Race or Ethnicity

Race or Ethnicity

Works of Kara Walker

Kara Walker is one of the most significant artists of her generation. Born in 1969 in Stockton, California, she is an African American woman at the forefront of the contemporary art scene. Praised by the art world for her daring confrontation of difficult topics, Walker is credited with more than 40 major solo exhibitions around the world, showing at some of the most prestigious art museums in the United States, including the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Walker first gained national recognition in 1994; in 1997, when she was only 28 years old, she became one of the youngest recipients ever of the MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award. Also in 1997, she was nominated by Time magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World of Artists and Entertainers (Shaw, 2004).”

One of the most prolific contemporary artists of her era, Walker has created works using drawing, writing, painting, shadow puppetry, silhouettes, prints, watercolor, and projected installation. Although she has a devoted audience, responses to her art alternate between great praise and tremendous condemnation, in equal measure. From her small drawings to her signature large-scale black-on-white cut-paper silhouettes, Walker has generated a body of artwork that fearlessly explores racial inequality in the United States (Walker, 2007).

Best known for her black cut-paper silhouettes, which she has uniquely developed, Walker portrays disturbing scenarios that transgress the boundaries of the conservative 18th-and early-19th-century genteel Victorian silhouettes concerning family and romance. Her stark black-and-white, vintage-like silhouettes have a distinctive air of Victorian modesty, yet she deliberately undermines and subverts their propriety through stereotypic representations of historical and fantastical people engaged in situations that reflect a range of race, gender, and class-based, sexually explicit, cataclysmic, entangled relationships between masters and slaves in the U.S. antebellum south, including miscegenation, sexual abuse and rape of black women, lynching's, and other power relationships and their brutality (Walker, 2007).

The silhouette gives way to avoid the disquieting and frequently difficult-to-view grotesqueness of her black-on-white narratives and forces the viewer to rely on visual cues, drawn from uniformly black featureless profiles, to discern differences among the races and to fully understand the scope of her subject matter.

When Walker was 13, her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia. After graduating from high school, she pursued undergraduate studies in painting/printmaking at the Atlanta College of Art, where she received her BFA in 1991. She obtained her MFA in painting/printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 1994. Influenced by Andy Warhol; conceptual artist Adrian Piper, who integrated issues of race and gender into her conceptual art; and painter Robert Colescott, who incorporated themes of race in his paintings, Walker has earned international acclaim and has received numerous grants, fellowships, and awards for her provocative, controversial body of work that has continued to link past and present entangled black and white histories (Walker, 2008).

Race-Ing Art history" by Kymberly Pinder

Social categories such as race, gender, age, sexuality, and ability ...