans. Walker stated that she was bombarded with news images of "black corporeality". She likened these casualties to enslaved Africans piled onto ships for the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing to America.
Walker took part in the 2009 inaugural exhibition at Scaramouche Gallery in New York City with a group exhibit called "The Practice of Joy Before Death; It Just Wouldn't Be a Party Without You". Works by Kara Walker in 2011 include Fall Frum Grace, Miss Pipi's Blue Tale (April–June 2011) at Lehmann Maupin, in collaboration with Sikkema Jenkins & Co. A concurrent exhibition, "Dust Jackets for the Niggerati- and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings submitted ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker", opened at Sikkema Jenkins on the same day.