Kara Walker

American (b. Stockton, California, 1969)

Kara Walker is a printmaker, installation artist, filmmaker, painter, and professor. She is best known for her paper cut-out silhouettes, usually of black figures placed against a white backdrop. Walker’s compositions rework stereotypical iconography to portray a subverted power relation within the grotesque plantation life in the south. The art narrates stories of oppression, liberation, romance, and sadism, challenging Western constructions of gender, race, violence, sexuality, and identity. She received her B.F.A. from Atlanta College of Art and her M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1994, Walker presented a cut-paper silhouette mural called, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart. The piece presents the Antebellum South in regard to a reality of sex and slavery. Walker uses the theme of folklore in the Antebellum South as a way to trace a contemporary identities of race and gender. Her imagery is profound in the way it exposes the United States’ racist history. Aside from her cut outs, she has also done large installations, watercolors, gouaches, video animation, and shadow puppets. In 2005 she created an immersive exhibit using sound and imagery called 8 Possible Beginning or: The Creation of African-America, A Moving Picture. Walker also presented a major survey exhibition, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love in 2007 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Walker continues to participate in exhibitions; her latest, A Subtlety. or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, was a large-scale installation that was held at the Domino Sugar Factory in New York City.

Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, 1997; Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, 1997

Kara Walker (American, born 1969)

bound volume of offset lithographs and five laser-cut, pop-up silhouettes

9 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 5/8 in. (23.5 x 20.96 x 1.59 cm)

Gift of The Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, 2014.1.4.1. © Kara Walker

Text excerpt from Kara Walker’s “Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times,” 1997

Taking the form of a children’s pop-up book, Freedom: A Fable transforms Kara Walker’s monumental cut-paper silhouettes into a hand-held object. The work’s title is a double entendre. The fable is not only the book’s form but also its politics—namely, the dark irony of the promise deferred of freedom, amid the failures of Reconstruction. The viewer holds the narrative in their hands, literally controlling the movement of bodies and scenes that animate the dark history of the American Civil War and its aftermath, and the story of one woman’s hope. Freedom follows the thoughts and actions of a newly emancipated woman about to embark to her new world, in this case Liberia. In the passage presented here, the woman contemplates her relationship to Africans she will encounter, dreaming of a sense of belonging in the new land.

African/American, 1998

Kara Walker (American, born 1969)

linoleum cut on cream wove paper

46 1/2 x 60 1/2 in. (118.11 x 153.67 cm)

Collection of Alvin Hall. © Kara Walker

In the 1990s, Kara Walker revived the Victorian art of the cut-paper silhouette, a popular form of nineteenth-century portraiture. Her characters—ranging from enslavers to enslaved children—are often shown engaging in taboo acts of sex, violence, and debasement. She describes the semi–nude figure in this print as “your essentialist-token slave maiden in midair.” Without any background or context, this figure seems to be helplessly falling through a timeless void. While she has been both celebrated and criticized for appropriating negative stereotypes of African Americans, Walker seeks to reconcile with a painful, violent, and traumatic past through her artwork. Her surrealistic figures, which often force incongruent elements into uncomfortably tense proximity, refuse to resolve the horrific historical and psychological circumstances of slavery’s era, leaving us to wonder whether some resolution between racism’s past and present is even possible.

Crossover Artist, n.d.

Kara Walker (American, born 1969)

gouache on paper

9 1/16 x 12 3/8 in. (23.02 x 31.43 cm)

Gift of Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation, 2020.39.1. © Kara Walker

American artist Kara Walker is best known for her silhouette figures. These works are often the result of a series of preparatory drawings that explore subjects and develop compositions. Quadroon Song and The Hi-Brids suggest the artist reckoning with the effects of miscegenation on people of African descent. Presented in these drawings are faces with stereotypical physiognomic features such as large foreheads and big lips, possibly the artist’s signaling of an African ancestry. In Crossover Artist, Walker seems to question her relationship to her art, as the left figure appears to be merging with the stoic figure profiled to the right. Poor Baby depicts a woman spilling milk while a nest of snakes nips at her body, prompting the viewer to question the act of violence done to the Black body. Together, these drawings explore themes found across her practice.