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Spotlight on Kara Walker

Kara Walker, who received a MacArthur Fellowship, the "so-called genius award" at the tender age of 27, is said by Cathy Fox, long-time Atlanta Journal Constitution art critic, to create "disarming, disconcerting, disturbing tableaux that explore racism, stereotypes and forbidden lusts in a way that offers no moral high ground and leaves no one-black or white-feeling comfortable." Walker says that her artistic intentions are to "make art that is self-incriminating for everybody. . . . I decided that if I'm going to delve into race and racism, as was expected of me as an African-American artist. . . I was going to pull out the stops." Who is this 1990's artistic genius?

• Kara Walker was born to Larry and Gwen Walker in 1969. Walker's father is an artist, Art Professor, and the former director of the School of Art and Design at Georgia State University. The Walker family moved to Stone Mountain, GA, in 1982.

• Walker earned a BA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994.

• Walker is the 1997 recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program Awards, a grant of $190,000 over five years.

• Walker married jeweler Klaus Burgel in 1996; their first child was born in October 1996.

Group exhibitions:

1994

• An Historical Romance, Sol Koffler Gallery, Rhode Island


• Selections ,1994, The Drawing Center, New York


• Summer Group Show +2, Stienbaum/Krauss Gallery, New York

• La Belle et La Béte, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville De Paris


• Inaugural Show, Paul Morris Gallery, New York


• Landscapes, Borders, Boundaries, Nexus Contemporary Arts Center, Atlanta


• Now is the Time, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

• Body Language, Mills Gallery, Boston


• No Doubt, Aldrich Museum, Connecticut

Solo exhibitions include:

1995

• The High and Soft Laughter of Nigger Wenches at Night, Wooster Gardens, New York

• Bernard Toale Gallery,Boston


• From the Bowels to the Bosom, Wooster Gardens, New York

• Kara Walker, The University of Chicago Renaissance Society, Chicago

Walker's technique: black and white silhouette tableaux. Walker draws a sketch, draws the composition of the work with a china marker on black photo backdrop paper. She then cuts out the silhouettes and adheres them to white walls with wax adhesive.

Some of Walker's more controversial works of art include:

• "Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart," which depicts a "dream"-a slave mistress controlling the sexual exploitation between herself and her slave master;

• "The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, 1995" one detail of which depicts several generations of slave women sucking each other's breasts. Another detail from this same piece depicts a slave man defecating an umbilical cord which is attached to a newborn baby, also recently defecated onto the ground.

• "Uncle Remus Spins a Yarn," depicting a slave man balancing a naked baby on his knee, while telling a story to a young girl, who (coincidentally) is being sodomized by a large rabbit.

• "Before the Battle (Chickin' Dumplin')" depicting a slave woman dropping a chicken leg from her hand as a confederate soldier kneels before her to suck her breast

• "The Battle of Atlanta" a detail of which depicts a young slave girl holding the sawed off, booted leg of a soldier in one hand and the surgeon's saw in the other as a naked girl runs before her sucking them thumb of a adult hand which has been severed from the arm at the wrist.

Wanna Read More? Check out writings from this Selected Bibliography:

Sheldon Selections I:Kara Walker
Sheldon Selections II: Kara Walker;
Kara Walker: Prints
The Broad Art Foundation: Kara Walker
Kara Walker: The Negro Emancipation Association;
Conversations with Contemporary Artists: Kara Walker

Images of Walkers works http://www.yvonneforceinc.com/yfinew/walker.htm
http://www.proarte.com/artists/kara_walker/kwalker1.htm

Alberro, Alexander. "Kara Walker." Index 1:1 (Feb 1996): 24-28.

Camhi, Leslie. "Cutting Up." Village Voice (Apr 9, 1996).

Colman, David. "Pretty no the Outside." George (Jun/Jul 1996): 117-118.

Cotter, Holland. "Group Show." New York Times, (Mar 3, 1995).

Cullum, Jerry. "Landscape Exhibition Alters the Boundaries." Atlanta Journal Constitution, June 1995.

Doran, Anne. "Kara Walker, 'From the Bowel to the Bosom.'" Time-Out-New York-Art, Mar 13, 1996.

Hannaham, James. "The Shadow Knows: An Hysterical Tragedy of One Young Negress and her Art." New Histories (exh. Cat.) Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996.

Locke, Donald. "A Room with a View: A Stroll through Nexus' Art Garden." Creative Loafing 24 (Jun 3, 1995): 37-38.

Wroth, Alexi. "Black and White and Kara Walker." Art New England 17 (Dec 1996/Jan 1996): 26-27.

Melissa Prunty Kemp is a writer living in Atlanta. She is a former Instructor of English Composition, African American, Native American and Latino Literature, Creative Writing and Women's Studies at Kent State University. A native Virginian, Kemp has published numerous poems in various literary journals and has published scholarly critical articles, newsletters and an annotated bibliography on Batteaux Boat use along the Roanoke/Stanton River.

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