Kara Walker represents a new voice and new perspective that came of age in the 1990s that offered a new visual platform to explore the complexity of race, gender, and sexual exploitation. Her fame came quickly and at a young age. She became an “art star overnight.”[i] In 1994, Walker presented Gone: An Historical Romance of Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of a Young Negress and Her Heart. The piece uses a Victorian era art medium of hand cutting paper silhouettes. While the medium is historical, her approach to the subject matter was not. Gone contains caricatures of slaves in sexual exploitative positions that highlight issues of miscegenation. In other words, these life size silhouettes (seen in the image below) show the lived and imagined realities of slavery in a size that cannot be ignored.
Kara Walker reflects the changing approach to grappling with the complexity of the legacy of slavery. Hazma Walker (no relation), argues that Kara Walker is part of the generation that is both post-Civil Rights Era—and post-Roots (the television adaptation). Young artists may no longer feel they must “address slavery in a strictly reverential way.”[ii] In other words, coming of age in the 1990s offered new ways to explore intersections of race, sex, and gender that may still be offensive or at least uncomfortable to the older generation. I would argue they are meant to make you uncomfortable. Discomfort, or even a visceral reaction, should accompany an exploration of identity and the legacy of slavery often minimized in mainstream American society.
In 1997, at the age of 27, Kara Walker won a $190,000 “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation and became the second youngest person to ever earn the award. It came only three years after Walker had graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and was met with controversy, especially within the African American artistic community.
An extreme example of the backlash can be seen from artist Betye Saar; the artist was in her early 70s at that time and began a letter-writing campaign petitioning curators to prevent her work from being shown. In the 1999 PBS documentary I’ll Make Me a World, she refers to Walker’s work as “‘revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves.’”[iii] Furthermore, Saar suggests that the younger artist’s use of racist stereotypes was betraying African-Americans “under the guise of art.”[iv] Saar admits she used caricature in her work, but argues that she was using it as a tool to reclaim and “recast” these images to give them power. The most noted example is her piece “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” which presents the title figure holding a broom in one hand–but a gun in the other. Therefore, Saar seems to be frustrated by the ambiguous nature of the characters. On the hand, writer Rhonda Stewart seems to emphasize that this “ambiguity” in Walker’s work is part of what makes it “thought-provoking.”[v]
Walker continues to take risks and repurpose old mediums. In this case, “elaborate medieval sugar sculptures displayed as symbols of kingly power at royal feasts.”[vi] In 2014, she built “a 35-foot-tall and 75-foot-long sphinx, [made] with 30 tons of white sugar,” entitled A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (seen above).[vii] The sculpture was built at the former Domino Sugar refinery in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York City. It was free and open to public. Writer Carol Kino described it as a “leonine body,…[and] like much of Walker’s work, built for controversy, with pendulous breasts, an Aunt Jemima–esque face and kerchief, a Kim Kardashian rump and a vulva so enormous one critic likened it to a temple entrance…[T]he installation was a monument to the slave labor that enabled sugar to become an everyday commodity.”[viii] It attracted 130,000 visitors and celebrities (including Beyoncé, Jay-Z and their daughter, Blue Ivy). The lines sometimes extended for eight blocks.[ix] Walker has now collected a body of work that can no longer be minimized due to her age or medium. —Ebony Gibson
[i] Kino, Carol. “Kara Walker’s Thought-Provoking Art.” Wall Street Journal. Nov. 5 2014.
[ii] Stewart, page 50.
[iii] Stewart, Rhonda. “Still Here: Artist Kara Walker in Black And White.” Crisis 111.1 (2004): 50.
[iv] Edgar, Allen B. “On the Cutting Edge or Over the Line? Kara Walker is Gifted, Angry, and Subjected to Criticism for Exploiting Racial Stereotypes in Her Art. The Main Resident is also Soft-Spoken and Unsettled by Her Own Success.” Boston Globe: 16. Dec 30 2001.
[v] Stewart, page 50.
[vi] Kino
[vii] Kino
[viii] Kino
[ix] Kino
