Kara Walker 1969-
By Isabella Bragoli
Kara Walker, The Keys to the Coup, 1997, Linocut on paper, 1175 x 1540 cm, Tate Collection, London.
Kara Walker is a contemporary African American artist known for her exploration of race, stereotypes, gender, and identity throughout American history. Born on November 26, 1969, Walker grew up in an integrated Californian suburb. At 13 her family moved to Stone Mountain, Georgia. This proved to be a shocking contrast to the widespread multiculturalism that Walker had experienced in California as a child. Walker’s images explore racism in the present and the vast social and economic inequalities that persist in America. Walker received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1991 and her MFA in painting and printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design three years later. Walker quickly found success after she left Rhode Island and became one of the youngest recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship at twenty-eight. Walker now lives in NYC and has taught extensively at Columbia University.
Many art historians consider Walker to be a history painter with a subversive twist, reviving European history-painting through her creation of scenes based on history, literature, and the bible - transforming allegory and making such cultural artefacts relevant to the contemporary world. Walker draws from sources ranging from slave testimonials to historical novels, and features brutal stereotypes in a host of situations that are frequently violent and sexual in nature. This brutal and harrowing imagery provocatively illustrates America’s origins of slavery in the antebellum South. On the topic of the provocative, Walker claims that she “didn’t want a completely passive viewer […] I wanted to make work where the viewer wouldn’t walk away; he would giggle nervously, get pulled into history, into fiction, into something totally demeaning and possibly very beautiful.”
The form of the silhouette is the focal point of Walker’s work. It is a potent metaphor for the stereotype, which, as the artist puts it, also ‘says a lot with very little information’. Walker also uses the form of the silhouette to reassess the idea of race, and to underline the artificiality of 19th century practices such as physiognomic theory and phrenology (pseudo-scientific practices of qualifying a person’s intelligence by examining the shape of the face and head), used to support racial inequality as somehow pseudo-scientific and ‘natural’. Walker also displays her work in curved spaces alluding to the cyclorama, a 360-degree view popularised in the 19th century. This choice of display envelopes the viewer alluding to the inescapable horror of the past and the continuous cycle of racial inequality. Ultimately, from her harrowing and provocative imagery to her multi-layered use of form and display, Walker demands that we examine the origins of racial inequality and at its core, a sense of shared humanness.
Bibliography
Bidler, Tiffany Johnson. "Suicide and Survival in the Work of Kara Walker." Women's Studies Quarterly 44, no. 1/2 (2016): 52-72. www.jstor.org/stable/44475166.
Harvey, Matthea, and Kara Walker. "Kara Walker." BOMB, no. 100 (2007): 74-82. www.jstor.org/stable/40427888.
Molesworth, Charles. "Kara Walker: Her Enemies and Her Brothers." Salmagundi, no. 158/159 (2008): 3-15. www.jstor.org/stable/40549947.